Tag: I’m A Celebrity

Advent, The Prologue and Relationships: 2, Jesus and John the Baptist (John 1:1-18)

John 1:1-18

Isn’t it strange that just as ‘I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here’ is on our screens yet again that John the Baptist comes into focus in the church year? The man whom Matthew tells us wore clothes made of camel’s hair and lived on a diet of locusts and honey[1] sounds perfect for the bush tucker trial.

And speaking personally, I’d rather engage with John the Baptist than Nigel Farage. Which is one major reason I’m not watching this year.

But we think of John at this time due to his connection with Jesus – not simply that they were related through their mothers[2] but that they were related in the purposes of God. We talk about John as the ‘Forerunner’ of Jesus. Their relationship is important for the Advent story.

But it’s not just interesting historical detail. John’s mission of preparing the way for Jesus is also a model for the ways in which God gives us our mission of pointing to Jesus.

I’m going to explore that in two phases today.

Firstly, John was sent.

We are used in the Methodist Church to the idea of ministers being sent. I was sent to this appointment by the authority of the Methodist Conference. The Salvation Army send their officers; the Roman Catholics send their priests. (Other denominations are different and speak less of the church sending and more of God calling.)

But being sent isn’t just a churchy thing. It happens in other areas of life, too. As I mentioned to some around Remembrance Sunday last month, I am the first man in my family for a couple of generations not to go into the Royal Air Force. My Dad only did National Service, but I often thought he might have fancied a longer time in it than that. My uncle served for many years, and so did my three male cousins.

The armed services’ concept of a ‘posting’ is very much a sending, and young families are often in an area only for a short time before the next posting happens, with adverse effects upon socialisation and education. One of my cousins was awarded the MBE for work he and his wife did on RAF bases with lonely families.

John the Baptist’s sending comes not from the church or the armed services, but from God:

6 There was a man sent from God whose name was John.

And yes, John has a very special calling that we mark at this time of year. And yes, we are used to the idea that certain Christians have particular callings in which they are sent by God.

Sadly, what we forget in all that is that every Christian is called and sent by God in some respect. Being sent by God doesn’t automatically mean being sent to dark jungles to be attacked by ferocious creatures and wild savages. Sometimes, God has already sent us to the place where we are, and this is the place where we are called to be fruitful and faithful for him.

Perhaps we still have that mediaeval Roman Catholic view of being sent that regarded the only vocations worth mentioning as those where someone was called to the church – priests, monks, and nuns. At least the Reformers broadened out that sense of vocation so that Martin Luther, ever provocative in his writing, could say that were the job of village hangman to fall vacant, the devout Christian should apply.

I am not here to recruit any hangmen today! But I am here to invite us all to consider our sense of being sent. Has God sent us to the particular job where we work? The neighbourhood where we live? The social groups in which we mix?

And if we think that’s possible, how does that change our attitude to those workplaces, neighbourhoods, and social groups? Are we on a mission from God in those places? Have we been placed there to live out our faith and bless those we meet with the love of God in our attitudes and actions? Has God sent us there as a sign of his abiding truth to those who may or may not want to know about it?

And for others of us, have we become restless where we are? Is it because we have not embraced the sense that God has sent us here, or is God preparing us to take up another posting and be sent somewhere else? Is this an issue that some of us should be praying about?

Secondly, John was specifically sent as a witness.

One of the things I do when I go to preach at a new church is I always ask for an assurance from the person on the sound desk that they will turn my microphone off during the hymns. Much as I love music, I am not blessed in that area with any personal ability. I was once next to my aunt in a congregation and she said to me afterwards, “I’m glad my bad singing voice has passed down another generation in the family.”

So when my friends in the church youth group formed a band, I was the only one not to be part of it. They became quite popular in local church circles and sold out some concerts.

I talk in the first chapter of my book about some of the socially awkward ways in which I related to them. Yet one Saturday evening in December, and I think it proved to be their biggest concert ever, they involved me by asking me to be the compère.

