Tag: holiness

Advent Sunday: The Most Miserable Time of the Year? (1 Thessalonians 3:9-13, Advent 1, Year C)

1 Thessalonians 3:9-13

The other year on Advent Sunday I railed against the rise of luxury Advent calendars. Well,, no need for me to be original this year, because this week the Irish journalist Melanie McDonagh did exactly that in The Spectator magazine. This year, she writes,

There are tea or coffee Advent calendars with a different flavour for each day – see Whittard’s Tea or Pact Coffee or Fortnum’s – there are beauty advent calendars like the Space NK one for £199 with a different skincare product for each day or the one from Dior for £400; a gin advent calendar from the Craft Gin Club; there are cheese versions, pork scratching versions and there are, of course chocolate advent calendars, which are everywhere: Charbonnel et Walker does one for £75; Cadbury’s Dairy Milk for £2.19 (‘make every day in the run-up to Christmas magical’).

And in fairness, Ms McDonagh also rages against ordinary chocolate Advent calendars. Why?

Advent generally is about expectation (actually it’s partly about preparing for the Day of Judgment); it’s the reverse of a binge.

That’s right: Advent isn’t a time of preparation in the sense that we prepare by buying presents, getting the decorations out of the garage, and putting up the tree. It’s a time when we prepare not only for the humble coming of Christ in the manger, but also for his future coming in glory, when he will judge the living and the dead, as the Creed says.

No, this is not ‘The most wonderful time of the year’. If anything, it’s ‘The most miserable time of the year,’ and I don’t mean that purely for those who find this season hard due to the anniversaries of bereavements and other tragedies.

So let me be the first person this year to wish you a thoroughly dismal Advent.

Er, no, not really. In our reading from 1 Thessalonians Paul is anxious not only to visit his beloved friends in Thessalonica, but also to help them prepare for Christ’s coming as judge. And while he wants them to be serious about that preparation, we can hardly call his desires for them miserable.

There are two ways Paul urges the Thessalonians to prepare for Christ’s coming. As we explore them, I hope you’ll agree with me that they require seriousness but they don’t necessitate being miserable.

Firstly, says Paul, love one another.

12 May the Lord make your love increase and overflow for each other and for everyone else, just as ours does for you.

Love each other (presumably those are the church members) and love everyone else (all those Jesus would have called our neighbour).

Love. Easy to state, hard to do. But that’s the calling.

Love one another in the church, because when Jesus comes again the new creation is going to be a place of love. Nobody will be having a little dig at someone else in the kingdom of God. Nobody will be stabbing someone else in the back when Jesus comes again. Nobody will disregard or ignore their brother or sister when Jesus returns. The actions of the community will entirely be driven by love.

Love your neighbour. Because the world needs a witness to the redeeming and unconditional love of God in Christ. If someone is hurt, we do not look for an excuse by pondering whether they deserve help before deciding whether or not to do something. If their need is an interruption to our routine, then rather than worrying about our routine we consider their need as putting our routine into perspective. How can we expect the world to believe in a God who loves them if the community that professes to believe in that love doesn’t show it to them?

But as I said, all that is easy to state but hard to do. We may struggle to love some people in the church. Just as it is said that we can choose our friends but not our family members, so the same is true about the church family. There are some people here whom we honestly would not pick as fellow church members if we had the choice.

And we just don’t seem to fit together naturally all the time, do we? Many years ago a couple of writers described building the church as like ‘building with bananas.’ Imagine trying to build an edifice out of bananas. Their shape would make it very tricky! Growing the church feels like that at times!

And as for that ‘love your neighbour’ stuff – well, what if we don’t approve of their lifestyle and we don’t think God does, either? What if they hold political views we don’t like? If people inside the church can be hard to love, it can be doubly difficult to love some people who don’t share our faith.

So maybe this is miserable after all?

Let’s re-read verse 12:

12 May the Lord make your love increase and overflow for each other and for everyone else, just as ours does for you.

May the Lord make your love increase and overflow. That’s the key. It’s not that we can do this on our own. That would be drudgery and failure. Our challenge to love as a sign of the coming kingdom is one that the Lord enables us to do, and he does not expect us to achieve without him.

So here’s a prayer thought for those times when we struggle to love someone, either in the church or the community, and yet we know Jesus wants us to show them his love. I once heard a preacher tell a story where he said that God challenged him to do something difficult, and he said, ‘No, Lord, I’m not wiling.’

But then he heard the Lord’s reply to him. ‘Are you willing to be made willing?’

Are we willing to be made willing to love? Let us say ‘yes’ to Christ increasing our love.

Secondly, says Paul, be holy.

13 May he strengthen your hearts so that you will be blameless and holy in the presence of our God and Father when our Lord Jesus comes with all his holy ones.

Oh dear, holiness. Well, that must be dour and it must be hard work. Doesn’t it make you think of those Christians who think the closer you get to God, the more sour-faced you will be?

If that’s your image, then let me speak to you about the famous preacher and devotional writer of a hundred or so years ago, Oswald Chambers. Famed for his preaching that led people to repentance and new life, he was also known for his joy and laughter. Many of his converts may have wept for his sins, but they laughed for joy at their realisation of how great God’s love for them was.

D W Lambert, who as a child knew Chambers as a friend of his parents, wrote a book about him. Here is one story he recounts of him:

On one occasion when my mother was preparing the tea, to which a number of local ministers had been invited to meet Chambers, there came gales of laughter from the study. I, with the priggishness of a small boy, looked shocked, thinking that such holy men should not indulge in laughter. My mother, with quiet insight, remarked, “When God makes you holy He gives you a sense of humour.”[1]

Indeed, Chambers was often asked to babysit for some couples – something remarkable, given that he and his wife Biddy lost their only child Kathleen when she was just four years old. The children would tell their parents that Chambers didn’t preach to them, he was a playmate, and he taught them funny rhymes. I don’t have time for more stories today about him, but if you go on the Internet and search for ‘Oswald Chambers laughter children’ you will find several anecdotes that support this.

Sure, holiness can be tough, challenging and painful. But at its heart it is about becoming more like Jesus. And we remember that Jesus loved weddings and banquets, and he promised abundant life to his followers. If you come across one of those Christians who gives you the impression that the most devout Christians are the most miserable ones, it’s usually because they are miserable people and they don’t realise just how good Jesus is.

