This is a lightly revised version of a sermon I first preached eighteen years ago (!). You can find the text here.
Mission in the Bible 4: Singing the Lord’s Song in a Strange Land (Jeremiah 29:1-14)
Confession time: I’m exhausted from a 3:45 am start (long story) and so rather than write something completely new, knowing I’ve preached on this passage before and realising I wouldn’t say anything substantially different, I’ve used a sermon from 2018. The full text of that sermon is below, but it is longer than what I deliver in the video and will be delivering in church, because it uses one or two stories I’ve already deployed in this series.
If you’ve ever watched The Wizard Of Oz – and I’m guessing most of you have – you’ll know the early part of the story where the whirlwind hits Dorothy’s home in Kansas. When it subsides, Dorothy looks around in bewilderment at the strange and different surroundings she finds herself in. She turns to her dog Toto and says, “Toto, I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”
Dorothy could be speaking for today’s church. We’ve been caught up in a social whirlwind, and when we’ve opened our eyes to survey the scene it looks nothing like that in which we grew up. The church used to be respected, but then we’ve gone through phases where first it was no longer a normal experience for people to attend church, and now there is a lot of outright hostility towards Christianity.
Similarly, you probably grew up in a culture where the ordained minister was a respected pillar of society. But again, no more. It is said that the average non-Christian man thinks that someone in a dog collar is either fleecing the flock for money or fiddling with kids as a paedophile.
Many of us would really like to cut to the end of the film where Dorothy finds herself back in home sweet home – there’s no place like it – but I have to say, that isn’t happening anytime soon. We must learn to be faithful disciples as a minority part of society. And actually that’s what most Christians down the centuries have had to do. To live as the majority in a society is less common.
Where do we go for help in being faithful to the Gospel in such circumstances? That’s where I find Jeremiah’s letter to the exiles in chapter 29 on his prophecy helpful. The armies of King Nebuchadnezzar have carted off the first lot of Jewish prisoners from Judah to Babylon. Those who found themselves as strangers in a strange land were disorientated and confused, like Dorothy. Had we read more of the letter, we would have heard Jeremiah warning them too not to believe the false prophets who were telling them it would all be over quickly and things would be back to the good old days. Instead, Jeremiah advises them how to live faithfully as aliens in a culture that is different from them and at times hostile.
I believe we can learn lessons for our discipleship today from Jeremiah’s model.
Firstly, it’s about where we live.
‘Build houses and settle down’ (verse 5a), says God to the exiles through Jeremiah.
I wonder whether you’ve noticed in recent years that the church is no longer regarded as the default moral voice in our nation. When Hallowe’en comes, it isn’t the church that is interviewed on BBC Breakfast about the content of the festival or the fears of elderly people about Trick Or Treat, it’s Age UK.
It’s no good pining for the good old days. This is where we are called to be missionaries, not back in some imaginary golden age of decades ago.
God called the exiles to do in some small way what his own Son would do later. What did Jesus say to the disciples in John 20? ‘As the Father has sent me, I am sending you’ (verse 21a). So how was Jesus sent? We have to go back from John 20 to John 1 and a verse that is too good to keep just for Christmas: ‘The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us’ (verse 14a).
Note that: Jesus dwelt among the people. Although he occasionally ministered in synagogues, for most of the time he didn’t say, ‘Come here and listen to me,’ he did his ministry amid people’s lives. He made his dwelling among people – literally, he ‘tabernacled’. Remember that in the Old Testament the tabernacle was the portable sign of God’s presence. So, then, Jesus was the presence of God in the middle of life.
Eugene Peterson puts it like this in The Message: ‘The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighbourhood.’
Friends, Christian mission today can no longer be sustained (apart from a minority) on ‘Come to us’. We have to go to the world and live actively in it. We don’t want to swallow the values of the world, many of which are contrary to our faith, but we still need to live in the middle of the world, not in a Christian ghetto.
I once took the funeral of an elderly church member, and in preparation visited her relatives, who were not Christians. As they told me about the lady’s life, they told me, ‘Her whole social life was based on the church.’ I could tell they thought I would be pleased by that, but in truth I was deeply saddened. We can’t scuttle across the moat, pull up the drawbridge and cosy up behind the turrets of a Christian castle if we are to be faithful missionaries in a world where we are the minority.