It stayed with me, because the next morning the Advent theme was John the Baptist, and the preacher spoke about how John was the compère for Jesus. Given my rôle the previous night, that description stuck with me. Just as the compère’s job is not to point to themselves but to the act everyone has paid to see, so the rôle of John the Baptist is not to big himself up but to be ‘a witness to the light’:

7 He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe. 8 He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light.

This rôle of a witness is seen in some of the other New Testament models for those who speak of Christ. We have the herald, who brought ‘good news’, rather like a town crier. ‘Good news’ was a technical term in the Roman Empire for the announcements heralds made that either the Roman army had won a great battle or that there was a new emperor on the throne. The first Christians translated this to their heralding of a different good news, the good news that God had won a great battle against evil at the Cross and that there was now a new king of the universe, Jesus the Lord.

And we have the ambassador that the Apostle Paul talks about. The purpose of an ambassador is to represent the king and the kingdom that sent them to an alien land. Paul and the first Christians saw themselves as representing Christ and the kingdom of God in an alien land.

All of these images – the witness, the herald, and the ambassador – have one thing in common. These spokespeople are not drawing attention to themselves but to Jesus Christ and the good news of God’s kingdom.

This was John’s purpose in a particularly special way when Jesus came into the world and thirty years later began his public ministry. It is also our calling.

For the New Testament also calls us witnesses. We may not all be evangelists, but we are all witnesses. Every Christian has the ability to witness to Jesus Christ by speaking about what he has done for them and what he has done for the world.

Think of a witness in a court of law. The witness speaks of what he or she has seen or heard, or about what he knows to be true. These are the things we do as witnesses for Christ, too. We speak about our experience of Jesus. We speak about what we know about him. Sure, we are not all what the courts call expert witnesses – perhaps those are the evangelists – but if we think about it, can we not all think of what Jesus has done for us, what he means to us, and what we know for sure about him?

Conclusion

Last week we saw that the Father’s relationship with Jesus said something about our relationship with Jesus, too. This week, John’s relationship with Jesus also has something to say about our relationship with Jesus.

Last week we saw that just as the Father’s relationship with Jesus was characterised by unity, love, and light, so too was Jesus’ mission to the world. This week with John we find that we are sent by God as heralds and ambassadors of King Jesus and his kingdom of unity, love, and light.

May the Holy Spirit show us the place where we are sent. And may we depend on that same Spirit to empower us as witnesses to Jesus and all that he has done.

[1] Matthew 3:4

[2] Luke 1:36

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Sermon For The Second Sunday In Advent: The Revolution Of God

Matthew 3:1-12

The language ‘kingdom of God’ is a problem today. Most obviously it’s a problem if you live in a republic. How do you relate to the image? One American Christian writer faced that difficulty and decided to paraphrase it in a way that he thought maintained the impact of the expression. He called it ‘the revolution of God’.

And even in a monarchy like the United Kingdom, we have trouble relating to the phrase ‘kingdom of God’. In our nation, the Queen acts on the advice of her ministers. The sovereign’s powers have been circumscribed over history. We, too, need to understand that when John the Baptist comes proclaiming the kingdom of God – the very theme that will be central to the ministry of Jesus – we are talking about a revolution. The revolution of God.

Indeed, ‘kingdom of God’ was revolutionary language in New Testament times. And our  mission this morning is to consider what kind of revolution John was heralding, and which would arrive in Jesus.

Because make no mistake, if our Advent preparations consist merely of tinsel, presents and mince pies we have missed its true meaning. This is the season when we prepare for revolution.

And that is essential for us to grasp. We have taken it as a truism for so long that the kingdom Jesus came to preach was not the one that good Jews of his day longed for. That’s a truism because it’s true! But if we Christians aren’t careful, we become smug or complacent about that, and we miss the fact that the kingdom of God is still revolutionary for us. Why? How?

Locusts
Locusts by William Warby on Flickr. Some rights reserved.

