Tag: Ian Paul

Easter Day 2024: God Ships His Blessings On The Third Day (Mark 16:1-8)

Mark 16:1-8

Here’s a true story I heard on Thursday. Somebody was looking up on Google the famous blessing prayer from the Book of Numbers. I’m sure you’ll know the one:

The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.

But the top result wasn’t from a Bible site like Bible Gateway, they only came in second to Amazon, who were selling a print of that text in a picture frame. As a result, the entry read:

 The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace. Usually ships within 2 to 3 days.

When the person shared this, somebody commented:

I do wish more of His promises came with delivery dates and tracking!

Welcome to Easter Sunday, where we celebrate the fact that God’s blessing has shipped within 2 to 3 days! For on the third day, the tomb was empty.

What blessings ship from God to us on Easter Day? There are many! I want to share four with you.

Firstly, a new body:

You may recall that during Holy Week, a woman at Bethany has anointed Jesus’ body with expensive perfume. Jesus says she has anointed his body for burial. You might say the woman did so prematurely, but perhaps prophetically.

Now, along comes this group of women to do what? Exactly the same.[1] The Greek implies they are bringing liquid spices. This is not the same as the solid spices that John tells us Nicodemus used. The women are coming to do what the woman at Bethany had prophetically foretold.

But if the woman at Bethany was early, the women at the tomb are too late! They knew Jesus was physically dead , otherwise they wouldn’t have come. But now, the body isn’t there, because he has risen.

They weren’t expecting that. Three times in Mark’s Gospel Jesus prophesies that he will suffer and die, but be raised from the dead, yet it hadn’t sunk in. It didn’t fit their prior beliefs. They were persuaded not by the divine words of Jesus but by God’s divine action.

Make no mistake, the Resurrection is bodily. This is not about an immortal soul, this is about God raising Jesus’ body from the dead and making it new – even with new powers, as we read in other Gospels such as John.

God is interested in redeeming the physical, the material, the bodily. Our faith is not simply an ethereal, spiritual matter. Resurrection tells us that the whole of creation is on God’s agenda for renewal.

And that’s why our mission is not only to call people to repentance and faith in Christ, it is also to things like healing, social justice, and the renewal of our planet. Everything that God created has been tainted, and everything that God created is up for redemption. The Resurrection assures us of that.

The second blessing to ship on Easter Day is a new family:

Who is ‘Mary the mother of James’ in verse 1?[2] In the previous chapter, among the women at the Cross, is ‘Mary the mother of Joses and James’ (15:40), which is then shortened to ‘Mary the mother of Joses’ (15:47). It’s likely that ‘Mary the mother of James’ at the empty tomb is ‘Mary the mother of Joses and James.’

But here’s the surprising thing. There is only one woman in Mark’s Gospel who is called ‘Mary the mother of Joses and James.’ She appears in chapter 6 verse 3 where she is the mother of Jesus’ brothers. In other words, this is Mary the mother of our Lord herself.

But just as Jesus had said that his true family were those who did his will, so here at the empty tomb Mary herself is discovering that the risen Jesus is indeed making a new family. His new family is the family of believers in him.

We sometimes talk about the church as a family, and that’s absolutely right. We are the family of God, the community of the King, the sign and foretaste of God’s coming kingdom. In our tradition, we may not go in for the hackneyed way that some Christians address one another as ‘brother’ or ‘sister’ and that’s fair enough, but that’s what we are. At both baptisms and funerals we refer to the subjects as ‘our sister’ or ‘our brother’, and that is because Jesus creates a new family in the Resurrection.

And his Resurrection will be ours one way. I guess that’s why he told the Sadducees during Holy Week that there would be no marrying and giving in marriage in the life of the age to come. There would be no more need for procreation, because no more would dead people need replacing in the population.

One of my colleagues recently told the circuit staff a story of how he was visiting a residential care home, and he met one resident who was dying for what would be the last time. Before my colleague left, the resident said to him, ‘I expect this will be the last time we see each other.’

He replied, ‘I’ve got news for you! I think you’ll find we’re going to be spending rather a long time together!’

So look around this morning in church. Here are members of your forever family. It’s worth us learning to get on with one another!

The third blessing to ship on Easter Day is a new commission:

Having seen the place where Jesus’ body had been laid, the ‘young man dressed in a white robe’ (verse 5) (which is just a long way of saying ‘angel’) tells the women to ‘Go’ (verse 7). They are to go with the message of the Resurrection.

Hang on – who is to go? The women. In our more egalitarian culture, that detail can pass us by. But this was a society in which women couldn’t even give evidence in a court of law. If you were going to choose witnesses to support your case, you wouldn’t select women. The fact that it’s women who are the first witnesses to the Resurrection is a sign that this is not a cobbled-together fiction.

And we might reflect on all those who still say only men can lead the church because Jesus chose twelve male apostles. He also only chose Jews. It’s apparent here that God doesn’t keep to our social conventions. Anyone and everyone who has encountered the Resurrection and wants to follow Jesus can be witnesses to Jesus.

How many of us feel disqualified from serving Jesus in any significant way? It may be through the disapproval of others. It may be through our own low self-esteem that we disqualify ourselves. We may feel unworthy or unfit. ‘I’ve let God down in the past.’ ‘I don’t have the necessary gifts.’ ‘I’m not strong enough.’

But could it be that in fact our risen Lord is giving us a poke on Easter Day and saying, the only thing that qualifies you is that you’ve encountered me and you want to follow me?

I want to invite you to consider whether there is some call you have been resisting, putting off, or filing away because you don’t think you fit the template. I certainly didn’t think I fitted the right mould to be a minister. I’ve had the odd congregation who have agreed! I still at times live with ‘imposter syndrome.’

But on Easter Day, we can put all that aside. Have we met with the risen Lord? Do we love him? If so, let’s take on a commission.

The fourth and final blessing is a new beginning:

But go, tell his disciples and Peter (verse 7)

says the angel to the women.

The disciples and Peter? Huh? Wasn’t Peter a disciple too, an apostle, even? Why mention him separately?

I’m sure we can guess. Peter is so mortified by his three denials of Jesus that he doesn’t even consider himself a true disciple anymore. He may even have returned to his old profession as a fisherman. It’s all over, especially with Jesus having been executed.

But in God’s economy, the end is not the end unless there is good news. And here we have that hint of what John’s Gospel will tell us in greater detail: that restoration is on the way for Peter. ‘No condemnation now I dread, Jesus and all in him is mine,’ as Charles Wesley wrote.

The new commission that I just spoke of is available to Peter as well. He has a new beginning.

This is after all the Gospel, isn’t it? That our sins and failures don’t have the final word, any more than the sins of those who conspired to have Jesus crucified had the last word. They didn’t. Jesus vacated his grave.

As the late Christian singer Larry Norman put it,

They nailed him to the cross,
They laid him in the ground,
But they should have known
You can’t keep a good man down.[3]

If anyone here thinks they have messed up so badly they can never be valuable to God, then the Resurrection says, think again. There is a new beginning for you.

If anyone here thinks they have committed the unforgivable sin, then the Resurrection says, think again. There is a new beginning for you, too.

The grace of God is bigger than our sins and failures. Even the worst of our betrayals of Christ do not have the final word in life: that place belongs to the love and mercy of God.

As a minister, I have heard respected church members privately tell me about the most awful sins they have committed. It has been my privilege to assure them of God’s forgiveness and the certainty that they, like Peter, have a new beginning with Christ. Easter Day is the reason I can do so. We all have a new beginning today.

I can’t conclude today without drawing attention to the theme of the women’s fear that is present in the reading.

‘Don’t be alarmed,’ says the angel, but despite his reassurances, the final verse says this:

Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid. (Verse 8)

I’m aware that I can give you all the arguments in the world for the joy, hope, and freedom of the Easter faith, but an encounter with almighty resurrection power can still leave us shaking.

And it seems such a strange way to end the Gospel – so much so that others have speculated that the original ending is lost, or have written alternative endings.

But maybe it all indicates that the necessary response is for us to write our own endings in each of our lives. For as Tom Wright has put it,

‘Jesus is risen, and we have a job of work to do.’

[1] This paragraph and the next are influenced by Ian Paul, The women at the empty tomb in Mark 16.

[2] Again, for what follows I am dependent on Ian Paul’s article.

[3] Larry Norman, ‘Why should the devil have all the good music?’, Only Visiting This Planet, MGM Records, 1972.

0

Palm Sunday 2024: Jesus The King (Mark 11:1-11)

Mark 11:1-11

Happy Cloak Sunday!

What, you say, not Palm Sunday?

Well, no. Of the four Gospel writers, only John tells us about the palm branches. We read from Mark, who gets the next closest by telling us that

others spread branches they had cut in the fields (verse 8b)

but he doesn’t specify that they are palms. He tells us more about the cloaks that the disciples put over the colt for Jesus to sit on (verse 7) and the cloaks that people spread on the road (verse 8a).