But I can’t deny the difficulties in being blameless and holy. Which one of us hasn’t had that sense of failure that we are so very far from being like Jesus? Isn’t the call to be holy a counsel of despair? We may understand that it makes sense, because surely when Jesus comes again all will good, true, pure, and right, and we need to be in harmony with that, but many of us are so conscious of our shortcomings and our besetting sins.

So note that there is good news in this verse. Let’s read it again:

13 May he strengthen your hearts so that you will be blameless and holy in the presence of our God and Father when our Lord Jesus comes with all his holy ones.

May he strengthen your hearts. Just as we found the command to love to be challenging but we discovered that God enables us, so the same is true of the call to holiness. May he strengthen our hearts.

So our prayer for holiness is similar to our prayer for greater love. Lord, I’m not always willing, but you can make me willing. I take responsibility for my own actions, but you can give me the strength I need in order to be holy, to be more like Jesus.

Yes, love and holiness are both marks of what life will be like when Christ returns. As Christians, we hear the call to conform to the life of the age to come while we live in the midst of this age which will pass away. This is all very demanding.

But in both cases, God is on hand and he waits for us to pray and ask him to give us the increase and the strength to fulfil his commands.

If we truly want to use Advent as a season of preparation, then let us prepare for Christ’s coming again by praying that God will give us more of himself so that we can be more truly loving and more deeply holy.

[1] D W Lambert, Oswald Chambers: An Unbridled Soul, p7f.

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Keep Quiet – Jesus Is At Work (Mark 5:21-43)

Mark 5:21-43

Last week, when our reading was about Jesus stilling the storm on Galilee, the story came to quite a climax. Jesus’ disciples said, ‘Who then is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!’

It’s quite a punchline. Mark leaves us in no doubt that he wants his readers to consider who this amazing Jesus is.

This week is different. While we have two amazing stories woven into one narrative, the climax after the healing of the woman with the flow of blood and the raising of Jairus’ daughter feels like an anti-climax:

43 He gave strict orders not to let anyone know about this, and told them to give her something to eat.

Keep quiet and have a snack. That’s it.

It’s not the only time Jesus tells people to hush their mouths about one of his miracles in Mark’s Gospel, and many people have assumed that the reason Jesus took this apparently rather strange approach was that if word got out that he was the Messiah the expectations people would have of him would be nothing like the way he saw messiahship.

And with that in mind, we have to look more carefully for the themes of Jesus’ mission that Mark wants to highlight here. I’ve found three.

The first is unity.

Look at the contrasts in the story. Jairus’ daughter is young: she’s only twelve. The woman, on the other hand, has had her distressing medical problem for as long as the girl has been alive. She is much older.

The woman is also now in poverty. She had spent all she had on doctors (verse 26). The young girl, on the other hand, is the daughter of a man who is probably quite well-to-do.

The woman creeps up on Jesus from behind (verse 27). Jairus is direct and open, falling at Jesus’ feet to beg him for mercy for his beloved daughter (verse 22).

Young and old, rich and poor, bold and shy – the range is wide but the need is the same. However different they are, Jesus knows they need the mercy and grace of God.

And that’s what he does. He brings people of all circumstances and life experiences into the family of God, because all need God’s grace and love.

That’s a picture of God’s kingdom. Jesus crosses all our human barriers because everybody needs the grace of God. In our social lives and our friendships we might look for people with similar interests or experiences to us. But in God’s family he brings together rich and poor, black and white, northerner and southerner, male and female.

I can look around congregations I’ve served and see people who owned two homes sitting next to others who were on a fixed pension. I can see my West Indian friends from the Windrush Generation and succeeding generations mixing with white Europeans. I’ve even found Arsenal supporters in the church, and that’s hard for me as a Tottenham fan!

Seriously, this work of Jesus to bring all sorts of people into the love of God is the first sign of his work of reconciliation. He reconciles people to God and he brings them into a family where those same people, often or different or even opposing backgrounds end up being reconciled to one another.

I like to put it like this. Jesus accomplished that reconciliation at the Cross. And the Cross has both a vertical beam, indicating our relationship with God and a horizontal beam, indicating that we are also reconciled with one another.

Do you need that reconciliation with God or with other people? Receive all you need for that from Jesus.

The second theme I’ve found is sovereignty.

Sometimes I wonder how I would be feeling in this story if I were Jairus. After all, I have a daughter, too. But to come in desperation and plead with Jesus, who agrees to come to my house (verse 24), only to find that he then stops and spends time trying to find out who touched him (verse 30) when time is of the essence – I think that would shred any remaining nerves that I had in my body.

Not only that, we get to Jairus’ house and we’re told that the daughter is dead (verse 35). Why did Jesus delay?

It’s a little like the story in John 11 where Jesus’ friend Lazarus dies but he doesn’t rush to Bethany where Lazarus lived with his sisters Mary and Martha. Jesus bides his time.

And so too here. Jesus isn’t ruffled. He encourages Jairus to continue believing (verse 36) and he isn’t rattled by the commotion caused by the professional mourners or the crowd laughing at him for saying the child is only asleep (verses 38-40).

It may not look like it to us, but Jesus has the situation under control. Taking only the girl’s parents and his three closest lieutenants, he goes to the girl and heals her (verses 40-42).

I wonder whether there is something that feels like it’s running out of control in your life? Is there something that seems to be descending into chaos and you’re afraid of where that will leave you?

If you are, I encourage you to invite Jesus into the situation. You can sound as desperate as Jairus if you like, it doesn’t matter. Jesus won’t be fazed. Let him walk calmly with you through what you fear will be an impending disaster.

That’s why I say this is about sovereignty. He’s still in charge. So turn to him.

The third and final theme I’ve noticed in the narrative is purity.

The condition of the woman made her ritually unclean in Judaism. For Jesus to come into contact with her would make him unclean.

And similarly, if you touched a dead body, as Jesus did when he took Jairus’ daughter by the hand (verse 41), that also made you ritually unclean.

It’s as if the uncleanness always pollutes the clean.  It’s like dropping one blob of ink into a glass of water and seeing the ink affect all of the water.

Except that doesn’t happen here. You could say that the purity of Jesus is so strong that it overpowers the ritual impurity of the woman and of Jairus’ daughter.

In this story, darkness doesn’t finally overcome good. It isn’t even a fight between two equals as some make it out to be. It isn’t even a fair fight at all. Jesus has all the power of divine holiness. That which would ruin lives cannot compete in his presence.

