Tag: imitation of Christ

Engagement, Not Attendance, Matthew 10:24-39 (Ordinary 12 Year A)

Matthew 10:24-39

Let me begin with an observation from a wise church leader:

If you want to grow the church, don’t concentrate on church attendance.

Does that shock you? Don’t we want to grow numbers at church?

Let me give you a fuller version of the quote:

If you want to grow the church, concentrate on engagement, not attendance.

The point is this: anyone can attend church, and that’s fine: all are welcome. But that doesn’t make them a Christian. What Jesus said was, ‘Follow me.’ That’s more than attendance. We don’t merely seek more attendees or even church members. We seek more disciples of Jesus. People who will engage with him.

So it’s fitting that in today’s passage Jesus concentrates on discipleship. If we listen to him, we will know more of what call we put out to those whom we desire to be his followers and part of his family.

Firstly, discipleship is essentially imitation:

It is enough for students to be like their teachers, and servants like their masters. (Verse 25a)

I hear those words and what comes into my mind is the old song from The Jungle Book, ‘Oo-be-do, I wanna be like you.’

In the culture of Jesus’ day, disciples were the students who learned from their teachers. But it wasn’t classroom knowledge. It was the kind of learning where the disciples learned from their masters how to live. They learned by imitating their teachers.

Some disciples of rabbis took this to extremes, and I could offend delicate sensibilities if I gave some examples. But the basic point was that a disciple wanted to learn how to live the godly life by imitating his rabbi.

The Christian tradition soon took this up. Not only did disciples follow Jesus, but the Apostle Paul would tell people to follow him insofar as he followed Christ.

In the late medieval era a Dutch-German Christian called Thomas a Kempis captured the spirit of this when he published a book entitled ‘The Imitation of Christ.’

That’s our priority: more people looking more like Jesus. We need to organise our priorities and our practices as a church around things that promote that. It means, for example, an emphasis on small groups – but not just ones that study the Bible and then close it. It means groups that look at how they are going to put into practice the teaching and example of Jesus, and the next week discuss how they got on.

Of course, we will all fail in imitating our teacher Jesus. But he has provided for the forgiveness of our sins through the Cross, and so we get back up, dust ourselves off, and go again.

It’s not enough for us simply to say that the Gospel is inclusive. If we say that God loves everyone but do not include the need to change, then that will never attract people, because they will think they can stay just the way they are. There is no need for Christian faith and the church on that basis.

But if we build on the fact that many people still have a warm regard for Jesus even if they are less positive about the church, then we have a real chance. We can say to people, ‘Come and see what it’s like to follow Jesus and be like him.’ That is a Gospel message. Just saying ‘All are welcome’ isn’t.

Secondly, discipleship is rooted in God’s love:

Jesus was loved – but not by all. The common people loved him, but the powerful generally didn’t. It earned him conflict, suffering, and eventually death.

If we are going to imitate Jesus then without us being provocative that is going to earn us opposition and pain at times. When bad times dominate, we may be tempted to despair. Is it worth it if the evil people come out on top?

So Jesus tells his disciples not to worry – God will expose the deeds of the wicked to the light. That’s why Jesus tells his followers not to be afraid of those who can kill the body, but not the soul (verses 26-28a).

Sure, there is a proper holy fear of God, but at the root of it all is a God who loves us so much more than anything else in all creation, sparrows included. We have a value to our heavenly Father (verses 28b-31).

And so just as Jesus’ security was in his Father’s love for him, our security as disciples is in the Father’s love for us.

There can be plenty of things to discourage us as Christian disciples. We are a minority. We are misunderstood. People reject us. Even family members take issue with us. It isn’t unusual for us to go through phases in life where we feel there isn’t much hope for all that is good, beautiful and right in the kingdom of God. Wouldn’t it be so much easier to chuck it all in and go along with the ways of the world?

To that experience, Jesus says,

29 Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care. 30 And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. 31 So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.

Is anyone here in a situation of discouragement or even despair about their life of faith? If you are, then Jesus says to you that his Father’s love for you has not changed. You are so valuable in his sight. After all, he made you in his own image. He knows you so well that he can count the hairs of your head – even if that gets progressively easier for him as time goes by!

You are loved. You are loved with the everlasting love of heaven. Whatever bad things happen to you in this life because you follow Jesus, nothing changes the fact that your heavenly Father loves you and that he will do justice in his time.

Remember: for the Christian, if the end is bad, then it’s not the end.

Thirdly and finally, discipleship is our priority:

Here I’m referring to what Jesus says about not bringing peace but a sword, how family members will be divided against each other, and how we must choose following him even above the desires of our families (verses 32-39).

This might get us worried. Is Jesus telling us to neglect our families? No, he isn’t. But he is telling us that because he is Lord our allegiance to him trumps everything else in life, even our families.