So I think we can be justified in renaming today Cloak Sunday.

In fact, to get more to the point of what this story is about, it’s helpful to note the heading that the NIV Bible gives it: ‘Jesus comes to Jerusalem as king.’ I don’t normally like the headings of Bible passages to be read out because they’re not part of the text, and they sometimes detract from the theme I am going to take from the reading, but on this occasion it’s spot-on. Jesus comes to Jerusalem as king.

Firstly, let’s look at the signs of kingship:

The colt, the colt, the colt, the colt. Four times in the first seven verses we read, ‘The colt.’ That’s without where a pronoun like ‘it’ substitutes for it. Those first seven verses are all about the colt.

And although Mark doesn’t directly quote it as Matthew does, you know what’s in his mind and you know what will be in the mind of those present – it’s Zechariah 9:9:

Rejoice greatly, Daughter Zion! Shout, Daughter Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

Even the cloaks on the colt’s back might indicate Jesus’ kingship, because the king’s steed could not be ridden by anyone else.[1]

But certainly the fact that Jesus rides into the city whereas all the pilgrims walk in sets him apart. And the ground was often covered for the arrival of a visiting dignitary. We can be in little doubt that Jesus is making an explicit claim to being Jerusalem’s king.

And that’s a change of tactic from Jesus. Up until now, Mark’s Gospel has recorded several incidents where Jesus has forbidden people to reveal who he is. He has wanted to keep his identity secret. (Scholars call it ‘The messianic secret.’)

But at this point, Jesus goes public. He is Israel’s true king, God’s anointed One. This is only going to do one thing, and that is to ratchet up the tension with both the Roman authorities who will not brook a challenge to their power, and the Jewish leadership who have rejected Jesus but will look bad if they reject their true king.

It had to come out at some point, but not earlier, when it would have ruined Jesus’ ministry in Galilee and other places. But all along Jesus has known his destiny and the climax of his mission. It isn’t what most people would consider a climax to their work, but yet again Jesus flips on its head the notions and the values of the world. His kingdom is different. It is different by one hundred and eighty degrees from the kingdoms of this world.

Many years ago, I read a book by an American Mennonite called Donald Kraybill that called the kingdom of God in Jesus’ teaching ‘The Upside-Down Kingdom.’ As the publisher’s blurb puts it:

What does it mean to follow the Christ who traded victory and power for hanging out with the poor and forgiving his enemies? How did a man in first-century Palestine threaten the established order, and what does that mean for us today? Jesus turned expectations upside down. The kingdom of God is still full of surprises. Are you ready?

So we need secondly to consider the type of kingship that Jesus was demonstrating on Cloak Sunday:

The crowds acclaim the coming kingdom of their father David (verse 10a), which is surely a sign of messianic expectation. You can imagine the hopes that this might be the one who will rid them of the hated Romans.

But if they did think that, then they missed the Zechariah hint with Jesus coming ‘lowly and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.’

Lowly. Not war-like. Among the disciples, I wonder what Simon the Zealot felt? Remember that the Zealots were committed to the overthrow, by violence if necessary, of Israel’s enemies. And did this contribute to Judas Iscariot’s disillusionment with Jesus? We don’t know, but I do wonder.

Jesus is clearly coming as king, but his enthronement will happen at of all places the Cross, where the charge against him will be ‘The King of the Jews’ (Mark 15:26). The Cross is enthronement and victory, not defeat.

It’s very easy for us to react with disillusionment, too. Some of the biggest conflicts and acts of sabotage in a local church are undertaken by people whose anxieties about the future have escalated. I was reading about this on Friday in an email from the organisation Bridge Builders, who train church leaders in how to transform conflict. Their Director of Training, Liz Griffiths, wrote this:

Triggers for that anxiety are plentiful – uncertainty about the future of many churches; declining numbers and aging congregations; rapid social change and concern as to how to respond to these with integrity and faithfulness; and the wider issues that impact far beyond the church – rising inequality, climate and environmental issues, and the aftermath of a global pandemic. It’s not surprising that anxiety is high, and reactive behaviour is so prevalent.

Now there may be all sorts of reasons in our family background and the history of our churches that lead to these anxieties, but in the long term what we need to do is bring them to Christ and submit them to his very different form of kingship. His way of overcoming evil is not by the crash-bang-wallop methods that some would advocate. It is by peace, lowliness, and ultimately, suffering.

I guess that Judas Iscariot bottled up all his frustrations and then his weakness for money became the flaw through which his dissatisfaction came to fatal expression with his betrayal of Jesus and his own subsequent suicide.

What about Simon the Zealot? He is still part of the eleven apostles come the Resurrection. Could it be that he submitted his own prior commitment to violent resistance to the ways of Jesus and followed the lowly, peaceable king? It looks to me like he did.

Will we bring our anxieties, our frustrations, our dissatisfaction with the state of the church and the world to Jesus, the king of peace and humility? Only his way brings healing.

And all that means that thirdly, we are talking about our responses to Jesus’ kingship.

How are we going to respond to the Jesus who rode humbly into Jerusalem as King? I have just posed it as a choice between Judas Iscariot’s pent-up frustrations and Simon the Zealot’s ability to put aside his prior commitments and go the way of Jesus. But there is another way of framing the binary choice we have, and it’s more directly in the passage. As with some earlier comments in this sermon, I owe what I am about to say to the Anglican New Testament scholar Ian Paul[2].

Mark refers to the two villages of Bethphage and Bethany at the Mount of Olives (verse 1), whereas Matthew only mentions Bethany. We know from John’s Gospel that Bethany was a safe place for Jesus, because that is where his friends Lazarus, Martha, and Mary lived. One Christian author, Frank Viola, even entitled a book of his about their relationship at Bethany ‘God’s Favourite Place On Earth.’

But Bethphage was different. The name of the village means ‘House of unripe figs’, and that seems rather significant given that one of the first things Jesus does in ‘Holy Week’ is to curse a fig tree that is not producing fruit. A fig tree sometimes symbolised Israel, and Jesus’ action was a prophetic sign of his assessment of the state of God’s people.

Symbolically, then, Bethany and Bethphage show us two contrasting responses to the kingship of Jesus. Either we draw close to him, learn from him, and follow him as Lazarus, Martha, and Mary did, or we make no serious response to him and end up unfruitful and even cursed.

This is a time, then, to take Jesus seriously.

And this week, I read a short devotional article entitled ‘Taking Jesus Seriously.’ The author, a retired American Baptist pastor named Mike Glenn, began by talking about how we don’t take Jesus seriously. We like to explain away some of his teaching. Some of us even think he was rather extreme in saying that he had to die on the Cross for our sins. Can’t we just say sorry and be done with it?

But this is a season which shows how much it does matter, just how serious the rupture between God and human beings caused by sin is.

Glenn ends the article by talking about the focussed seriousness for Jesus that we need, and which is the only proper response to him at this time:

It takes a focused effort to begin to our lives more seriously and when we begin to think about our lives and purpose, we begin to seek Jesus again. He’s the only one who knows how to make life matter. As Peter confessed, “Only You, Lord, have the words of life.”

Only by focusing on Christ are we able to take our attention away from the sin that tempts us and still seeks to destroy us. We don’t overcome temptation by fighting it. We overcome temptation by ignoring it, by no longer desiring it.

Believe it or not, it’s in watching Jesus die that we learn to live. It’s only when we begin take Jesus seriously that we can take ourselves seriously.

Easter tells us how seriously Jesus takes us. Now, the question we have to answer is how seriously we’ll take Jesus.

[1] Ian Paul, Jesus enters Jerusalem on ‘Palm Sunday’ in Mark 11

[2] Op. cit.

0

Mission in the Bible 8: The Great Commission (Matthew 28:16-20)

Matthew 28:16-20

So here it is, the reading most people would have expected as the big one in this series on mission. It’s the passage often called ‘The Great Commission.’

These are the verses responsible for many Christians being called to become missionaries or evangelists. And maybe because of that, a lot of us can feel it isn’t for us. We like to lift the end of verse 20,

And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age

and draw comfort from it, but the earlier stuff, we think, is for others.

But that won’t work. Jesus is addressing the same people throughout. In fact, this teaching is for all Christians. Why do I say that? Two reasons. Firstly, this is the incident that many scholars think the Apostle Paul was referring to in 1 Corinthians 15:6, when talking about the resurrection of Jesus:

After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep.

How many? ‘More than five hundred.’ So it wasn’t just the apostles.

My second reason comes more explicitly from the reading, and it’s found in verse 17:

When they saw him, they worshipped him; but some doubted.

In among the worshippers were the doubters. Whether their faith was strong or weak, Jesus included them in the call.