Firstly, the revolution of God is an outsider revolution. John is not part of the establishment. No priest or scribe he, even though he was the son of Zechariah who ministered in the Jerusalem Temple. John puts all that behind him and goes to the wilderness. No flowing priestly robes for him, he goes for true shabby chic (without having it professionally distressed) in his choice of camel hair and a leather belt. I have joked in past years that he might have been the inventor of the ‘Bush tucker trial’ on ‘I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here’ with his diet of locusts and honey, but actually he wouldn’t have been impressed at all by celebrities. In fact, given the scathing words he addresses to the Pharisees and Sadducees here I can’t see him getting on the phone voting to save them.

Here’s the way God’s revolution often works. It comes from the margins, not the centre. It is rare for God to renew his church and reform society in a movement that comes through the structures of power in the church itself. He tends to be at work on the outer boundaries. He tends to be stirring things up among those who do not have access to traditional sources of power or authority. He takes delight in using nobodies. It’s not just the aims of God’s kingdom that are revolutionary, it is the methods, too.

And if that is true, then it is time for hope to spring up in the pews of the church. Hope – and perspective. Do not wait around, expecting the ministers and Local Preachers necessarily to be the standard bearers of God’s revolution. I would love to be such a person, but God may not choose me. Do not assume that because of my office God will somehow automatically choose me. That is by no means necessarily God’s way. He may come in power upon and through those of you who think you are nothing in the eyes of the church, let alone the eyes of God. It’s what he did, using John the Baptist in the wilderness. It’s what he did, having his son born in poverty and laid in a manger.

So I invite you this Advent to consider the thought that you are as likely as anyone to be the kind of disciple that Jesus would enlist to do something significant in the revolution that we call his kingdom. Do not let the disappointments of everyday life blind you to the possibility that God may choose to use people who are among those who are unexpected, the ones who would never pass the selection criteria for the ministry, the ones who never pass exams, the ones who have never been in the limelight or held a significant rôle in society.

Secondly, it’s a homecoming revolution. Listen to the language of homecoming:

“Prepare the way for the Lord,
make straight paths for him.” (Verse 3)

Homecoming
Homecoming 2013 by Queen’s University on Flickr. Some rights reserved.

The Lord is coming home, is the message. He is coming to take his rightful place on his throne. That is why we can say the kingdom is coming.

And it was relevant to John’s audience. These words are quoted from Isaiah 40, where the prophecies of Israel’s return from exile in Babylon begin. It is no accident that scriptures with that theme were relevant to John and Jesus. For in their day, the Jews believed they were still in exile. Not geographically, for they were in the Promised Land, but because they did not rule it themselves on behalf of God, but living under a foreign power, Rome, they felt they were still effectively in exile. Many felt God had deserted them. Some rabbis had said that after the final prophet in the Old Testament had spoken, the Holy Spirit had left Israel.

So imagine what it is like for them to hear that God is making a homecoming. He will reign – and the Romans will not. He will be present in his kingly power, not absent. This is good news. In fact, it really is good news in their terms, because the word ‘gospel’, which we translate as good news, comes from an ancient practice of proclaiming the great things the king had done. God’s return to Judah and especially to Zion is a Jewish form of gospel.

Yet now see these things not merely as Jewish gospel two thousand years ago, but in the light of the One who did come to Zion, Jesus the Messiah. He comes to reign. He comes and has the title ‘Lord’. He is Lord, and by implication, Caesar is not Lord. The Romans would not have the final say in this world, and nor will the powers that be today, be they political, military, economic or media. Like Jesus was to say to Pilate, they only have power because it has been granted to them from above. The true Lord of our lives and of the whole cosmos is Jesus himself.

So we rejoice that the powers of our day will one day have had their day, while Jesus reigns – not from Zion but from a hill outside where he was lifted up; not in a temple made by human hands but in the midst of a temple made of humans; not in the precincts of Jerusalem but at the Mount of Olives, from where he ascended and where he will appear again.

The authorities of today are put in their place. They can posture and pout as much as they like, but it is all vanity and we can laugh at it, because Jesus is the true Lord.