When we commit to Jesus Christ we are not joining a social club. We are not taking on a new leisure interest. We are reshaping our entire lives around him. This is not like taking out a monthly subscription to the new branch of PureGym.

And of course many of us already know the pain of divided families, where some of us are committed to Jesus Christ and other family members are not. Jesus reminds us here not to compromise our own commitment to him in order to appease our loved ones.

By implication, he also reminds us here not to make excuses for those relatives who do not follow him. Wishful thinking about their eternal destiny is just that: wishful thinking. God doesn’t suddenly lower the bar for someone just because they are related to us.

What should we do, then, when we are faced with this division in our families and perhaps our friends as well? We know Jesus doesn’t want us to back down on our commitment to him or to dilute it, and we also know we don’t want to be harsh.

I believe this should drive us to regular, sustained, and passionate prayer. Pray regularly for those loved ones who do not follow Jesus. If you can, pray every day for them. Prayer is what moves spiritual mountains. Prayer is what removes blockages in people’s lives.

The evangelist DL Moody prayed daily for one hundred of his friends to surrender their lives to Christ. During his lifetime, ninety-six did. The other four gave themselves to Christ at Moody’s funeral.

So keep up the praying. Don’t give up, and don’t compromise, because you’ll be surprised in the long term what God can do. Let your tears for your loved ones drive you to your knees for them.

Conclusion

It may seem a paradox, then, but according to Jesus the way to grow the church is not by lowering the bar but raising it, not by making entry easy but by being frank about how difficult and challenging the Christian life is.

Are we ready to embrace that challenge for ourselves, and to take it to the world?

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Take Up Your Cross (Covenant Service, Mark 8:27-38) Ordinary 24 Year B

Mark 8:27-38

We’ve had some very hot weather this week and it feels like it will be quite a while before the central heating has to go back on.

Nevertheless, I would guess that by a month’s time it is likely that many of us will have warmed up those radiators again.

Well, this is the point in Mark’s Gospel where the heat starts to turn up. Up until now, Jesus has certainly had criticism and opposition from the religious establishment, some of it serious, but mostly he has had a positive reception from the crowds in the north of the country. Now, as he begins the journey south to Jerusalem, he warns his disciples of what is to come and what it consequently means to follow him.

We come to this annual Covenant Service (although thanks to COVID-19 it’s our first for two years) as people who, like Peter, confess that Jesus is the Messiah. We know and accept the later story that Peter found hard to accept, about Jesus going to the Cross and rising again. These things are the Good News that are the basis of our commitment to Jesus.

In the light of that, it seems appropriate on a day like today to explore Jesus’ statement that

‘Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.’ (Verse 34)

What do those three elements of discipleship – self-denial, taking up the cross, and following Jesus – entail?

Firstly, self-denial.

I have an amateur theory that in our society self-denial is for others, but self-fulfilment is for us. We can applaud the sporting hero who has endured years of disciplined training at the expense of other comforts along with a diet few of us would wish to eat when they end up winning a gold medal at the Olympics.

But for many of the rest of us, the exhortations to success are different: follow your dreams! Base your career on your passion! You must be personally fulfilled sexually!

Now it isn’t all wrong, because we are expected to use our gifts and our resources in the service of God, and the Covenant Service has a balance between ways of serving we will find personally rewarding and other ways we will find difficult. But the problem with our society’s values is that these things are usually expressed in very self-centred ways, and that’s where it’s wrong.

Today is a day when we say to Jesus that we are willing to deny ourselves for the sake of the gospel, because he did precisely that. He gave up the glory of heaven for earth, and life as part of a poor family, at that.

Today is a day to ask ourselves some questions. One is, what have I given up for Jesus? Because if I haven’t given up anything for him, I have barely accepted what it is to be a disciple.

And another question is whether Jesus is asking me to give up something for the sake of his kingdom now. It isn’t always bad things he asks us to give up. Sometimes it’s good things. We may look down on the Roman Catholic insistence on celibacy for their priests, but I know a Methodist minister who said to me he knew in his case that to fulfil his call to ministry he would have to give up all hopes of a wife and family. That was the only way he could answer the call.

So – where are we denying ourselves like Jesus for the sake of God’s kingdom?

Secondly, taking up the Cross.

We must not water this down to the saying, ‘Everybody has their cross to bear.’ This is not about the general suffering of the world, dreadful as that is.

This is about being willing to suffer for Jesus. Christians from the days of the apostles to our day have known that the call to follow Jesus risks martyrdom. Not only did many of the first disciples lose their lives due to their faith, the same happens today. In India under a militant Hindu nationalist government. In Pakistan and Iran under the influence of extremist Islam. In Cuba, North Korea, and China under Marxist governments.