And as an aside, doubt isn’t the same as unbelief. Doubt means we are still in two minds but could still land on the side of faith. Unbelief is an outright rejection of faith.

Jesus’ call, then, is for all of his followers. Not just the leaders. And not just those with a strong faith. All of us.

Our question, then, is this:  if Jesus is commissioning every Christian here, what is he asking of us?

Some would say there are four commands here: go, make disciples, baptise, and teach. However, it’s not as flat as that in the Greek, which is more like ‘Going, make disciples, baptising, teaching.’ In other words, the main command here is ‘make disciples’, and we make disciples by going, baptising, and teaching.

Hence, it’s a three-point sermon, all about how we are all called to make disciples. Make disciples by going; make disciples by baptising; make disciples by teaching.

Firstly, make disciples by going:

When Jesus tells us that making disciples will involve going, does this mean we all need to go abroad as missionaries? After all, the disciples are going to made from ‘all nations’, Jesus says.

Well, it does mean that for some Christians. Whatever the faults of the missionary movement, we should never throw out the idea that Christianity is a worldwide movement. And it also means we need to welcome missionaries here from nations where the faith is growing. They could reinvigorate us.

But most Christians aren’t called to go abroad, although we might easily be called to move somewhere else in general terms. If we accept that employers can move our jobs, why should we not think that God can call us to a new place to serve him?

Yet generally we will remain where we are. The word for most of us is what Paul tells the Corinthian Christians about their social status:

Brothers and sisters, each person, as responsible to God, should remain in the situation they were in when God called them. (1 Corinthians 7:24)

So how do we go? Most of us go in Christian mission by getting out of our comfortable places to show the love of God on territory where those who are not yet followers of Jesus feel at ease.

We need to ditch the idea that our mission happens on church premises. Maybe a few people will come to events and services that we host here, and perhaps the carol service is our best opportunity, but we must be realistic that fewer and fewer people feel comfortable – even safe – in a church building, and therefore it is our responsibility in the cause of the Gospel to go where they feel happy.

I suspect one of the reasons we have held onto church-based mission is that we are afraid of showing Jesus elsewhere. We end up making all sorts of excuses: a popular one I’ve heard in the Methodist church is that the groups which hire our premises are mission contacts. But they generally hire our halls as a commercial transaction: we have the facilities and a good price. By no means does it necessarily indicate spiritual openness.

Let’s see our going out into the world beyond our own private boundaries as a going with the presence of Christ to live out his way in those places where he calls us. For some, it will be a workplace. For others, it will be a social group like the U3A. Another place will be community groups that we are involved in. Many of us will go in mission in this way when we meet non-Christian relatives and friends.

In all these places Jesus calls us to live as his disciples, to radiate Christlikeness, such that our lives are an invitation or even a provocative question to others. We don’t need to harangue the people we meet, but we do need to be ready to speak about Jesus at an appropriate time.

Secondly, make disciples by baptising:

Here’s where we need to let go of all the sentimental and superstitious detritus that has clung to infant baptism. There is a place for infant baptism, because it arose in the early church when the first generation of Christians wondered about the spiritual status of their children, and they began to regard baptism rather like the way the Jewish faith sees circumcision for boys.

But all the social and superstitious accretions, like the need to be baptised as a baby if you are to have a church wedding in adulthood, or the thought that the unbaptised can’t go to heaven (which falls down the moment you think about the penitent thief on the cross) has obscured the relationship between baptism and discipleship. Baptism, says Jesus, is in the name of God, and the name of God is ‘Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.’

We are one of the Christian traditions that calls baptism a ‘sacrament’, and that’s worth thinking about. Now you hear certain definitions of sacrament as being ‘an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace’ and those are fine, but why the word ‘sacrament’? It comes from the Latin ‘sacramentum’, which was the oath of allegiance that Roman soldiers took to the Emperor. The sacraments are the Christian’s oaths of allegiance. Baptism is the initial oath of allegiance, Holy Communion is the ongoing one.

And that helps us see why baptism is linked to mission. It is the initiation ceremony where someone makes their oath of allegiance to God and his kingdom. It is a radical commitment to which we are calling people. None of this ‘Make a decision for Christ and then wait for heaven’: the early church called people to confess that Jesus was Lord, the very title the Emperor claimed for himself as a sign of divinity. In other words, it was a call to repudiate the powers that be, because confessing Jesus as Lord also meant that Caesar wasn’t Lord.

If we reduce baptism to ‘wetting the baby’s head’, we miss its fundamental message: that the Christian Gospel calls people to confess that Jesus is in charge of their lives and commands their ultimate loyalty, not the idols of our day, be they politics, technology, money, sexuality, or anything else.

This is where we have to be careful in all our talk today about inclusivity, much of which we pinch from the world rather than Jesus. Yes, Jesus wants us to invite all people, but when he welcomed people, such as the ‘tax collectors and sinners’, he did so with a view to calling them to leave behind their lives of sin and follow him.[1] Baptism should remind us of this.

Thirdly, make disciples by teaching:

Our three points are actually in a chronological sequence. Our discipling begins with going in order to reach people, it continues when they make a commitment with the oath of allegiance to Jesus at baptism, and finally the follow-up is our third point: teaching.

We need to get out of our heads the idea that teaching is filling our heads with facts and no more. It’s much more. Teaching involves getting people to learn things that they then apply in life. That is certainly true here in what Jesus says:

and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. (Verse 20a)

Someone who comes to faith in Christ needs to learn how to live the Christian life. In truth, we all need to learn that: to be a disciple of Jesus is to be a lifelong learner.

How does it happen? Only partly from the front on Sunday morning! I hope the sermons do some of the work of explaining what living the Christian life involves, but they are not the whole process. However much ministers should have a teaching gift, the sermon is only the start.

Small groups are a vital part of it. Bible study and fellowship groups are meant to be places where we reflect all the more on the teaching of Jesus, how we are going to put it into practice, and also to be accountable to one another about how we are living out what we have already learned. This is what Wesley did with some of his small groups in the Evangelical Revival in the eighteenth century. A church that is short on small groups, or where the small groups don’t get to grips with what it means to live as a disciple, are seriously lacking.

In one of my previous churches, we asked all the preachers to bring discussion questions based on their sermons so that the small groups could work on putting into practice. It did go a little awry in one group where an elderly man decided this was his opportunity to tear every preacher to pieces – it’s the old gag, ‘What’s the favourite Sunday dinner in a church household?’ Answer: ‘Roast preacher.’ But mostly the groups who stuck to the programme benefitted from it.

One-to-ones can help, too. Matching people together so that a more experienced Christian can nurture and mentor someone younger in the faith is valuable. I gained a lot in my early years as a Christian from the person I described as my ‘spiritual elder brother.’

I hope you can see from these examples that while the minister certainly plays a part in teaching the faith, it is an exercise for the whole church. We do not have to be theological specialists in order to help teach people how to live out the teaching of Jesus. At heart, we just need to love Jesus, want to go his way, and be willing to share our experience of that with others.

In conclusion, Jesus gives us a sequence here for our task as disciple-makers. We begin by going out of our comfort zones to live for Christ in front of the world. We call people not simply to receive the blessings of forgiveness, but to make the baptismal oath of allegiance to Jesus as Lord over all. And then we build relationships with people in the church family where we share our learning how to follow the teaching of Jesus.

It’s straightforward to describe, but we may feel nervous about putting it into practice. And I think that’s why Jesus’ final words here are

And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age. (Verse 20b)

These are not just general words of comfort, good as they are for that. These words are Jesus’ promise that he hasn’t sent us out on the challenging task of mission on our own. Where we go, he goes. And usually, he’s even gone there ahead of us. We can count on that as we seek to make more disciples.

[1] See Ian Paul, In what way does Jesus ‘welcome’ sinners?

0

Seven Churches 7: Laodicea (Revelation 3:14-22)

Revelation 3:14-22

Like a lot of men, I am not keen on going to the doctor. One time, several years ago, I forced myself to go because I was suffering from regular blinding headaches. The reason I didn’t want to go was that I feared bad news.

The first thing the GP did was put me at ease. He was quickly able to assure me that I didn’t have a brain tumour. He said, ‘Almost everyone who comes to me with bad headaches assumes they have a tumour, but the vast majority don’t.’

If men don’t like seeing the doctor, I venture to suggest as a parallel that many churches would rather not receive a diagnosis of their spiritual health from Jesus. In the case of the church at Laodicea, they are in for a shock when Doctor Jesus gives his diagnosis of their condition and prescribes treatment in our reading. Unlike a lot of men who fear they have a serious condition when they are more or less fine, the opposite is true of them. They think they are fine, but they are perilously ill.

Let’s remind ourselves of Jesus’ diagnosis. It’s devastating:

15 I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! 16 So, because you are lukewarm – neither hot nor cold – I am about to spit you out of my mouth. 17 You say, “I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.” But you do not realise that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked.