Are we known positively, then, in our neighbourhoods and our networks? And what are we known for? We’ll come on to that in other points.
Secondly, it’s about where we work.
‘Plant gardens and eat what they produce,’ says God (verse 5b).
In his book on Jeremiah, Eugene Peterson (him again!) says this means we should ‘Become a productive part of the economy of the place’ (The Quest, p151).
It’s time to bin the idea that the only work worth doing is church work. Church work – such as mine – is support work for those in the frontline of mission as Christ’s representatives in the world, pointing to the Gospel in word and deed, living lives that are so puzzling and magnetic that people end up asking them why they do what they do.
So when a circuit steward’s wife once told me that her husband wanted to spend more time on the important stuff, like church work, rather than his occupation, I was saddened. This man worked in commercial shipping, helping to ensure that vital goods got from one port in the world to another. He also volunteered as a governor at his daughter’s school. Imagine doing both of those things in a Christlike way, being a good steward of resources but not ruthless, caring for the wellbeing of the school community and its place in the wider area, and so on. Imagine doing these things for Christ, occupying ground in his Name.
You can find all sorts of resources for churches to encourage this approach, not least from an organisation called the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity. Their ‘whole life discipleship’ project includes all sorts of courses and resources to help Christians be fruitful on the frontline. It includes material to help preachers and worship leaders support this work.
One of the stories that set them on their way was that of a schoolteacher who also taught in Junior Church on a Sunday. “Why does my church pray for my Junior Church work,” she asked, “when I deal with maybe a dozen children there, but it doesn’t pray for my Monday to Friday work when I get the chance to influence many more children?”
Any church can start supporting people in this. One of LICC’s ideas is called ‘This Time Tomorrow’. You take five minutes out of Sunday services to interview someone from the congregation about where they will be and what they will be doing twenty-four hours later. You ask them what they most need prayer for, and include that in the service. It’s simple. And it is as applicable to retired people as to those still in paid work, because you can include what people do in the community and in their leisure activities.
Remember, church doesn’t stop when we leave this building on a Sunday lunchtime. As an Australian Christian called James Thwaites puts it, how far apart from each other do we have to be in order no longer to be church? Five yards? Five miles? No: we never stop being the church. It’s just that sometimes we are the church gathered, and sometimes we are the church dispersed. All our work in the world is Christian work.
Thirdly, it’s about where we flourish.
The next thing God says is, ‘Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease.’ (verse 6)
Whoa! Wait a minute! At other times, God’s people are told to be very careful about who their sons and daughters marry. Now, they’re meant to settle down in a pagan land. No wonder Psalm 137 asks, ‘How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’
Our trouble today is that having been part of the majority culture where we haven’t had to fight for the place of our faith in public life, we now find ourselves singing the Lord’s song in a strange land, and the temptation is to be negative and self-pitying about it. But God says it’s possible for his people to flourish as minorities. Remember, that was certainly the story of the Early Church, too, both in Israel and in the wider Roman Empire. Why should it not be true for us, too?
In Mark chapter 6 we have the story of the disciples rowing their boat on the late at night, straining at the oars in the fourth watch of the night. Jesus comes to them, walking on the water. He thus comes to them from outside the boat.
Now given that the Early Church also read the boat symbolically, as standing for the Gospel community, maybe Jesus was coming to them from outside the church, so to speak. Maybe he had already been at work outside their community before he came to them in the dark of night.
Could it be that our task in order to flourish involves finding out where Jesus has gone ahead of us in the world by his Spirit, and we join in with him there? I’m not saying that people outside the church don’t need to become Christians, I am simply saying that Jesus prepares the way and we catch up.
Our children started school while we were in my last circuit. When you are a parent of primary school children you have a great opportunity to flourish as Christians in the community. Debbie and I made it our point to lurk with intent at the school gate. We made friends with other families. I told my churches not to expect me to be at my desk at 9 am for that reason. Some of them didn’t like that, because they thought the minister was there to be their private chaplain, but we persisted.