It makes me think about a couple of verses from the First Letter of John:

The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the work of the devil. (1 John 3:8)

Greater is he who is in you than he who is in the world. (1 John 4:4)

Sometimes when we’re involved with all our fallibilities the fight against suffering and sin is long and grim. But with Jesus in charge the final outcome is certain. None of this can stand in his presence. Instead of the virus of sin contaminating him, his holiness infects the darkness, exposes it, and cleanses it.

Isn’t it good news that ultimately the pure holiness of Jesus overcomes all the darkness and despair of this world? If you’re disheartened because the bad stuff so often ends up on top, look at this story and see signs that what Jesus does here puts all the powers of darkness on notice for what will ultimately happen when he appears again on Earth in glory.

Take heart from the superior purity of Jesus!

In fact, take heart from all three of the themes we’ve been thinking about today. Be glad that Jesus opens the kingdom of God to all people, that God longs to see all people reconciled to him and to one another. Rejoice in the sovereignty of God in Christ, where even when we get frantic and time seems to be slipping away he is still in charge. And take heart that suffering and death do not have the final word in all of creation, because the purity of Jesus is superior.

None of this might sound as spectacular as the calming of the storm on Galilee, but believe me, it’s every bit as important.

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Video Teaching: First Principles of the Gospel (2 Corinthians 5:6-17)

2 Corinthians 5:6-17

In my O-Level Physics class there once came an occasion where our teacher set us a problem for homework that none of us could solve. When my parents saw me struggling with it my Dad decided to write a letter to the teacher, asking him why he had set homework that none of the pupils could do.

In response to that letter the teacher phoned my Dad. He explained that all we needed to do to solve the problem was go back to the first principles we had learned in that topic.

When I heard that, I learned an important life lesson. Always go back to the first principles.

There is something of ‘first principles’ in our reading from 2 Corinthians. It’s a strange selection of verses in the Lectionary – but hey, what’s new there? But even despite that and the fact that we’re reading these verses out of context, we can pick up on some first principles. Because like my old Physics teacher, the Apostle Paul also always went back to first principles.

So today we are going to think about some of the First Principles of the Gospel. What are the first principles Paul talks about here, and how do they affect the way we live?

Number one first principle is that we live by faith, not sight.

Paul tells us that in the life to come we shall be at home with the Lord and shall see him, but right now we are away from home and do not see him, so we have to live by faith, trusting in the God whom we do not yet see. But when we do see him, he will call us to account for all that we have done while away from home (verses 6-10).

What does that mean for us? To live by faith means that we trust that even though we don’t yet see God, one day we shall. And in the meantime, we are to live as those who know we shall see God one day. That’s what living by faith is here: trusting that we shall meet God face to face in the life to come, and letting that reality direct the way we live now. The Gospel promise of meeting God face to face one day is meant to change us on this day.

So for one thing, living by faith means that we consider our attitudes and our actions now. Would we act the way we do if we had to live our every moment before the visible face of God? How does the fact that we shall one day see him face to face affect how we live today? What would we be happy doing in that knowledge? What would make us ashamed?

For another thing, we know that the Lord has entrusted us with resources, gifts, and talents in this life. So another part of living by faith is to consider how we use these things. From the abundance of creation to our natural talents, how would we use these if we were doing so before the face of God? How would we use our brain, our artistic abilities, our work skills, our homes and gardens, our possessions? The answers to questions like these will show how much we are living by faith – or not, as the case may be.

We often restrict the expression ‘living by faith’ to those Christians who have to trust God to supply their financial needs. I have no quarrel with that: I have had to do that at times. But Paul tells us to expand our vision of living by faith, because he tells us here that all Christians live by faith. How are we going to live now, knowing that we shall one day see God face to face?

Number two first principle is that Christ’s love compels us.

Paul talks about the love of Christ being a compelling motive in the Christian life, and he links it to his death on the Cross. If you hadn’t heard the whole reading but were just hearing his letter read out in public for the first time you might have thought that the link from the love of Christ to the Cross was going to be the forgiveness of our sins through the Cross. But it isn’t.

Of course, it’s true that Christ’s love brings us forgiveness through the Cross, but Paul makes a different point here. His punchline comes in verse 15:

15 And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.

Christ’s love compels us, because his example shows us that we are to live for Jesus and for others, not primarily for ourselves.

That’s why a church that gets hung up on just wanting the things that the members themselves like is an unhealthy church: it’s not modelled on Christ’s love.

In fact, were I to choose a church to be part of based on my own preferences it almost certainly wouldn’t be the Methodist Church. There are so many things in Methodism that I find tedious, frustrating, or annoying. But God called me to serve here. He loves me in Jesus, and calls me to return that love in the context of Methodism.

You may know the famous comment of Archbishop William Temple, when he said that the church is the only institution that exists for the benefit of those who are not its members. It’s not a perfect statement, but it does capture some of this idea: Christ’s love means we live for him and for others.

Each and every one of us needs to be asking ourselves, how am I imitating the love of Jesus by serving him and serving others?

Number three first principle is the new creation.

16 So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. 17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: the old has gone, the new is here!

Following Jesus makes us treat people differently, says Paul. But it’s that final verse where I need to give you this week’s episode of Bible Trivia.

‘If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation,’ said many older translations. Some newer translations say, ‘If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation.’ That’s bit different.

So which is it? Is it that the convert is a new creation? Or is it that conversion promises the general new creation of all things?

If you go back to the Greek you’ll see why we have this problem. It’s ambiguous. A literal translation would be, ‘If anyone is in Christ – new creation!’ For us English speakers there are missing words. To translate it into English, we have to add words. Whether we opt for ‘the person is a new creation’ (favoured by those Christians who emphasise personal conversion) or ‘there is a new creation’ (favoured by those who care about the environment and social justice) depends largely on our existing theological preferences.

But what if the words ‘If anyone is in Christ – new creation!’ are deliberately ambiguous and cover both of these possibilities? I think both are true biblically.

When we are united with Christ, God makes us new by his Spirit, and starts a work of holiness and healing in us that will not be complete until glory. He calls us to co-operate with his Holy Spirit in this work.

But our union with Christ also shows God’s project to make the whole creation new, just as he makes us new. He is not content to leave the world as it is and calls us to join with his Spirit in the renewal of all things.

So he will send us into the world both to call people to conversion and to make a social difference.