We need to look separately at the problems of being lukewarm and being rich.

A lot of people misunderstand the criticism of lukewarmness. It is often said that to be hot is to be ‘on fire’, fiercely devoted to Jesus, and to be cold is to be hostile to him. Therefore in condemning lukewarmness, Jesus is saying either be totally for me or totally against me, both are preferable to being half-hearted. But why would Jesus want people to be against him? It makes no sense.

What does make sense is to put these images into the context of Laodicea itself. The nearby town of Hierapolis had hot springs which were used for healing and therapy. Nearby Colossae had cold water, which was used for cooling and refreshment. But Laodicea only had a lukewarm water supply, laden with minerals, which drinkers wanted to spit out.[1]

Applying this to the metaphor of hot, cold, and lukewarm water in our text, I think we are meant to understand that the Laodicean church’s so-called faith had no positive effect on anyone. They brought neither healing nor refreshment to those with whom they engaged. They were not a good news community. Nothing about them brought the transforming love of God in Christ into people’s lives for the better. Encountering them just left a bad taste in the mouth.

And as for their claim to be rich and self-sufficient, again this was something in which the Christians followed their city. Laodicea had been hit by earthquakes in AD 20 and again in AD 60. On the first occasion, they received imperial aid to rebuild. On the second occasion, they refused outside aid, saying they did not need it due to wealthy benefactors in the local farming community and a nearby centre of medicine.[2]

What does that sound like to you? Well, to me it sounds like pride. I don’t need any help thank you, I’ve got it all. In spiritual terms this is devastating to faith. In fact, it’s contrary to faith and kills faith. In the Gospel we are, as Jesus tells the Laodicean church, ‘wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked’. We need someone else. We need Jesus. We need the grace of God. And we need humility to ask for it. Pride stops us from receiving what God has for us.

And if they were full of themselves, full of pride, no wonder they were bad news for people they met. No wonder they left a bad taste.

It’s important for us to reflect humbly on where we are as a church in this respect. Are we a good news community? Is this a group of people where folk are being changed, bit by bit, so that they more beautifully reflect Jesus Christ to the world? Is this a society where the tired and weary find refreshment?

Alternatively, are we just a private club, maybe a bit harsh in tone, where rather than healing and refreshment people encounter judgmentalism and rejection? Which are we?

Because for any church that falls into the latter category, Jesus’ words, ‘I am about to spit you out of my mouth’ must be taken seriously. Did you realise that Jesus closes some churches? Not all – some churches that close have fought the good fight but run out of steam. But others, those like Laodicea, are ones that Jesus himself spits out of his mouth. He withdraws his blessing. He stops pouring out his Spirit. And these churches wither until they die.

These churches may be more familiar to you than you might think. How often have I heard people in some Methodist churches say, ‘I’m not interested in all that mission stuff, I just want this church to remain open to see me out and have my funeral.’ That is a statement of unutterable selfishness. It goes against the whole spirit of Jesus and his community. I think we can work out from today’s passage what Jesus does with a church like that.

Secondly, we need to reflect on Jesus’ prescription:

18 I counsel you to buy from me gold refined in the fire, so that you can become rich; and white clothes to wear, so that you can cover your shameful nakedness; and salve to put on your eyes, so that you can see.

19 Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline. So be earnest and repent. 20 Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.

I wonder whether you have childhood memories of being made to take vile-tasting medicine. For me, there was one dreaded medicine bottle in a kitchen cupboard. It was one that my grandmother, who lived with us, was fond of reaching for as some kind of cure-all panacea.

Kaolin and morphine. Or ‘Kaolin-morph’, as she called it. These days I shudder at the thought that pharmacies sold over the counter a medicine containing morphine for unrestricted use with children. In those days, all I knew was that it had the most disgusting taste.

I want to suggest to you that here Jesus has no alternative but to prescribe some fairly unpalatable medicine to the Laodicean church. But nothing other than a drastic turnaround will bring them out of their spiritual death.

So – gold refined in the fire: a Christian life that is costly and sometimes means suffering.

White clothes to cover nakedness: I think this is about a willingness to go against the popular culture. For the Greeks, public nakedness was celebrated. You may recall that the athletes in the original Olympic games participated naked. Even our word ‘gymnast’ derives from the Greek word for naked.[3] They had to be willing where necessary to go against popular culture, rather than think they could continue to fit in and just tack belief in Jesus on top of that.

Salve on their eyes so they could see – they were so spiritually blind that they needed to see again what was truly important to God.

No wonder Jesus talks about rebuke, discipline (or, perhaps better, instruction) and repentance. When a church is dying spiritually the solution is almost never the introduction of new methods and techniques. All they do is put new clothes on a corpse. Much more likely is a solution that entails taking some difficult medicine to get back on the right track, or submission to spiritual surgery.

There are many churches that need to stop asking, what quick fix can we apply that will turn us around, and instead ask, what pain are we willing to endure in order to become more Christlike?

The great tragedy of the church at Laodicea is expressed in verse 20:

20 Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.

That is not an evangelistic text. It is the description of a church that has shut Jesus out. And Jesus, who described himself to the previous church, Philadelphia, as one who could open doors, either cannot or will not open this door. He waits on the outside, where he has been exiled, until the Laodiceans welcome him back in.

We need to reflect on these matters from time to time. Have we just chosen the easy, comfortable life? Do we avoid the cost of discipleship by blending in with our wider culture? Have we lost sight of what is important to God?

Sure, there are times when churches decline because the wider culture has rejected the Christian Gospel. They struggle to get a hearing because of this. But at least they are trying to get a hearing.

Sadly, there are other churches that are uncomfortably like Laodicea, choosing the easy life and compromising with society. These churches face a hard choice, to know that the only way to spiritual life is the costly path of discipleship.

And maybe it’s the fact that the way of Jesus is a costly and at times painful route through life that puts us off and leads us to take the soft option. If that is the block, then let’s just take a step back and consider all Jesus has done for us. The universe was made through him. He left the glory of heaven for the poverty of the Incarnation. He was betrayed, falsely accused, tortured, and subjected to a cruel death. All this he did for us.

If he has done so much for us, what can we, his people, offer him in gratitude?

[1] Ian Paul, Revelation (TNTC), p113.

[2] Op. cit., p111.

[3] Op. cit., p116.

0

Seven Churches 6: Philadelphia (Revelation 3:7-13)

Revelation 3:7-13

One of the discussions Debbie and I have been having lately has centred around the fact that next March our daughter reaches the age of 21 and what we might do to mark that occasion.

It’s less of a milestone now, since 18 became the age of majority in the UK. (I think I’m right in saying it’s still 21 in the USA, though.) So our daughter will probably not recognise the old ditty,

I’ve got the key of the door, never been 21 before! 

The traditional gift of a key or a key pendant when someone reached 21 signified them becoming an adult and now being responsible enough to have an actual key. Doors opened for them both literally and metaphorically.

In our passage, Jesus is the One who has the key to the door, spiritually:

These are the words of him who is holy and true, who holds the key of David. What he opens no one can shut, and what he shuts no one can open. (Verse 7)

‘The key of David’ alludes to a messianic prophecy in Isaiah 22:22:

The one with the keys, the steward of the household, had authority both to allow and to prohibit admission to the house itself … As the successor to the Davidic kingdom, Jesus has authority to give access, not to the physical Jerusalem, but to the New Jerusalem and the presence of God.[1]

And Jesus explicitly says he has opened the door for the church at Philadelphia:

I know your deeds. See, I have placed before you an open door that no one can shut. (Verse 8a)

When we use the metaphor of a door being opened, it is often to mean that an opportunity has presented itself for us. It’s not unusual for Christians to read about the door Jesus has opened for the church at Philadelphia and think that Jesus has given them a particular opportunity. Indeed, I recall reading many years ago the book ‘God’s Smuggler To China’ and learning how this verse encouraged the author that there was an opening to smuggle Bibles into communist China. It’s a thrilling story.

But the original context here does not indicate that Jesus is presenting an opportunity to the Philadelphian church. Remember, he has the key of David, which opens up citizenship of the New Jerusalem and a place in the presence of God.

And that key of David opens the door to three blessings for the church at Philadelphia. There are no criticisms or rebukes of this church, unlike most of the others, just blessings of grace.

Blessing number one is affirmation:

8 I know your deeds. See, I have placed before you an open door that no one can shut. I know that you have little strength, yet you have kept my word and have not denied my name.

Philadelphia is not a big, strong church. Their city is fragile, and so are they. The city had been devastated economically by the Emperor Domitian. Although they were loyal to the emperor, he had taken over half their vineyards to grow grain that would feed the Roman army. Philadelphia depended economically on their vineyards. This was a devastating blow.[2]

Jesus explicitly says he knows the church has ‘little strength.’ Perhaps they are a mixture of those who have weathered the economic storm and those who have been plunged into financial difficulty and poverty. They are not glamorous. But Jesus loves them. He is pleased with them.