We may be grateful that these are not the conditions in which we live out our faith, but we should not be glib. Even if we do not risk martyrdom, we know that there is at least a secondary application of Jesus’ teaching, the one brought out in Gospels other than Mark, where Jesus is recorded as referring to taking up our cross daily, and that’s our willingness to suffer for our faith.

The late John Stott put it like this:

The place of suffering in service and of passion in mission is hardly ever taught today. But the greatest single secret of evangelistic or missionary effectiveness is the willingness to suffer and die. It may be a death to popularity (by faithfully preaching the unpopular biblical gospel), or to pride (by the use of modest methods in reliance on the Holy Spirit), or to racial and national prejudice (by identification with another culture), or to material comfort (by adopting a simple life style). But the servant must suffer if he is to bring light to the nations, and the seed must die if it is to multiply.[1]

I wonder what Christian faith has cost any of us? If over a period of time we haven’t lost something significant from our lives then we need to reflect how serious we are about being a disciple of Jesus. Because it cost him everything.

Thirdly, following Jesus.

So what does it mean to follow Jesus? Perhaps that’s a strange question for many of us when we’ve been Christians for many years?

I see it as encompassing two things: imitating Jesus and going where Jesus goes (although arguably the latter is part of the former).

Here’s why I say following Jesus involves imitating him: it’s because that’s what disciples of rabbis did two thousand years ago. Disciples sought to copy as best as possible their master’s lifestyle – right down to some precise and even private details! To follow Jesus is to say, I want to be more like him. Today is a day when we pledge that.

But as well as doing what Jesus did we need to go where Jesus went – and go where he is going today, by his Spirit. In other words, there is not just the general imitation of his character (which is challenging enough!) but the openness to the specific directions he gives for each of us.

What do I mean? Questions like these: is Jesus calling us to go to the poor with his love in a particular way? Is he calling us to move home or to change our job? Is it as simple as Jesus wanting us to change where and how we are doing voluntary work in the church or the community? It can be small things as well as big things.

For me, I remember being clearly called away from leading a church Bible study group which I greatly enjoyed to serve a Youth For Christ centre committee instead. Both were rewarding, but I knew my time at the Bible study group had finished, and I was filled with a desire to move on.

In conclusion, all of these three callings as a disciple are deeply challenging. The self-denial of giving up cherished things. The taking up of the Cross in being willing to suffer for our faith. Following Jesus by doing what he does and going where he goes. It’s a tall order.

But Jesus points us to a future

‘when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels’ (verse 38)

and while he talks about it in the context of those who are ashamed of him, the positive converse of this is that here is the great joy and glory to come for those who love and serve him.

So have a vision today not only of the challenge it is to follow Jesus but also of the rewards in the age to come. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews wrote about Jesus,

‘For the joy that was set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.’ (Hebrews 12:2b)

Let us take up the cost of discipleship with one eye on the joy and glory set before us.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1023823078452194&set=gm.6304018576305311

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Sermon: Imitating Missional Jesus

Quite a difference this week. Last Sunday I was invited to preach in a Baptist church and was given half an hour for the sermon. You may have noticed the sermon was longer than usual. Tomorrow it’s an Anglican church where a friend is the priest in charge, and my limit is fifteen minutes.

Luke 4:14-21

When my sister left home for college, she went to study in York. It wasn’t very long before her North London accent gained a North Yorkshire twang. We seem to have a knack for picking up other people’s accents in our family.

Then one summer she went on placement to Ipswich. One Saturday afternoon I took a phone call. There was a strange-sounding young woman on the other line. It took me a minute or two to realise this was my sister. London plus Yorkshire plus East Anglia made for a confusing accent, further magnified by the telephone line. Perhaps my sister above all exemplifies this family trait of picking up accents.

As Christians, we are called to pick up an accent, too – the accent of Jesus. Not that I mean we should speak in a first century Palestinian dialect – as if we could know what that sounded like anyway. But rather, our calling as disciples is to pick up the accent of his life. The New Testament says we are to imitate him.

So I want to take today’s Gospel reading and ask about the ways in which we might imitate Jesus.

Firstly, Jesus is filled with the Spirit. He has come out of the wilderness temptations and the first thing we hear is that ‘filled with the power of the Spirit, [he] returned to Galilee’ and that created a stir (verse 14). When he enters the Nazareth synagogue, he is handed the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and begins reading from what we call chapter 61, with the words, ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me’ (verse 18).

And if you’ve been reading Luke not in little chunks like we do on Sundays, but from cover to cover, you’ll get this message even more clearly. Jesus has been conceived by the Holy Spirit, and at his baptism he has been anointed by the Holy Spirit. You just can’t get away from Luke telling us an important point: whatever Jesus’ special divine status, he conducts his entire ministry dependent upon the power of the Holy Spirit.