Therefore, if any of us prefers personal piety to social justice, we have sold the Gospel short. And if any of us is willing to campaign for social justice but not seek personal conversion and holiness, then we too have diluted the Gospel.

To sum up, the three Gospel first principles we’ve looked at today all lead to transformed lives and transformed society. When we live by faith, not by sight, we live as if we were doing so in the presence of God, and that surely changes our actions and our priorities.

Christ’s love compels us through the Cross to live for him and for others, rather than for ourselves.

And the new creation is both personal with our conversion and our journey of holiness but also social as we anticipate God making all things new.

Each of us needs to ask: in what way is the Gospel changing me? And in what ways am I serving the kinds of change God longs to see in his world, as a result of the Gospel?

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Palm Sunday (Sixth Sunday in Lent): Worship In The WIlderness – A surprising Journey

Israel longed for the homecoming of God to Jerusalem. Jesus fulfilled this hope on Palm Sunday, but not in the ways Israel expected. His journey into Jerusalem holds surprises for us, too. That’s what I explore this week.

Isaiah 35:1-10

Have you ever anticipated a homecoming? Perhaps it was your oldest child coming home after their first term at university. Maybe it was a reunion with a long-lost friend.

If you have, then you probably imagined what it would be like. But then the person arrives, and they look different. Your son home from university has grown his hair long. Your daughter has arrived home with a tattoo. The friend you haven’t seen for years has aged badly.

Somehow, homecomings do not always turn out how we imagine they will.

Israel was longing for the homecoming of her God to Jerusalem. We read that in Isaiah 35. But when it happens, as Jesus enters Jerusalem on what we call Palm Sunday, it isn’t entirely in the form they had popularly imagined from their interpretations of the prophetic hope.

It is a surprising homecoming at the end of this wilderness journey we have been exploring through Lent.

Let’s look at the elements of God’s homecoming in Isaiah 35 and see where the surprises lay in the light of Palm Sunday.

The first element is joy:

The desert and the parched land will be glad;
    the wilderness will rejoice and blossom.
Like the crocus, 2 it will burst into bloom;
    it will rejoice greatly and shout for joy.
The glory of Lebanon will be given to it,
    the splendour of Carmel and Sharon;
they will see the glory of the Lord,
    the splendour of our God.

The joy is so unconfined that even the inanimate parts of creation seem to shout with gladness. Poetically, creation sings. It is renewed.

The New Testament takes up this theme when it fills out the Old Testament prophecies about a new creation. Before that time, we see creation groaning in expectation, but we look forward to a day when, as Augustine of Hippo put it, every part of creation will mediate the presence of God to us. The homecoming of God is not just about personal salvation, it’s about the renewal of all creation. This is something to shout, sing, and celebrate!

But where is the surprise on Palm Sunday? Isn’t it in the failure of the religious establishment to welcome this and join in? They tell Jesus to silence the children who are singing praises, but Jesus says that if their mouths are shut, then even the stones will cry out.

How easy it is for our meanness and jealousy to close our own mouths to the praise of God and to close our hearts and minds to seeing and rejoicing in the fulfilment of his purposes. For that is what many of the religious leaders of Jesus’s day did.

Has a mean spirit silenced our praise? Has our jealousy of what another Christian can offer stunted our faith? It’s time to repent of these unworthy attitudes. They rip churches apart, and they suffocate our faith.

The second element is hope:

3 Strengthen the feeble hands,
    steady the knees that give way;
4 say to those with fearful hearts,
    ‘Be strong, do not fear;
your God will come,
    he will come with vengeance;
with divine retribution
    he will come to save you.’

Think how Israel struggled for hope in the face of Roman occupation. To them, it was like being in exile despite being in their own land. So they looked forward to the day when God would come and right these wrongs, and his Messiah would boot the Romans out, leaving Israel to live in peace within her own borders.

Where’s the surprise? Well, the Christian hope does include the righting of all wrongs and the judgment of the wicked and the unrepentant. No-one in the Bible talked more about Hell as a place of punishment than Jesus.

But the difference is this. Jesus postponed the judgment. It wasn’t to be now, but at the end of time. When he preached at Nazareth in Luke chapter 4, he stopped his reading from Isaiah 61 before the verses about judgment.

So when Jesus comes riding into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, he adopts instead the prophecy of Zechariah, by entering on a donkey, not a war horse. His gift of hope comes in a peaceful manner, not a warlike one. When he receives the cries from the crowd of ‘Hosanna’ (which loosely  means, ‘O God, save us’) that opportunity for salvation is not just for Israel. When he dies on the Cross, a convicted thief and a Roman centurion will confess faith in him. The hope is offered both to Israel, and to Israel’s enemies.

And that must make us think about how we frame our hope in Christ. Do we see that he also offers hope through his saving love at the Cross to the people we don’t like? Are there people whom we would rather God just zapped with a thunderbolt, but who are also candidates for hope, according to Jesus?

The third element is healing:

5 Then will the eyes of the blind be opened
    and the ears of the deaf unstopped.
6 Then will the lame leap like a deer,
    and the mute tongue shout for joy.
Water will gush forth in the wilderness
    and streams in the desert.
7 The burning sand will become a pool,
    the thirsty ground bubbling springs.
In the haunts where jackals once lay,
    grass and reeds and papyrus will grow.

In these verses we see both the kinds of personal healings that Jesus himself performed (curing the blind and the lame) and also the healing of creation, where even inhospitable places like the wilderness become beautifully inhabitable, and safe instead of being places of danger.

One thing we might dwell upon is how some Christians favour physical healing and others favour the work of the Church to heal the wider creation. However, neither Isaiah nor Jesus give us a choice in this. We are called to both. The Christian with the healing ministry may need to learn about climate change, and the Christian politician may need to pray for the sick.

But there’s another surprise here. Strictly it doesn’t come on Palm Sunday, but what we’ve said in the point about hope being offered not just to Israel but to her enemies might make us think further on into Holy Week. Remember when Jesus was arrested in Gethsemane after Judas betrayed him. Then remember how Simon Peter lashed out with a sword and cut off the ear of the high priest’s servant. What did Jesus do? He healed the servant, even though that servant was part of the group that was arresting him and about to take him away to certain torture and death.

So the surprise here for God’s people in God’s homecoming is the call to bless all the broken people and all of broken creation, even including the enemies of God. The healing mandate brought by Jesus encompasses a call to love our enemies as well as those for whom we feel an affinity.