We can also resist their seductions, in the name of Jesus the coming Lord. It will anger them, and it will cost us, but their days are numbered.

And furthermore, if Jesus is the presence of God coming to us – Emmanuel, God with us, as we remember at this time of year – then we are no longer alone. God has no longer deserted his people. By sheer grace, God is with us. Yes, granted, God hides himself from us for seasons, but he has come to be with us and never to forsake us.

Viper
Viper by William Warby on Flickr. Some rights reserved.

Thirdly and finally, it’s a revolution of repentance. Those who flood out from the big towns to John’s outsider location (verse 5) confess their sins and are baptised (verse 6). John says he baptises for repentance (verse 11). And when the religious élite come to seek baptism too – are they like modern politicians jumping on the coat-tails of a popular phenomenon? – he reserves his choicest insults for them:

‘You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? 8 Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. 9 And do not think you can say to yourselves, “We have Abraham as our father.” I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham. 10 The axe has been laid to the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire. (Verses 7b-10)

This is a kingdom where status counts for nothing. All that matters is the opposite of clinging to status: humility; the humility that leads to repentance. A repentance that does more than say sorry; a repentance that makes straight our crooked paths to be fit for the coming of the Lord.

This is a kingdom where no-one can rest on religious laurels. What could have been truer for good Jews than to trace their spiritual heritage back to Abraham? Yes, that strictly was where God began to form a pilgrim people for himself, but it could not be claimed as a badge. You could not hold up your ‘child of Abraham’ laminate on your lanyard and automatically be granted entry into God’s kingdom. There had to be substance, and that was shown by a willingness to change.

There has to be the substance of repentance for us, too, and it needs to be on-going. John could come to us and say, ‘do not think you can say to yourselves, “We have Wesley as our father’”’ We are not a heritage site designed for spiritual tourists, we are a colony of God’s kingdom.

Let us beware what we are building on. In one previous church, a group of people objected to the use of modern worship songs alongside traditional hymns. (Those who enjoyed the contemporary songs were more generous in their attitude to the tried and tested gems from the past.) The final straw for one of this group came after I had left that church, when they decided to replace the pews with chairs. She and her husband resigned their membership. Her understanding of faith was based on the style of her heritage, and certainly not on the spiritual substance of what Wesley wrote about in his hymns.

So let us ask ourselves this question: when was the last time we allowed God to challenge our actions, our thoughts, our words or our lifestyles? Have we permitted God to effect a revolution in our own lives, such that he may use as agents of his revolution in the world?

There are many popular images of the church. It is common to say that it is a hospital for the sick and the sinners, and I certainly understand the church like that. But I think we also ought to ask what kind of church we are. Would it not also be reasonable to conclude that the church is a field hospital, healing its wounded so that they may be strong for the battle with those forces that foolishly resist the coming revolution? Here God binds up the injured nobodies and sends them to herald his kingdom from the outside, not the centre. Here in the church, his revolutionaries know the presence of Jesus and acknowledge him as Lord, following his instructions in his presence.

Have we signed up for the revolution? Because that is what John – and later Jesus – called us to embrace.

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Sermon: The Good News Of John The Baptist

Tomorrow will be a milestone for me: the iPad arrived on Thursday, and so in the morning I shall preach my first paperless sermon in the thirty-five years since I first preached as a teenager. Here it is:

Luke 3:1-6

There’s no doubt about it: if you put together your dream team for ‘I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here’, John the Baptist would be on it. The man who lived in the desert and existed on a diet of locusts and honey would be a shoo-in for the bush tucker trials. In a cage, having insects dropped on him? Breakfast. Being forced to eat the private parts of strange Australian animals? Lunch. Any fading radio or television personalities seeking to re-ignite their careers by endearing themselves to the public through their endurance of humiliation would be blown away by J the B.

But sometimes we don’t get much past that aspect of John, those elements of his lifestyle that we condescendingly assume to be eccentric. Who has not secretly sniggered at the gospel descriptions of him?