Why? They have access to the presence of God through Jesus and in response to that they have engaged in good deeds out of gratitude, they have kept his word because he is trustworthy, and they have not denied him, despite strong social pressures.

A church doesn’t have to be big and trendy to be loved and cherished by Jesus. If we are small because we have been unfaithful, that is one thing. But if we are small, despite celebrating Jesus who opens the door to God’s presence by his death and resurrection, and if we respond to that in gratitude with our deeds, and faithfully keep God’s word even when it is costly, then you can be sure he is pleased with a congregation like that.

It’s not for us to worry about whether we have flashy programmes, big budgets, and eye-catching publicity. We only need to concern ourselves with whether we are doing good because Jesus has been good to us, and whether we are remaining faithful to his word, because we know he has the words of eternal life and it is therefore worth sticking with his ways, even when society doesn’t like them.

Blessing number two is vindication:

9 I will make those who are of the synagogue of Satan, who claim to be Jews though they are not, but are liars – I will make them come and fall down at your feet and acknowledge that I have loved you.

The church in Philadelphia is under the cosh. At a guess, what has happened is something like this. Whoever first took the Gospel to that town probably followed the example of the Apostle Paul and shared the message first of all in the local synagogue. You may recall that Paul said that the Gospel is first to the Jew and then to the Gentile, and there are several examples of him pursuing this strategy in the Acts of the Apostles.

But what typically happened was that some responded positively and others with hostility. Some Jews would believe that Jesus was their Messiah, but others would react angrily. Maybe that is what has happened in Philadelphia. The church is suffering unjustly. What does Jesus say to them?

Effectively, his message is, leave this with me. I will sort it out. It’s a version of Paul’s counsel in Romans 12:19, where he quotes Deuteronomy 32:35,’Vengeance is mine, says the Lord.’ No fighting back. No violence in words, thoughts, attitudes, or actions. Leave it in his hands.

My last but one appointment was a mismatch. I certainly made some mistakes there, but from the beginning my gifts were not what several of the more vociferous church members wanted, and it became a painful experience. The trouble was, it was a lovely area to live in and the children had settled in happily to an excellent primary school. But we had to make the painful decision to leave.

When we did so, a friend who at the time was the URC minister of an ecumenical church in the circuit had words for me that I have never forgotten. He pointed me to the opening of Psalm 35:

Contend, Lord, with those who contend with me;
    fight against those who fight against me. (Verse 1)

That’s what I needed to do. Ask God to sort it out. It was no use me getting worked up about it. If I tried to sort it out, then even my purest motives for justice would have been coloured by the emotions of my pain. Best to leave it to God.

It didn’t mean that things were fixed quickly. I know that, because a few months later I was asked back to conduct the funeral of a saintly church member. I was still subjected to nastiness.

But leave it to God. Hand it over. In time, he will sort it out. It is not for us to set the timetable for his justice.

Whenever we are picked on for our faith, let us ask God to contend with those who contend with us. He can do so with pure love. Even his wrath is an expression of his love.

Blessing number three is preservation:

10 Since you have kept my command to endure patiently, I will also keep you from the hour of trial that is going to come on the whole world to test the inhabitants of the earth.

What is this hour of trial that will test the inhabitants of the earth? I don’t think it can be a reference to the Last Judgment. That could hardly be construed as a test. It sounds more to me like a time of general suffering in the world, as opposed to the specific suffering for faith in Jesus that we considered in the last point. I suspect this is the suffering to which all people are vulnerable, from ill health to natural disasters to war and so on. Certainly God uses such times to test people and perhaps to see whether such times will lead people to call out to him.

Christians were not exempted from COVID. Christians are not being spared in Israel and Gaza, or in Ukraine. We are in the thick of these things just like everyone else. In what sense does God preserve his church, then?

Well, it’s not that we are miraculously protected from the suffering of the world. We do not get an escape route in the way that some Christians read Revelation and other New Testament texts to believe that we shall be ‘raptured’ to heaven before the so-called ‘Great Tribulation’ comes on the earth.

But God will always preserve his church. Remember that Jesus said the gates of Hades would not be able to withstand the church. Hades is the place of the dead. Death cannot destroy the church. We are resurrection people!

But neither will death destroy the church on earth. Many of the churches in Revelation disappeared years and centuries later. Places that became strongholds of the church in her early centuries, such as North Africa, are now deserts for Christianity. Yet even though the church may be crushed in some places, she blossoms and flowers elsewhere. In our day, the western church may be in trouble, but the church is growing in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and south-east Asia amongst other places.

To the world, the church of Jesus Christ is the jack-in-the-box that will not stay in the box. To our enemies, their efforts to destroy us are no better than a game of Whack-A-Mole. Hit us in one place, we pop up somewhere else. God will always preserve us. His church is central to his eternal purposes.

Whatever discouragements we face, let us never forget that.

In conclusion, Christ’s faithful church receives many blessings, even in times of trouble: affirmation, vindication, and preservation. How might we respond? Jesus says,

11 I am coming soon. Hold on to what you have, so that no one will take your crown.

Keep on keeping on. Continue to be faithful to Jesus’ word.

Simply said and sometimes less simple to put into practice, I know. But let us remember God’s grace and mercy to us in Christ. Let us remember the blessings he promises his faithful people that we have thought about today.

And let those things motivate us to depend on the Holy Spirit to hold on in faith and await Christ’s blessings.

[1] Ian Paul, Revelation (TNTC), p106.

[2] Op. cit., p105.

0

Seven Churches: 5, Sardis (Revelation 3:1-6)

Revelation 3:1-6

I’m sure you have noticed that whenever a major organisation is in the news because of a scandal, one of the first things they often want to do is protect their image. They call in public relations consultants who specialise in so-called ‘reputation management.’ The public image must be protected at all costs.

I think it was to the credit of McDonald’s UK boss on Thursday that when the BBC reported nothing had changed there since they had exposed a culture of sexual abuse and harassment of young workers, he didn’t pretend that everything was actually fine. He spoke instead of his determination to make the company a better and safer place to work. Of course, only time will show whether there is substance to what he says.

And with that in mind, let’s take a trip to this week’s church in Revelation, the church at Sardis. This time, Jesus is so troubled by them that his rebuke comes before his praise – the opposite way around from usual.

So the first thing we will consider is Jesus’ rebuke of Sardis.

I know your deeds; you have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead.  (Verse 1b)

‘You have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead.’ If ever a church was trying to maintain a good public image while everything was in truth rotting, it was Sardis.

But to help hear just how forceful Jesus’ words are here, it’s useful to know something about the history of the town itself. Listen to what Dr Ian Paul says about them:

Sardis lost out to Smyrna in competing to host an imperial temple, because of emphasizing its past splendour rather than the present reality. And though the capturing of the acropolis became a byword for an impossible task, it was in fact taken by force – not once, but twice! When Cyrus attacked the city in the sixth century, his forces noticed the use of a trapdoor under the unguarded walls, and while the occupants slept he entered to open the city gates. Three hundred years later, the Seleucid king Antiochus III the Great besieged the city, and apparently took it after reading of Cyrus’ victory. The inhabitants were once again asleep instead of on guard.[1]

The church at Sardis was just like the city itself. In having a reputation of being alive when they were dead they too were trading on past glories. They might not lose an imperial temple but rather a community that was the temple of the Holy Spirit, worshipping the One True God. They too were asleep and needed to wake up if they were not to suffer invasion from their spiritual enemy.

How easy it is for a church to trade on its past reputation, or to live in the past when the present doesn’t seem so appetising. I tell the story of a vociferous elderly lady in one past church who repeatedly reminded everyone of the time when the church had a hundred children in the Sunday School. It didn’t do much for the morale of those who were trying to lead the children they did have at the time, and nor did it help in finding out what God wanted to do there and then in that part of the church family’s life. The only way to do that involved sidelining and ignoring the nostalgia, and then praying, ‘Lord, this is the honest situation. Things are not good. What do you want to do here with children and young people?’

There are many churches which would like us to believe the hype that they are alive when in fact they are dead. They may be trading on past glories. They may be deluding themselves that because the people who worship there at present are happy, it must be a good place. They may not want to ask why some people have left. Show me a church that doesn’t say it’s a friendly church. But then ask people if they have ever encountered an unfriendly church. Many dying congregations expend a lot of time and energy on deluding themselves. They need to hear the rebuke of Jesus to Sardis for themselves.

And they need to hear what Jesus says they should do instead.  

2 Wake up! Strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have found your deeds unfinished in the sight of my God. 3 Remember, therefore, what you have received and heard; hold it fast, and repent. But if you do not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what time I will come to you.