Who is God calling me to bless this week?

The fourth and final element is holiness:

8 And a highway will be there;
    it will be called the Way of Holiness;
    it will be for those who walk on that Way.
The unclean will not journey on it;
    wicked fools will not go about on it.
9 No lion will be there,
    nor any ravenous beast;
    they will not be found there.
But only the redeemed will walk there,
10     and those the Lord has rescued will return.
They will enter Zion with singing;
    everlasting joy will crown their heads.
Gladness and joy will overtake them,
    and sorrow and sighing will flee away.

God makes his homecoming on a particular road. It is called the Way of Holiness. Israel rejoices that ‘The unclean will not journey on it’: they can’t have any Romans or even native sinners joining in this celebratory march to Jerusalem.

But the surprise here is that God’s people cannot simply look down their self-righteous noses at those they consider unworthy to be on the Highway of the Lord. The call to holiness is a call for all of us to shape up. It’s a call that reminds us that the only way we can march to Zion with Jesus is if we too take the Way of Holiness.

And as Jesus enters Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, the event we often call ‘The Triumphal Entry’, we need to remember that his greatest triumph is to come at the Cross and the tomb. Jesus took that journey, doing what was right. It led him to Calvary, but then to the vacating of his grave.

If we want to walk with Jesus, it is on this road, the Way of Holiness. We shall slip up from time to time, but the basic question is whether this is the direction we are willing to take or whether we have deluded ourselves that we can take a different route to glory. The Cross to which Jesus was headed was not only for our forgiveness, but it was also to make us more like Christ.

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Video sermon And Text: Active Patience (Second Sunday Of Advent)

This week, having realised that the copyright fears that led me not to post my videos these last couple of weeks were groundless, I’m going to give you both the video and the text of my talk.

2 Peter 3:8-15

In my teens, one of my favourite pop songs was ‘I’m Not In Love’ by 10cc. It was cleverly arranged and produced, and it had wry and touching lyrics that even clicked with a fifteen-year-old.

However, I heard both the single version and the album version on the radio. The single was a four-minute butchered edit of the full six-minute album track, and so I saved my pocket money to buy the album.

The album – ‘The Original Soundtrack’ – also contained much darker material, not least a song called ‘The Second Sitting For The Last Supper’ in which the band mocked the Christian hope of Christ appearing again in glory.

Two thousand years and he ain’t come  yet
We kept his seat warm and the table set
The second sitting for the Last Supper

It’s a hope for which many people mock us. It’s a hope with which numerous Christians struggle.

Perhaps sometimes it touches on those never-quite-disappeared childhood traits, remembering the times as little ones that we sat in the car while our parents drove, and within five minutes were asking, ‘Are we there yet?’

The third chapter of 2 Peter can give us help in understanding God’s purposes and responding appropriately. What these verses tell us is that when we understand God better, we shall also understand better how to live.

So firstly, understanding God better:

8 But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: with the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.

This verse, which takes some words from a psalm, tells us two things about God which get taken up in the next two verses. If a thousand years are like a day to the Lord, then he acts over a long period of time. But if the reverse is also true, that a day is like a thousand years, then God also acts suddenly and quickly.[1]

We see the long-term patience in verse 9:

9 The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.

The slow – to our eyes – acting of God is a mercy to the human race. He doesn’t want to wrap things up without people having a full opportunity to repent and put their faith in his Son, Jesus.

So if someone mocks us as Christians for the fact that Jesus has not returned, we can remind them that he is hanging back to give them the chance to hand over their lives to him. ‘Why hasn’t he come?’ we might reply. ‘Because he’s waiting for you.’

They may or may not appreciate that answer! But it is consistent with the merciful and gracious character of God. The offer of salvation is not a quick, instant, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it event. It is there on the table and stays on the table even for the most recalcitrant of sinners.

God is patient. Jesus hasn’t forgotten to come again, because he hasn’t forgotten the sinners he loves.

But as well as the long-term patience of God there is also his ability to act suddenly and quickly. Verse 10:

10 But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare.

God may be patient, but he will not suffer mocking. He will ‘come like a thief’. Christ appearing again ‘like a thief [In the night]’ is a common New Testament image for his return in glory. No-one expects that a thief is coming: you need to be prepared in order to avoid suffering loss.

It’s no good, then, having a casual attitude to God which says, ‘I’ll live just how I like, and then I’ll repent at my leisure on my deathbed.’ That is to treat a patient and merciful God with contempt, and to forget that he is also holy.

And – although in some cases it can be emotional manipulation – the old line of the evangelists that asked, ‘If you were to be hit by a bus tonight, do you know what would happen to you eternally?’ makes a good point to those who would be casual with God and disregard the fact that he can act suddenly and quickly.

So I think we can put these two apparently contradictory elements of God’s character together and see where that leaves us with our Advent hope. God is patient, because he longs for everyone to repent. Yet he will not be mocked by those who treat him casually, and one day he will come both suddenly and quickly. He will even do that before the end in individual people’s lives.

Therefore secondly, we look at understanding better how to live:

Just as there were two elements to understanding God better, so there are two corresponding ways to live in the light of that as we await our Advent hope of Christ’s appearing again in glory.

In response to God’s sudden and quick action, not least in his glorious return, we read verses 11 to 13:

11 Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives 12 as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming. That day will bring about the destruction of the heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat. 13 But in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells.

Forty years ago, I went to Spring Harvest for the first time. On the first evening, a preacher named Stuart Briscoe said that he believed in 2 Peter 3 when he saw the atomic bomb fall on Hiroshima. Then he knew it was possible for the heavens to be destroyed by fire and the elements to melt in the heat (verse 12).

But we do this a dis-service if we think that Christ’s sudden and speedy return is only about destruction. For we go on to read of the hope expressed elsewhere in the New Testament, not least by Paul in his letters and John in Revelation, that Christ’s goal is to bring ‘a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells’ (verse 13).

This is why Christ will come again in glory: to bring a new creation, where righteousness dwells.

And so the way to live in the light of that is to live in righteousness now. Christ calls us to live now as a sign of his new world that is coming. Live according to the new creation, not the surrounding culture.

What would it mean to live in righteousness now? Well, the English word ‘righteousness’ might be a little misleading here. Often we take it just to refer to matters of personal morality. But the Greek word means not only personal righteousness but social righteousness – justice, if you will – as well.