There is far more to him, in terms of the way he prepares the way for the Messiah – which is why, part-way through Advent, we skip thirty years beyond Jesus’ birth to passages such as today’s. These six verses, which we might mistakenly dismiss as a mere preface to the real action, are packed with significance for the coming of the Christ.

What things?

Firstly, history.

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar – when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrarch of Iturea and Traconitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene – during the high-priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. (Verses 1-2)

‘History is bunk’ was the foolish saying of Henry Ford, the car maker. It is a sentiment echoed by the so-called New Atheists today, who sneer at our scriptures on the basis that it is crazy to base our lives on writings from the Bronze Age.

But Luke – not for the first time – locates his story in space and time. ‘This is the year that it happened,’ he says, ‘and these are the people who were in power.’

Why does this matter? Because the coming of the Christ changed everything. There are such things as events that altered the course of history, and Luke makes the bold claim that the arrival of the Messiah is just that – indeed, the greatest such event in history. This is what we are marking. There are certain parts of our Scriptures where it is of little account whether they are historical, but this is one of many – and the pivotal one at that – where the fact of history is critical to the truth.

We celebrate at this time of year the decisive work of God in history. The singer Nick Cave once sang, ‘I don’t believe in an interventionist God’:

Well, this is not an interventionist God but the work of a God who is always at work in history, and who did his most significant historical work among the human race when he gave up his only begotten Son.

It is this God who is committed to changing history. It is this God who cares about the historical circumstances in which we find ourselves. The God who announced his Son through John the Baptist during the reign of Tiberius Caesar, under the delegated authority exercised by Pontius Pilate, Herod, Philip and Lysanias, and during the times of Annas and Caiaphas, is the God who is still at work in the reign of Elizabeth II, her Prime Minister David Cameron and of Mark Wakelin’s presidency of the Methodist Conference. Here and now, in December 2012, that God is present and at work for his kingdom through his Son and in the power of his Spirit.

What does that mean for us? God through Jesus is always committed to working for salvation. That includes now. Take a moment to reflect: where do we need to see God at work? Where does our world need to see God at work? The Advent message as John the Baptist heralds the coming King is that the King is still coming in salvation, because history is the arena where he works. That means us, just as much as the biblical story.

Our second theme is power. Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate, Herod, Philip and Lysanias; Annas and Caiaphas. It’s quite a list, isn’t it? John the Baptist announces the coming Messiah in a context of these powerful people.

The snag is, John isn’t impressed by the powerful and the Gospel writers certainly weren’t, either. Pontius Pilate chose to save his own political bacon rather than do justice. Herod saved his adulterous marriage by executing John. Annas and Caiaphas conspired in the arrest of Jesus.

John, on the other hand, works on the margins, in the countryside (verse 3) and the wilderness (verse 4), far from the centres of power, just as Jesus was born in little old insignificant Bethlehem, not in the capital city of Jerusalem.

It raises a serious question for us about how we view power and influence. Ours is a culture that refers to the President of the USA as ‘the most powerful person on Earth’. We talk about politicians being ‘in power’. It is also exercised by the media and by multinational companies. We defer to the influence of celebrities.

And before we look too far down our noses at this culture, let us remember that the church falls into the same trap all too often as well. We like it when a famous person becomes a Christian, as if their testimony were more valuable than that of an ‘ordinary’ person. We think the Church is more effective when we lobby politicians. We are under a delusion that the most important people in the Church are the ministers, and especially those holding senior positions.

Does any of this make sense when John exercises his ministry off the beaten track? When the only time we know he came into contact with the powerful was when he criticised Herod’s adulterous marriage and paid with his life? It’s hardly the kind of life that would feature in Hello magazine, or get press releases in the daily papers.

Knowing this, I am fond of the expression coined by one Christian that what we are about in the mission of Jesus is ‘the conspiracy of the insignificant’. It is the sort of thing going on at Corinth when the Apostle Paul reminds them that not many of them came from influential parts of society.