Get back to basics, says Jesus. What brought you to a living faith in the first place? Was it not repentance for your sins and trusting in the mercy and grace of God rather than your own good deeds? Why is it that we confess our sins in every Sunday service? Is it not because we always need to be in that habit of getting back to basics? None of us is beyond the need to confess our sins.

When I was in my church youth group, our favourite preacher in the circuit was an elderly Welsh Local Preacher. I worked out once that he had been born two years before the Welsh Revival at the beginning of the last century. He would have been a toddler during that revival, and he preached like he was still in the middle of the revival.

One Sunday he challenged us from the pulpit with these words: “Have you been converted? Because I’ve been converted many times.” And I think what he meant was that he regularly had to come back to Christ in repentance and be made new again.

If we spend our time telling the old stories, we should be thankful to God for what he did then. But if we live in the past without walking with Jesus today, it counts for nothing. We are asleep in the light and it won’t be us who closes the church, it will be Jesus.

The second of our two things to consider is Jesus’ praise of Sardis.

4 Yet you have a few people in Sardis who have not soiled their clothes. They will walk with me, dressed in white, for they are worthy. 5 The one who is victorious will, like them, be dressed in white. I will never blot out the name of that person from the book of life, but will acknowledge that name before my Father and his angels.

What is this about? Let’s hear from Ian Paul again:

It is striking that the contrast here is not between the (spiritually) dying and the living, but between the dying and the unpolluted; spiritual life involves purity of living, symbolized by the unsoiled garments. From Genesis onwards, walk[ing] with God signifies approval, friendship and obedience (Gen 5:22); the purity of the garments now is in anticipation of the life of the age to come (6:11, 7:9, 13). Although the high priests in the Old Testament wear linen, white is predominantly the colour of pagan worship, signifying purity, holiness and honour in Greek and Roman culture. Participation in the life of God and Jesus includes sharing in their qualities; just as God and the lamb are lauded as being worthy (4:11; 5:9), so those who remain faithful are the ones who have ‘lived a life worthy of [their] calling’ (Eph 4:1).[2]

So here is our number one priority in the church: to be people who walk with Jesus, who reject the pollution of the world for the purity of his ways. This is what pleases him. This is the true sign of life in the church.

Having a lively programme of events and meetings is not our priority: walking with Jesus is. Having high-quality music from a choir or a band is not our priority: walking with Jesus is. Being the hip and fashionable place to go where there are lots of young people is not our priority: walking with Jesus is. Being an institution that is a respected pillar of the local society is not our priority: walking with Jesus is.

If other blessings come, that’s great, but they are not what we seek. Our priority is walking with Jesus.

And the thing is, we already know what to do about this and we’ve heard it over and over for years. We know from the Gospels how Jesus wants us to live our lives. We also know he has given us the Holy Spirit so that we can put these things into practice. Let’s not deflect from this by saying, “But how do we do it?” because Jesus has already given us his instructions and given us the tools for the job.

I read a column on the Internet by an American New Testament scholar called Scot McKnight. Every Friday he hands over his column to a recently retired minister, a Baptist pastor by the name of Mike Glenn. This week, he was writing about the ways in which preachers look for sermon illustrations and how long it takes us. But he ended his column this way:

Since my retirement, I’ve had a little more time to think. As you would imagine, I’ve come up with a lot of theories with what’s wrong with the world. Here’s one of my theories. The world needs some good sermon illustrations. That is, we need more people whose lives prove the reality of the Risen Christ. Before people look at Jesus, they look at His followers. Do His followers show any difference in their lives? Do they show evidence of having been with Jesus? If the world sees something interesting, then they might want to learn more about Jesus. If they don’t find anything in the lives of His disciples, the world will conclude there’s nothing to Jesus either. 

As I have often said, the world isn’t mad at the church because we’re different. They’re mad at us because we aren’t different enough. 

Maybe the world needs a few more sermons. Maybe. What we really need, however, are more good sermon illustrations. People whose lives tell the gospel in unforgettable ways. People who love their neighbors. People who forgive after being horribly wronged. People who can live in hope when the world is filled with despair. Whenever we hear stories like these, they stick with us. We can’t forget them.

The world is always looking for a good story. We just can’t find enough of them. Maybe if we made it easier to find a few good stories – a few good sermon illustrations – the world would find it easier to find Jesus. 

Do you see now how important it is that we all walk with Jesus. We shall fail. I do. We shall need to return to confession every week and be converted many times.

But there is nothing more vital in our lives and the life of the church. It comes above everything else we do.

So let’s make it our priority.

[1] Ian Paul, Revelation (TNTC). p99.

[2] Op. cit., p102.

0

Seven Churches 3: Pergamum (Revelation 2:12-17)

Revelation 2:12-17

You may have spotted that I’m one of those ministers who only wears a clerical collar for formal occasions or when it’s absolutely necessary, such as when I visit someone who doesn’t know me and I need to be identified as a minister.

One of my Anglican friends noted this attitude of mine and said to me, “Dave, you’re not so much low church, you’re more like subterranean!”

Others, more particularly older and more traditional church members, have questioned me on this and claimed that the dog collar is like some magical Open Sesame that gains ministers entry into places others can’t go. The usual claim is that it allows us to get into hospital wards outside visiting hours.

I have to disappoint these people and tell them that I have no more right to go into a hospital ward out of hours than anybody else, unless I’m a member of the hospital chaplaincy team. And then what would gain me access is not the dog collar but a hospital lanyard.

If I’m feeling particularly mischievous in the conversation, what I then retort is that since Methodist doctrine says that ministers hold no priesthood that is different from the priesthood all believers have, then maybe all Christians should wear the collar!

Why am I telling you this? Because what Jesus writes to the church at Pergamum is all about being identifiably Christian. If we ask what Jesus praises them for, it’s being identifiably Christian. If we ask where he calls them out, it’s for when they hide their Christian identity.

Firstly, then, let’s listen to the praise Jesus heaps on the church at Pergamum:

13 I know where you live – where Satan has his throne. Yet you remain true to my name. You did not renounce your faith in me, not even in the days of Antipas, my faithful witness, who was put to death in your city – where Satan lives.

They wore their Christian uniform, so to speak, and were clearly identifiable as followers of Jesus. They knew it would put them in the firing line in a place ‘where Satan has his throne’. Whatever that phrase means precisely, we can be sure that Pergamum was a tough place to identify as a Christian, because hostility, opposition, and even violence would come their way. Yet they still did it. And it even cost one church member his life.

This wasn’t unusual at the time Revelation was written. We are fairly sure it was written around the time that Domitian was the Roman Emperor (that’s AD 81-96, fact fans). A cruel and ruthless ruler, he only tolerated religions other than the Roman emperor cult if they could be assimilated into that Roman culture. If they stood out, it seems persecution was the consequence.

Indeed, the Book of Revelation is not so much cryptic prophecies of future end-time events as a document to give hope to persecuted Christians. Throughout the centuries and around the world, the persecuted church has taken great comfort from it.

Today, we hear inspiring and shocking stories from around the world about what it means for many Christians to ‘wear their uniform’, to be publicly identifiable as disciples of Jesus.

Here’s one I found through an email from Christian Solidarity Worldwide:

[In August], hundreds of people stormed a Christian colony in Jaranwala city near Faisalabad in Pakistan. Up to 25 churches and chapels and hundreds of homes were ransacked and set on fire.

Why? Two local Christian residents, Rocky Masih and Raja Masih, had been accused of blasphemy. Mobs, stirred up by reports that the men had desecrated religious scriptures, attacked the colony, demanding to execute the two men themselves.

Rocky and Raja were subsequently arrested and charged with insulting Islam and defiling the name of the Prophet Mohammed. Other Christians in the area have fled in fear of their lives.

This is what happens in many places around the world when you publicly identify as a Christian. Lies, false charges, violence, and the risk of death.

But what does that all mean for us, in a country where it is much safer to be a Christian, even if it is less well received than it once was?

I think there are a couple of applications.

One is that we need to take seriously what happens to other members of the Christian family around the world. We need to use our freedoms to support them and campaign for them. I strongly recommend that we look into the work of organisations like Christian Solidarity Worldwide, whom I just quoted,  or Open Doors, who do similar work. Who else is going to speak up for suffering Christians if not the rest of the church? These organisations can provide us with material for prayer, for lobbying Parliament, and so on.

The other application I would draw is this. If our situation is easier, then why do we allow relatively trivial opposition to close our mouths from speaking up for Christ? I know we want to avoid the stereotype of Christians being judgmental, but the mockery or opposition we would face is nothing in comparison to what our sisters and brothers in Pakistan, Nigeria, India, Iran,  North Korea, China, and so many other countries face.

Surely we could find a bit more courage to nail our colours to the mast?