So our personal moral conduct needs to come more closely in line with what Jesus calls it to be. But so do our actions in society.

Abraham Kuyper was a Dutch Christian theologian and politician – in fact, he became Prime Minister. He put it this way:

‘There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!’

Is there any part of our lives where we don’t want Christ to cry, ‘Mine!’?

And then there is the way we live in response to the patience of Christ. This comes at the end of the reading:

14 So then, dear friends, since you are looking forward to this, make every effort to be found spotless, blameless and at peace with him. 15 Bear in mind that our Lord’s patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote to you with the wisdom that God gave him.

‘Our Lord’s patience means salvation.’ As we saw earlier, that patience means salvation in the opportunity for repentance, and so another way we live in the light of Christ’s coming is to offer the Gospel.

But it’s also the climax of our own salvation. For our salvation is not just the forgiveness of our sins through the Cross, it is also the transformation of sinful lives by the Holy Spirit into those that live righteously as we’ve just been saying.

And it is also that our salvation will be completed when Christ appears in glory. For when righteousness dwells, sin will be abolished. Peace will reign. All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well, as Mother Julian of Norwich said. This is part of our great hope.

To conclude – Christ’s appearing in glory seems to be a long time coming, but it is because God is patient. The chance is there for repentance, and the Church must announce that.

But Christ will still come suddenly and quickly. Let us be prepared by living according to the pattern of his great future.

[1] My understanding of these two contrasting elements is owed to Ben Witherington III, Letters and Homilies for Hellenized Christians Volume II, pp376-8.

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Sermon: Holy Suspense (Advent Sunday)

As with last week and throughout Advent I won’t be able to post the video of my devotional talk for the week. However, here is the text as I explore the Lectionary Gospel (Year B) and tackle that sense of suspense and tension that confronts us at Advent and throughout our Christian lives.

Mark 13:24-37 NRSV

In the lead-up to family birthdays and to Christmas, there is a noticeable difference between the males and the females in my immediate family.

My wife and daughter cannot stand not knowing what their presents will be. They want to know in advance. In particular, I often subjected to intense lobbying from my daughter to know what we’ve bought her.

My son and I are different. Both of us are content to wait and find out on the day. That’s part of the pleasure for us. If we knew in advance, it would be an anti-climax.

Advent – and particularly Advent Sunday itself – is about how you deal with suspense. That’s why this week’s theme in the series I’m following is called ‘Holy Suspense’.

We are living in between times in a sense of tension and hope about what is to come, not satisfied with life as it is and longing for it to be different.

We are in the hour before dawn, the time when the temperature is usually at its coldest, but when the complete darkness begins to be replaced by a blue light. As twilight before dawn beckons, indirect light from the Sun below the horizon takes on a blue shade. It is sometimes called ‘blue hour’.

The ancient Celts used to talk about living in ‘The time between the times’, and while some of their expressions of that would not be helpful to us, I think we can at least affirm those words.

For that is where the holy suspense of Advent, in the hour before dawn, places us: in the time between the times.

But what times are we in between? There are two in Mark chapter 13.

You may be surprised to hear that, because for a long time people have wrongly assumed this chapter is entirely about the Second Coming and the events leading up to it. However, there is a real tension between two ‘comings’ in this chapter, and the Lectionary verses we have today give us the cusp between the two.

So – what is the first coming in Mark 13?

You might assume it is Jesus’ first coming, the Incarnation, the great event to which we are building up.

But you would be mistaken.

24 ‘But in those days, after that suffering,

the sun will be darkened,

   and the moon will not give its light,

25 and the stars will be falling from heaven,

   and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.

26Then they will see “the Son of Man coming in clouds” with great power and glory. 27Then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.

Now some of you will jump on that language and say it’s talking about the Second Coming. My one-word answer to that is ‘no’, but bear with me as I explain what it is.

For one thing, language about the sun being darkened, the moon not giving its light, stars falling from heaven, and powers in heaven being shaken is not to be taken literally. This is neither Carol Kirkwood giving the weather forecast on BBC Breakfast, nor is it Brian May or Brian Cox describing an astronomical event on The Sky At Night. This is special language that we call ‘apocalyptic language’, which was a veiled way of speaking so that enemies like the Romans would not understand what they were on about.

But, you say, the verses go on to speak about the Son of Man coming in clouds and sending his angels to gather his elect from the four winds. That must be the Second Coming, mustn’t it?

Only if you don’t recognise your biblical quotes, I respond. ‘The Son of Man coming in clouds’ is a direct citation of Daniel chapter 7. In that chapter the Son of Man does indeed come in clouds – but not to earth. He comes to the Ancient of Days, that is, Almighty God.

It would seem therefore that what Jesus is talking about here isn’t his first coming, nor is it his return, but his ascension to the right hand of the Father, where, as it says in Daniel 7, he receives the kingdom.

And Jesus’ statement

30Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place

makes it quite clear he is talking about an event that is very close at hand, not in the distant future.

What then about the Son of Man sending out the angels to gather the elect? That surely is the evangelistic mission of the church that Jesus commissions his disciples to undertake. He gives that command just before he ascends, and it begins at Pentecost.

Hold onto those thoughts for a moment, while we ask – what is the second coming in Mark 13?

Well – er – it’s the Second Coming! Not that the Bible ever uses that expression. Normally it uses a word that means not ‘coming’ but ‘appearing’ or maybe ‘presence’. Jesus will appear again on earth after his ascension, and we need to be ready.

That’s why he tells the little vignette at the end of the reading about the master who goes away (the ascension again) and leaves his slaves in charge of his property. However, those slaves need to be ready for whenever the master returns. They don’t know when that will be, so they need to be ‘on the watch’ and ‘keep[ing] awake’ (verses 32-37).

That’s all rather more straightforward than what I called the ‘first coming’, isn’t it?

The only strange thing about as far as I’m concerned is that all of Jesus’ teaching in this chapter is a response to him prophesying that the Jerusalem Temple will be destroyed, and Peter asking him when this will happen and what the signs will be (verses 1-3). So why would Jesus go on to talk about his return in glory?

I think it must be something like this: Jesus has solemnly spoken about the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple as a sign of judgment. But he goes on to warn that a greater judgment is waiting in the wings for the end of time.

Right – now that I’ve outlined what I think is the right way to understand this passage, we can answer some practical questions about how we live during holy suspense.