So take heart if you are one of our world’s nobodies. You are precisely the sort of person God delights to use in the spread of his kingdom, as he reverses the values of our world. If he even sent his Son to be born in an obscure town and raised in another backwater, if he grew up as an artisan rather than a power broker, what do you think that says about his potential to use you in his kingdom purposes?

However, that still leaves a question especially for some Surrey residents. We include among our number people who are influential in ways that the world recognises. Should such Christians give up their roles?

By no means necessarily. There are a few such people featured among the disciples of Jesus in the Gospels, and occasionally in Acts and the Epistles. They clearly remained where they were when they were called by Christ. The distinctive Christian call to such people is surely to subvert the world’s love affair with power by not using it in self-aggrandising ways, but by seeking to use such positions for the welfare of others, as a voice for the voiceless not a cheerleader for the privileged, and in the fashion of a servant, contrary to expectations.

Thirdly and finally, having been firstly among the historians and secondly among the politicians and the powerful, then we are now among the civil engineers. Our third theme coalesces around images of roadworks:

‘A voice of one calling in the wilderness,
“Prepare the way for the Lord,
make straight paths for him.
Every valley shall be filled in,
every mountain and hill made low.
The crooked roads shall become straight,
the rough ways smooth.
And all people will see God’s salvation.”’ (Verses 4-6)

Straightened paths, filled-in valleys, mountains and hills flattened, crooked roads straightened, rough ways made smooth. As the arrival of winter here sees the increase of potholes in Surrey roads, so a Highways Agency project rather like this prophecy of Isaiah 40 that Luke quotes sounds very appealing to us.

But we generally interpret this as an image for the kind of message John the Baptist proclaimed, namely one of repentance. Although Isaiah 40 in its original context has a sense of smoothing out the way for God to lead his people on a highway back from Babylon to Judah, in the New Testament’s use in relation to John it becomes a metaphor for repentance. John is announcing that the King is coming, and so just as a town is cleaned up before a royal visit, so we need to straighten out the roads of our lives in order to be ready for Christ.

That much is certainly true. We need to get rid of our crooked ways if we are to be fit to receive the King. Advent needs to be a time of self-examination. Preparation for Christmas is not merely about completing the present-buying, writing the cards and finishing the annual letter. It is a time of spiritual preparation, which is why there are hints in earlier centuries of the Church that Advent was regarded as some kind of penitential season, almost like Lent. As the world is filled with lights outside, we need to shine lights inside to see how we are preparing our hearts and minds for the reign of God in Christ.

Yet let me suggest there is more to this than we sometimes suppose. There is here preparation that we need to do – ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight paths for him’ but this is not just about commands to us. The rest of the prophecy is about promise – ‘Every valley shall be filled in, every mountain and hill laid low. The crooked roads shall become straight, the rough ways smooth. And all people will see God’s salvation.’

Not only are we commanded to change, God promises change. I believe this means a couple of things. One is the gospel reminder that the call to change our lives is never meant to be accomplished on our own. We are incapable alone of making ourselves into the people God wants us to be. But his command to turn our lives around is accompanied by the promise that he will be at work among us by his Spirit to fulfil those purposes.

However, I think there is even more here than that. If God promises that we shall change from crooked to straight, from rough to smooth, then I suggest that is not only about growing in holiness. I offer to you the thought that there is much that is rough and crooked in our lives that is not necessarily sin. We carry burdens, brokenness, damage and pain from so much of life and I believe God also promises the straightening out of these sorrows and defects, too. Is that not what Jesus also came to do, as well as call people to repentance, as his cousin John did? Just as I long for the day when I shall no longer have to slalom around the regular potholes in our road – well, I can hope! – so I long for the day when God will complete his work of restoration in every way.

If you thought, then, that everything about John the Baptist was severe, I invite you to think again. Yes, there is the challenge to repentance, but it comes in the context of the God who is always at work in history – including ours. It comes as good news from the God who is pleased to work among the nobodies and on the fringes. It comes as part of a rebuilding package for every part of our lives.

Let us celebrate the ministry of John the Baptist and every way in which he points us and the world to Christ.

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