And if he does, how much more do we need to do the same. If the Son of God needed to live this way on earth, what price us?

But what does this mean for us? After all, the Spirit of God dwells within each of us from the time our faith in Christ begins. We cannot allow that fact to lull us into complacency. Too many churches and Christians work on auto-pilot. So much of what we do and how we behave is little different from any other organisations or individuals.

So certainly we should all make it a matter of prayer that God would fill us with his Spirit, again and again. None of us can trade on past glories. As has often been said, the church is always just one generation from extinction.

Yet also we cannot sit around simply waiting for a powerful spiritual experience before doing anything for the kingdom of God. What strikes me about Jesus and the Spirit in this passage (and generally in Luke) is that, having received the Holy Spirit, Jesus gets on with what the Father wants him to do. There is no bargaining. He knows he has received the Spirit, and he sets to work. Perhaps some of us know perfectly well what God has called us to do, but we keep employing delaying tactics. Yet if we have received the Spirit when we found Christ, why are we doing that? Truly Spirit-filled people make a difference for the kingdom.

Secondly, Jesus has a message of freedom. It seems to me that ‘freedom’ is a major theme of the verses Jesus reads from Isaiah. The obvious examples are ‘release to the captives’ and ‘to let the oppressed go free’, but ‘good news to the poor’ and ‘recovery of sight to the blind’ are kinds of freedom, too. (Verse 18)

We know that Jesus put this manifesto into action. He dignified the poor by proclaiming the good news to those beyond the pale. He set the captives and oppressed free when he commanded demons to go. He healed the blind and the sick. His was a wide-ranging message of freedom that was proclaimed in word and deed. He evangelised. He healed and delivered. And while he wasn’t directly political, the implications for social justice are present in his ministry.

Our imitation of Christ, then, is to be bearers of a message of freedom. It comes in the gospel theme of forgiveness. The Greek word translated ‘forgive’ in the New Testament means ‘set free’, and that is what forgiveness is. When we forgive somebody, we set them free from the obligations they are under to us. They are no longer bound to us. Not only that, when we forgive, we set ourselves free. For the alternative is bitterness, and that binds us tightly.

We bring freedom to others when our hearts are moved with the compassion of Christ for their plight. For some, that may involve the ‘miraculous’. For others, it may mean trailblazing a way forward in care for those in need. Why do we have hospitals today? Because Christians of earlier generations invented the infirmary. Why does Karen, your priest, conduct funerals for all and sundry in the parish? It isn’t simply because the Church of England is the Established Church in this country. It’s also because in the earliest days of Christianity, disciples of Jesus took pity on those who could not give their loved ones a proper burial.

Or what about this? The other day, our six-year-old daughter discovered that some of her friends wouldn’t play with another girl, because she was black. Our daughter set out to be the black girl’s friend. Even at six, she knows racism is wrong in the sight of God. Now if a six-year-old can do something in Christ’s name for justice, what about us? Ours is the precious message of freedom, as we imitate Christ and anticipate God’s new creation by showing glimpses of God’s kingdom.

Thirdly and finally, Jesus brings the fulfilment of God’s promises. In just over six months’ time, we shall be leaving Chelmsford for a new appointment. The profile of the appointment is very close to what I feel I can offer as a minister. My wife can see where she can get involved on behalf of the church in the community. The schools look quite promising. The manse (which being translated to Anglicans is ‘vicarage’) is more suitable than the one we live in here.

So there’s a level of excitement I feel – but we have to wait until early August when we move!

The Jewish people had been waiting, not for six months, but for centuries, for the promised Deliverer, the Messiah. Now Jesus says, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (verse 21). You don’t have to wait any longer, he says.

We imitate Jesus by bringing a message of fulfilment, too. All around our communities and across the world are people waiting for something or someone that will give them hope. They may be damaged by the hurtful actions of loved ones. They – or someone they love – may be bound by dreadful illness or bereavement. They may be victims of injustice. There may just be an aching emptiness in their hearts, because they have believed our society and bought one possession after another in pursuit of happiness, only to find they might as well be chasing the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow.

And we have the privilege to say to such people, you don’t have to wait any longer. Your emptiness, your pain or your brokenness can be healed, because there is a God who loves you. He loves you enough to give up his only Son for you.

Now that is exactly why we hear calls to be a ‘Mission Shaped Church’ – because unless the church is about mission, she is not truly the church. It is why our two denominations – and now also joined by the United Reformed Church – co-operate on the Fresh Expressions project to reach out to people within their own cultures. It’s why although not every Christian is an evangelist, every Christian is a witness. Each one of us can speak about our experience of Christ.

Because that’s what happens when – like Jesus – we are filled with the Spirit and have a message of freedom. The time is now.

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