For the suspense in which we live is this: at the ascension, Jesus sat down at the right hand of the Father and was given the kingdom of God. He reigns.

Yet not all is well, and we await his appearing (a.k.a. the Second Coming) when everything will be put under his feet.

Just as the Queen reigns but not everyone obeys the law of the land, so we live in a time like that. Jesus is in charge of the universe, but not everyone acknowledges that. Such a state of affairs creates a sense of tension for us as followers of Jesus.

Two applications, then:

Firstly, the gathering of the elect: because not everyone willingly lives under the reign of King Jesus we are given the Great Commission to proclaim the Gospel. In the Roman Empire when a herald came announcing ‘good news’ it was usually the good news of a new Emperor or of great victories.

Well, that is our message in the Great Commission. There is a new king on the throne, and his name is Jesus. What’s more, he has won the greatest victories of all time – over sin and over death.

As we live with this great tension between Jesus receiving his kingdom and it being completely fulfilled, we call more people to bow the knee to King Jesus.

Secondly, the slaves staying alert and awake in the master’s house: because Jesus will appear again and everything and everyone will acknowledge him as Lord and King, we need to be ready for that. In other words, we need to live as if that future is already here. The call to obey Jesus now is critical, because it’s the consequence of proclaiming the Good News that he is King and has won those victories over sin and death.

Now that creates more of the tension with the world we live in, where to live like that may not be popular. But discipleship is not an option. And if we proclaim to the world that Jesus is King, then a necessary part of our witness to back up our words is to live as if Jesus is King. Which he is.

To conclude: do we know what our present is on the Great Day of Christ’s Appearing? Yes and no. Yes, we know in general terms that his new creation will be full of truth, beauty, and love, and there will no longer be anything to spoil it.

But also no, because how can we imagine such a gift with accuracy and detail? We might just as well also be surprised.

What we know is that Jesus will reign without any further opposition.

Meanwhile, we live as citizens of his kingdom and proclaim his reign, even though that brings tension.

But one day, the suspense will be over and all will be well.

That is the Advent hope.

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Video Sermon: You Have Never Been This Way Before – How To Face New Challenges

I wrote and recorded this week’s video a week ago, so it was before last night’s announcement by the Prime Minister that England is being placed in another lockdown from Thursday coming.

Joshua 3 has been significant for me for a long time as a guide to how we face new challenges in life. And we certainly need that help right now.

I hope this helps you, too. If it does, please share this on your socials.

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Another Sermon On Matthew 22:1-14

I only preached on this passage back in October when I visited a church in another circuit and this was the Lectionary Gospel passage. Tomorrow I preach on it in a sermon series for Lent based on selected incidents from Holy Week.

Matthew 22:1-14
One of my cousins married the daughter of a captain in the Army Catering Corps. The father of the bride said he would therefore organise the food at the reception. And so, on a cold February day, we trekked after the wedding ceremony to the barracks in Aldershot. As we arrived, the usual champagne flute glasses were offered, along with plates of vol au vents. As we ate these appetisers, we waited for the call to the main course.

It never came. The vol au vents were the meal.

Some of us later decamped to my aunt and uncle’s house, and to compensate for our hunger we ordered in fish and chips. Just as we were tucking in, there was a ring at the doorbell. In came the bride and groom. “Fish and chips?” they said, “Great! Can we have some?”

It wasn’t exactly the image of the wedding banquet that we expected. The nearest I have experienced to that was at another friend’s wedding where there was at least a full roast meal. However, as I went along with my plate taking my food, I was told by a member of the catering company, “Only two potatoes, sir.”

I can’t quite imagine God (or the king in the parable) throwing a banquet for his son where there was a strict rationing of the food. Although I have to say I harbour strange thoughts at communion services where we thank God at the end that we have had ‘a foretaste of the heavenly banquet prepared for all people’ when that ‘foretaste’ consists of no more than a miniscule square of white bread and a tiny sip of sweet wine. It is the merest of mere foretastes!
In the parable, I am sure the king is sending out invitations to a lavish banquet, just as I am sure that the wedding reception at Buckingham Palace last year for ‘Wills and Kate’ was rather more than a selection of ready meals from Asda. The invitation is to something generous, swish, and – in the best sense of the word – tempting. It is to come to the table of the abundant God. Oxen and fattened cattle have been slaughtered – the best of the herd have been prepared (verse 4). Nothing less will do.

The question arises, then, what will people do with an invitation to such a feast?

But in normal circumstances that seems such an easy question to answer. The shock in this parable – and I never tire of saying that we need to look for the shocks in the parables of Jesus – is what happens in response to the invitation.

In the first instance, the king sends his servants ‘to those who had been invited to tell them to come’ (verse 3). It sounds like this is a group of people who have already received an invitation. But the nature of the invitation is different from our culture. In our society, when we receive an invitation to a wedding, we are told the date and time as well as the location. But these people have not yet been told the date and the time. They have been invited more generally. Now the servants go with the word that the date and time have been set, and they are to attend.
I therefore take these people to be the ones who expect an invitation. Given that this parable occurs in the midst of the tension being racked up between Jesus and the religious establishment, I take it that these are the people in the firing line here. They are the people who would expect an invitation to the great messianic banquet of God’s kingdom. They are the people who would expect not only to be invited, but to be sitting in the places of the greatest honour. They are the people who consider themselves uniquely favoured by God. And yet they are the ones whom Jesus says have effectively trashed the invitation.

What had they done wrong? If we are talking about the Pharisees, we are considering a group who honoured the Scriptures and cared passionately about the holiness of God’s people. Yet this had distorted into the erection of barriers to decide who was ‘in’ and who was ‘out’. Conveniently, they themselves were ‘in’.

If we are talking about the chief priests and the teachers of the law, we are considering a social class who had ingratiated themselves with the ruling Romans in order to protect their own status. To do that, they had made their religion in their own image, to justify their actions. It’s not dissimilar from what many Christians do today. It’s remarkable how many Christians of a certain political persuasion think that Jesus would vote in a rather similar way to them. The Guardian carried an article about this very phenomenon at the beginning of this week, which even showed a photo of Argentinean football supporters holding a large photo of Jesus, who by sheer coincidence was wearing an Argentinean football shirt. Not that we would ever claim that God was a perfect English gentlemen. Oh, no. Not us.