Secondly, why does Jesus call the church at Pergamum to repent?

You may know one of my favourite sermon stories. It concerns a question set in a training examination for police recruits:

‘You are on the beat and you see two dogs fighting. The dogs knock a baby out of its pram, causing a car to swerve off the road, smashing into a grocer’s shop. A pedestrian is severely injured, but during the confusion a woman’s bag is snatched, a crowd of onlookers chase after the thief and, in the huge build-up of traffic, the ambulance is blocked from the victim of the crash.

‘State, in order of priority, your course of action.’

One recruit wrote, ‘Take off uniform and mingle with crowd.’[1]

I think that’s rather like the issue Jesus had with Pergamum:

14 Nevertheless, I have a few things against you: there are some among you who hold to the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to entice the Israelites to sin so that they ate food sacrificed to idols and committed sexual immorality. 15 Likewise, you also have those who hold to the teaching of the Nicolaitans. 16 Repent therefore! Otherwise, I will soon come to you and will fight against them with the sword of my mouth.

Effectively, the Christians at Pergamum had taken off their uniform and mingled with the crowd. How? Note the reference to eating food sacrificed to idols and committing sexual immorality. It sounds very much like some of them were joining in with the practices of the local pagan religious cult.

The management guru Peter Drucker once famously said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” and this rather sounds like the local culture had eaten the Christians for breakfast. After all, surely it doesn’t harm to mingle with the local crowd if the alternative is sticking out like a sore thumb as a Christian and getting in trouble as a result?

But the problem here is that in letting themselves be absorbed by the surrounding culture they ended up imbibing a lifestyle that denied the Gospel. So no wonder Jesus calls them to repentance.

Could it be that we face the same challenge? Sadly, there is plenty of evidence of both individual Christians and the church corporately taking off uniform and mingling with today’s crowd. We do it when we baptise the world’s ethics and try to convince ourselves they are consistent with the Gospel.

We take off our uniform when we succumb to the politics of ‘might is right.’

We mingle with the crowd when we adopt a celebrity cult in the church, just as the world does.

We do it when we worship the god of individual choice, or the idol of consumerism. And you don’t even have to buy anything to worship consumerism: you can just treat church as a consumer choice, that exists solely to meet your needs and tastes.

Yes, we are every bit in as much danger as the Pergamum church of letting the culture eat us up and losing our Christian distinctiveness.

And when we do this, we are saying we are ashamed of the Gospel, and of he One who went to the Cross for us. That’s serious.

We might do well to reflect on whether there are any ways in which we have bent the shape of our faith to fit what’s popular in our society, rather than calling our society to change shape in conformity to Christ.

Each one of us needs to examine ourselves from time to time to consider whether we have compromised our faith to fit the wider culture.

In conclusion, we have a choice and each choice will lead to a different response from Jesus.

If we choose to take off our uniform and mingle with the crowd, rendering ourselves indistinguishable from the wider world, then Jesus has a solemn response. He says,

16 Repent therefore! Otherwise, I will soon come to you and will fight against them with the sword of my mouth.

In other words, he will speak against us. Is that what he has done when scandals have been exposed in the church that is exposed in the world?

But there is good news from Jesus if we take the more difficult route of staying in our distinctive Christian uniform in the world:

17 Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To the one who is victorious, I will give some of the hidden manna. I will also give that person a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to the one who receives it.

The ‘hidden manna’ surely means he will sustain us in difficult, wilderness times in our lives. The ‘white stone’ is what a not guilty verdict was returned on in the local courts and indicates Christ’s acceptance of us. The secret name likely signifies his intimate knowledge and love for us.[2] These are ways in which Jesus strengthens us when times are tough.

So there we have it. We are faced with a tough choice, whether to identify publicly as Christians at a potential cost or to go underground and be indistinct from the rest of the world.

But the easy road is confronted by the opposition of Jesus, and the tough road takes us into the blessing of Jesus.

Which will we choose?

[1] Adapted from Murray Watts, Bats In The Belfry, p137 #232.

[2] See Ian Paul, Revelation (Tyndale New Testament Commentary), p90.

0

Farewell 3: The End Is Not The End

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Jeremiah 8:20)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I want to give you two words of encouragement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jesus wins.

1

You Are Not Alone: The Temptations Of Jesus, Matthew 4:1-11 (Lent 1 Year A 2023)

Matthew 4:1-11

So we begin Lent and our journey with Jesus to the Cross. When we get to the Cross, we are used to saying things such as, ‘Jesus died for us,’ and indeed he did.

But one thing we miss is that Jesus could only die for us because he lived for us. Yes, his death was an atoning sacrifice for our sins, as the New Testament says, but there is more to it than that. In his death and our faith in him, we are united to his life and the benefits of his life for us. He did not only die for us (as if everything up until Calvary was just filling in time), he also lived for us.

I think that’s important when we consider the temptations of Jesus. It’s important to say he was tempted for us. And that’s the way I want us to explore this oh-so-familiar story that we read in one of the Gospels on the First Sunday of Lent every year.

So here are three strands of the temptations story that help us because we are united with Christ:

Firstly, fellowship.

Most weeks when I prepare a service I have to choose the hymns before I have written the sermon or even know what direction I’m going in with the Bible passage. More often than not that works out all right, but I have to confess that this week we’re now going to be singing a hymn after the sermon that takes a completely different tack from what the passage says.

What we’ll be singing is the hymn ‘Lead us, heavenly Father, lead us.’ It imagines Jesus in the wilderness and the hymn-writer says,

lone and dreary, faint and weary,
through the desert thou didst go.

And that’s how I’d conceived Jesus’ wilderness experience – as a tough, solitary time.

However, then I began to read and consult scholars about the passage, and I’ve had to admit I was wrong. Ian Paul points out that Jesus wasn’t alone. At the beginning, the Holy Spirit leads him into the wilderness (verse 1), and at the end of the story ‘angels came and attended him’ (verse 11).

So if last week when we thought about the Transfiguration we sang the old 80s song ‘Weak In The Presence Of Beauty’ by Alison Moyet, this week we sing with Michael Jackson, ‘You Are Not Alone.’

Jesus was not alone in facing temptation. Neither are we, and that’s good news. It’s easy to feel that we are on our own when temptation comes, but it’s not the case that we are isolated. The Holy Spirit is with us to give us strength to do what is right. God’s angels are not far away to encourage us in the ways of the kingdom.

We may well feel alone when temptation comes, but that is all part of the lie. God’s Spirit is on hand to help us to say no to temptation and yes to Christ. It may be that all the noise and pressure of the temptation is there to stop us recognising God’s presence with us, but present he is.

Or it may of course be that really to our shame we want to give in to this particular temptation, and so we ignore the presence of the Holy Spirit with us in our hour of testing.

But God is there. He is our escape route. He is our strength in times of weakness.

When we are tempted, let’s look for God. He won’t abandon us.

Secondly, obedience.

I once heard a preacher declare as if it were blindingly obvious to everyone, ‘Of course Jesus was unable to sin,’ but I sat there thinking, well if that’s the case, the whole story of the temptations is pretty pointless!

I think the preacher’s error came from so wanting to defend the divinity of Jesus (which is a right and noble thing to do) that he forgot Jesus was fully human as well as fully God. And because Jesus took on sinful human flesh, it would have been possible for him to sin.

The Good News, though, is that he didn’t. Here at the temptations as at every stage of his life, Jesus, in the words of John Calvin, took sinful human flesh and turned it back to obedience to the Father.

You can’t miss the parallels between Jesus in the wilderness for forty days and Israel in the wilderness for forty years. But whereas Israel disobeyed and her life became futile, Jesus obeyed. He redeemed sinful human flesh by his obedience.

So when you and I find ourselves facing temptation, our union with Christ means that we have his obedience available to us. Before we resist the devil we submit to him and say, ‘Lord, give me the gift of your obedience.’

Our world doesn’t appreciate talk of obedience. It claims we are only answerable to ourselves and only need take others into account by ensuring we don’t hurt them. Obedience to anyone – let alone the Almighty – is out of date and repressive.

But you know what? Obedience to God is nothing of the sort. It is in fact the way we enter into true freedom. For true freedom is not the chance to do anything we like, but freedom to do what is right instead of being enslaved to sin. And as such, obedience to God is the most liberating of practices.

The expression, ‘Do what thou wilt’ is actually one of the cardinal tenets of Satanism. But ‘Do what God wills’ is the road to freedom. It may seem difficult, if not unattainable at times, but it is possible for the Christian because we are united with Christ and he gives us the gift of his obedience.

Thirdly, example.

The thing about the temptations story when it comes to us preachers is that it looks like an easy shoo-in for one of our favourite three-point sermons, one point for each temptation. And I’ve done that plenty of times over the years.

But while I’m still giving you three points this morning, I’m trying to show you the bigger picture. And so I want to think about all three temptations under this one heading about Jesus’ example. Because the temptations that the devil tries on Jesus come in some form to every generation. And Jesus’ example shows us how to rebut them.

So the devil tries to attack Jesus’ identity – who God says he is. God has just spoken from heaven at his baptism to say that Jesus is his beloved Son, and so the devil kicks off two of the temptations with the words ‘If you are the Son of God.’

Likewise to us he would love us to take on any identity except that of being beloved children of God. I could say that my identity is male heterosexual, a husband, a father, a Methodist minister, and a photographer, but these all pale into insignificance beside the fact that God loves me as his child. There is no more secure identity than that, and it’s important not to let the enemy to tempt us into skewing what our most fundamental identity is.

The devil wants Jesus to live by bread alone, just as much of our society, especially that influenced by atheists, wants us to believe that life is solely comprised of material things, that there is no soul or spirit, and unless something is material, it doesn’t exist. You and I know otherwise, and we cannot afford to compromise or forget that truth.

The devil wants Jesus to test God by jumping off the top of the Temple to certain death, and many people today say they will only accept the existence of God if he passes a test they set for him. It even comes in apparently heart-rending forms: ‘I will believe in God if he heals my auntie from cancer.’ Now it isn’t that God lacks compassion, but it is that allegiance to him must come first, whether he blesses us by fulfilling our requests and tests or not.

Finally, the devil comes out with his most naked temptation: you can have all the kingdoms of this world, Jesus, if you will only worship me. And this reminds us that we are all worshippers, whether we accept it or not. As Bob Dylan sang,

You’re gonna have to serve somebody
It may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody.

To what do we give our time, our affections, our money, and our energy? This will give us a good idea of who or what we worship. Those which are lesser than God may well be good things, but if they command our affection ahead of him then in our lives they are instruments of Satan.

Conclusion

Lent can be quite severe as we engage the spiritual discipline of warring against evil. But Jesus teaches us here not to lose heart, and to be encouraged.

For he is with us, and we can draw on his presence when we fight evil.

His obedience is available to us through our union with him so that we can conquer.

And his example shows us that what we face today is nothing new but rather simply old tricks given a new polish. They can be resisted in his name as he did, and we can live for the glory of his Name.

0

We Are Being Watched, Matthew 5:13-20 (Ordinary 5 Lent -3 Year A 2023)

Matthew 5:13-20

Earlier this week I was at the Byfleet Tuesday Fellowship where over a series of meetings I have been telling them the story of my life and faith. Bit by bit, episode, by episode, this week we finally got to the point where my family and I arrived in this circuit in 2010 – which was probably a good point at which to end.

One of the hymns we sang on Tuesday was ‘Blessèd Assurance’, for its theme of testimony and those lines, ‘This is my story, this is my song.’ I hope that in hearing my story people heard how my story fits into the bigger story of Jesus.

We’ve been tracking the story of Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel in recent weeks. A fortnight ago, we heard how Jesus came into Galilee of the Gentiles with a proclamation that was to begin forming his community of light, a community that forms through repentance. Last week (if you watched my video) you’ll know I preached on the opening of the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus shows us what the repentant life with him looks like.

This week, Jesus tells us what the community of light is meant to look like to the watching world.

Firstly, says Jesus, his people are the salt of the earth.

13 “You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.

Now before we think about the salt, I want us to think about the earth.[1] The word here could just mean the soil, or it could mean the land, be that the local land where they are or the land of the whole world.

If it’s the local land, then it would be an image of Israel. Remember that before Jesus ever said, ‘Blessèd are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth’ (Matthew 5:5), the Psalmist had said that the meek will inherit the land (Psalm 37:11). The land was so crucial to Israel: it was, after all, the Promised Land. If that’s what we’re talking about here, then Jesus is seeing his people as a renewal movement within the people of Israel. And I guess initially that’s what Christ-followers were.

But I mentioned a fortnight ago that Matthew has the mission to the Gentiles in view. He emphasises that Jesus comes to ‘Galilee of the Gentiles’, and he ends his Gospel with the Great Commission. So in the long term the earth here is surely the whole world. We are to be salt in the whole world. This is an image of the mission to which Jesus calls us.

So we need to know what the salt is. We know how salt had various uses, the main ones being as a seasoning, a preservative, and as a fertiliser. I am going to dismiss the first two of seasoning and preservative here, partly because they refer to food whereas Jesus is talking about salt of the earth, and that’s where it was used as fertiliser.  Besides, it makes little sense to talk of the Christian calling as merely seasoning the world or preserving it. We are not here simply to make the world more flavoursome, or to preserve it, when there is much wrong with it. It is not our calling to bless everything that goes on in the world.

No: if we are salt of the earth, then Jesus means that we are fertiliser. The kingdom community is divine fertiliser. We enable life and growth where there is death and despair. Ultimately, that life only comes in Jesus Christ. We point people to that by our words and deeds. Food banks and the like are signs and pointers to the life of Christ in the midst of death and hopelessness. We also need to speak about the life Christ brings.

So a church community is meant to be fundamentally outward-looking. A fellowship that only looks inwards on itself is one where the salt has lost its saltiness. That may seem strange to us, who are used to our salt largely just being made up of one chemical compound. But in the days of Jesus salt was often found in a mixture with other minerals, and it could be dissolved out of it.

To us, salt losing its saltiness is absurd. Jesus would say to us, a church that only looks in on itself and does not make outreach a priority is equally absurd. Such a church cannot offer life, because it has dissolved the life out of itself.

Secondly, says Jesus, his people are the light of the world.

14 “You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. 15 Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. 16 In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.

Go back two weeks again in our story. Jesus has come to Galilee of the Gentiles to bring light to those living in darkness. Now, he says, that’s the ongoing task of his people. While in John’s Gospel Jesus owns the title ‘Light of the world’ for himself, here in Matthew he gives it to his kingdom community.

Sometimes we’re happy at the thought that Jesus is the light of the world, but we baulk at the fact that he called his church to be that light, too. It would be easier and more comfortable for us if our faith were just a private thing. We wouldn’t have to worry about being a good witness and what reaction we might get to that in society.

And there are factions in our society who would like us to adopt that attitude. Groups like the National Secular Society and others argue that faith has no place in public life. Either they don’t understand what faith is, or they don’t want to understand.

Jesus says, we are going to be seen – both as individual disciples and as a community of believers together. It will be our good deeds that shine light into a darkened world. We are not doing them so that people praise us, as Jesus condemned some religious leaders for doing: we are doing good deeds so that people may ‘glorify [y]our Father in heaven.’

Do we want to make a first step in changing this world for the better, for the glory of God? Surely we do. Then we need to think, talk, and pray about what good deeds would show up as light in our dark world.

So let me remind you of some of John Wesley’s most famous words:

Do all the good you can,
By all the means you can,
In all the ways you can,
In all the places you can,
At all the times you can,
To all the people you can,
As long as ever you can.

I think Jesus would approve of those words.

Thirdly and finally, Jesus calls us to be better than the Pharisees.

Jesus says he hasn’t come to abolish the Jewish Law but to fulfil it, that we should therefore not dilute it, and that in fact our righteousness needs to exceed that of the Pharisees and teachers of the Law (verses 17-20).

We need to hear this, and hear it carefully. Jesus is not saying that we should obey every Old Testament law, for he said that the food laws were no longer necessary (Mark 7:1-22) and the New Testament generally sees his death on the Cross as fulfilling the sacrificial laws.

Therefore, we need to read the Old Testament and its laws carefully. As Dr Ian Paul says,

… God looks on the heart as well as the hands. We must, in our reading of the Old Testament, always move from ‘What does it say?’ through ‘What is the intention?’ before we ask ‘What is God saying to us now?’[2]

The bottom line is that we cannot be casual about our conduct. Just because we believe in grace, mercy, and forgiveness does not mean we can live carelessly. That will not shine light into darkness. That will simply make us hypocrites, just as Jesus often said the religious leaders of his day were.

No. In God’s grace and mercy in Christ we do indeed find forgiveness and many a fresh start in life after we have messed up. But that grace then calls us to aspire to a higher standard. If all we are called to be as Christians is ‘nice’ then what makes us shine as the light of the world?

That’s why the early church gave dignity to the dead by taking funerals for those not considered worthy of one in the Roman Empire. That’s why they also took care of babies abandoned to die because they were the wrong sex or in some other way did not fit their parents’ aspirations.

Friends, if we are called to bring life to our world and shine in the darkness, how is the Holy Spirit calling us to a higher standard than mere religion?

It’s a question we need to ponder.

[1] Here and in most of what follows I am dependent on Ian Paul’s blog post ‘Being distinctive as the people of God in Matthew 5’.

[2] Ibid.

0

Create a website or blog at WordPress.com

Up ↑