These, then, are people who use God and religion to their own ends. If we use faith as a way of justifying ourselves and fortifying our own positions, rather than seeing it as bowing the knee to Jesus Christ as Lord, then we can be sure that Jesus sees us as one of those who have scorned the invitation to the great banquet. Because the way to accept is to confess Jesus Christ as Lord, in both word and deed. People who seem the most ‘religious’ may in fact be those least likely to follow Jesus. For ourselves, we need to ensure that we don’t substitute religion for discipleship, and that in sharing the Gospel we don’t just assume that the ‘nicest’ people will be more disposed than others to the Good News.
The second wave of invitations goes out. Rather than send his servants to the usual suspects, now the king commands them to ‘go to the street corners’ (verse 9) and invite anyone, whether ‘good or bad’ (verse 10). The implication of this for Jesus’ critics is scandalous. He wants to invite into the kingdom the very people who had been kept out by their rules. Those with a blemish. Those who didn’t fit. Those whose reputations brought shame rather than honour.

Applying this to us, no longer are we necessarily talking about taking the Gospel to the obvious candidates, to the people we think would have the most chance of fitting in with the church culture.  One church I served appointed a married couple from another church as the cleaners. When this was done, somebody remarked that these people didn’t look like conventional churchgoers. The husband had long hair – even though he was in his fifties. They weren’t the most cultural of people. They were deeply working class. But the depth of faith this couple and their teenage daughter had shamed many established Christians. They had, as it were, come to the banquet from the street corners.

I have seen other people ostracised in churches who have had deeper faith than the clean, eloquent types who typically fill our pews. Not that there is anything wrong with being clean or eloquent, but too often we miss the fact that Jesus by his Spirit is going ahead of us to the street corners and wooing people we wouldn’t even think of with his grace and love. It’s our calling to join in with what the Holy Spirit is doing. As we do, we become the servants of the king, carrying the invitations to the great banquet.

Around the 1970s, when the so-called Church Growth Movement was at the height of its popularity, one of its most controversial beliefs was the idea that the best way to make churches grow numerically was to attract more people of similar social background. The idea was that people like to mix socially with others who are similar to them. Apply that to the church, and you have more chance of seeing growth. Many people criticised it, because the Gospel is not only about personal reconciliation with God in Christ, it is then also about reconciliation between human individuals and groups who would previously have shown animosity to each other. Not only that, it contradicted the teaching of this parable that involved taking the Gospel to people beyond the usual boundaries of those who normally embrace it.

Yet despite this, many churches persist who are monochrome. Same culture, same race, same economic background, similar interests, and so on. Yet the Gospel says that the banquet is not just for people like us. It is for all.

We’ve had two shocks so far. The expected guests at the wedding say ‘no’, and come under judgment, rather than blessing. Then, the invitation is extended to people you wouldn’t expect to be in attendance at the wedding banquet of the king’s son. It would be like the Queen throwing open the grounds of Buckingham Palace to the Occupy Movement.
But there is a third and final shock. A man turns up who is not wearing wedding clothes. Just as we dress up for weddings, so did people in the ancient Middle Eastern cultures. Furthermore, kings would provide wedding attire for their guests. This man has no excuse. In the words of a hymn we shall sing tonight at the ecumenical Lent service, ‘All are welcome in this place’. However, with the Gospel offer of grace comes in response the Gospel demand of discipleship. Does the man turn up for a free lunch? If so, he’s in for a shock. The Gospel is a free lunch – we are freely forgiven in Christ and have just to accept the gift by faith. But that free lunch is given us not only in love but also to build us up for the calling of discipleship.

The other day, somebody told me a story about not being allowed to go to Sunday School one week as a child because she was in her ‘play clothes’, not her ‘Sunday best’. This isn’t about the physical clothes we wear, it’s about being ‘clothed with Christ’. We are clothed in his righteousness that is our forgiveness and declares us to be in the right with God through his death in our place on the Cross. But we are also clothed in Christ in that we begin to take on his righteousness by the Holy Spirit. Our worship and gratitude in response to God’s free grace is shown as we actively co-operate with Christ’s work by his Spirit in our lives to make us new people, to make us more truly into the character that is fit to be at the king’s banquet. Of ourselves we are not fit to be there at all, and we only enter by grace. But we stay as we allow the Holy Spirit to transform us more into the image of the King’s Son.

You may be the sort of person who doesn’t notice that the clothes you have been wearing have become dirty, and it takes someone – perhaps a loved one – to point this out. Similarly, it is possible not to notice the bad habits or compromises that sneak into our lives. Someone may need to point them out lovingly to us. It may be our reading of the Scriptures or our participation in worship of fellowship groups that reveals the truth to us. However it happens, our calling is to be present at the wedding feast of the King’s Son when God’s kingdom comes in all its fullness. And for that reason, it’s time to dry clean our clothes, so to speak, to accept the invitation on Christ’s terms and to be part of taking his invitation to all who will receive it, whether they fit the commonly accepted stereotypes or not.

Friends, the wedding feast awaits. It’s time to get dressed.

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Cleverness Is A Gift, Kindness Is A Choice

Vodpod videos no longer available.

I never thought I’d be using Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, as an illustration of the difference between talents and character, between the gifts and fruit of the Spirit. But the graduation speech at Princeton University shown above is certainly an example. He might seem a surprising choice, given this recent article about Amazon’s ruthless business methods and this one about the effect of their low download prices on musicians, though. Surely the difficult decisions that individuals have to make in favour of kindness need also to be made corporately.

Yet sin will always be a problem. This is where it becomes more than an issue of choice: it is about needing to co-operate with the renewing power of the Holy Spirit in all areas of life. And that is not an instant thing. It is acquired with practice, as Tom Wright argues in Virtue Reborn. Bit by bit, we train ourselves to behave and react differently, until holiness becomes more of a habit. It takes time to acquire Christlike habits. Perhaps that is why Paul refers to ‘the fruit of the Spirit’: fruit doesn’t just appear, it takes time to grow.

Bezos’ speech above is only short and cannot cover all bases in twelve minutes. A longer exposition might explore a relationship between gifts and character, such as using gifts with character. It might also take on the thought that although gifts are given, we still need to work on crafting them. But whatever the failings of Amazon as a company, his call at the end of his speech to students to make a difference in the world with kindness is a welcome one. It might not be what we expected from a billionaire entrepreneur, but it is a breath of fresh air.

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