In doing that, and letting people know our door was always open and there was always water in the kettle for tea and coffee, we befriended three young mums who went through horrendous divorces. One husband went off with his wife’s best friend. Another drank away all the family income, even spending time in the pub when it was the birthday party for one of his three daughters. That mum and the little girls nearly joined the church.
When we announced our decision to leave, some of the church people cheered, but some of the community wanted to raise a petition to keep us – including our next door neighbour, who was totally clueless about church. On the last day of term that July, twenty of them threw a surprise picnic for us in the local park.
We may not have flourished in the church there, but we certainly flourished as Christians in the community.
Fourthly and finally, it’s about where we bless.
‘Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the LORD for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.’ (verse 7)
Contrast that with the ways today’s church often reacts to the decline of Christianity in the West and the rise of ideologies we dislike. Either we claim that God is bringing revival soon (but remember God told Jeremiah the prophets who were saying that in his day were false prophets) or we rail against evil, and think we’re being prophetic in that way.
But look what happens here. Rather than condemn Babylon, God calls his people to bless it! I’m not calling us to ignore unrighteousness and injustice, but I am asking this: what difference would it make if Christians were known as a people of blessing?
The trouble is, there are plenty of indicators to suggest that we are not known as a people of blessing. If you ever ask an MP who they don’t want to send them letters, I’m afraid that often the answer is ‘Christians’. We are known at Parliament for our complaining and our judgmentalism.
In America, it’s commonly known in the catering industry that the people who moan the loudest and tip the least at restaurants are the Christians.
How exactly does that reputation stack against New Testament verses like these?
‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you’ (Mt 5:44)
‘Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse’ (Rom 12:14)
‘Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good’ (Rom 12:21)
What would it look like if we were the people who were always wondering what good we could do unconditionally for people? If we were the people who – rather than complaining – were instead always seeking to put in a good word for someone, or leaving a surprise ‘thank you’ gift for somebody? Do we encourage our elected representatives? Do we tip generously at the restaurant, realising that the waitress is a young student trying to make ends meet on her student loan?
What if in the wider society we were getting involved in those civic and political decisions that affect the wellbeing of our communities, as councillors or business people?
The Argentinean preacher Ed Silvoso has a wonderful way of putting this. He says, ‘In the celestial poker game, a hand of blessings always beats a hand of curses.’
So go – and bless your Babylon. See what happens when Christians start blessing. Wait for the questions about why you do this. And then speak of the One who calls you to bless.
Covenant Service: Good News For Failures (Jeremiah 31:31-34)
It’s that time of year when sign-ups to health clubs and gyms breed like rabbits. Yet in a few months’ time, many of the direct debits will still be going out from bank accounts, but a lot of the new fitness enthusiasts of January will have given up. The thought of ‘New year, new me’ will lie in tatters. Another set of New Year’s Resolutions will have failed.
Maybe that’s why I haven’t bothered with such resolutions for many years. I feel sure I’ll fail.
So much of life is made up of failures – cheerful thought, I know! – be they failures of good intentions or that much larger feeling that our lives themselves are a total failure. Not one of us is without our failures.
But on this first Sunday of the New Year, when we renew our covenant with God, and we traditionally become sombre and serious, wondering whether we can keep the solemn and intimidating promises we make, I want to preach Good News.
In my draft order of service, I simply called this sermon ‘The New Covenant.’ But now I want to give it a different title: ‘Good News For Failures.’ I want you to have a sense of hope from our reading in Jeremiah.
Yes, I know many people have Jeremiah down as a depressing and depressive prophet of doom. But if you read him closely, he preaches short-term doom but long-term hope. And that’s why we can have a theme of ‘Good News For Failures.’
I have two pieces of Good News from Jeremiah for Failures:
Firstly, God’s New Covenant means Failures Are Not Forgotten:
31 ‘The days are coming,’ declares the Lord,
‘when I will make a new covenant
with the people of Israel
and with the people of Judah.
32 It will not be like the covenant
I made with their ancestors
when I took them by the hand
to lead them out of Egypt,
because they broke my covenant,
though I was a husband to them,’
declares the Lord.
Jeremiah has preached doom to Israel. He warned them that if they did not turn from their sins the king of Babylon would come and conquer them and take them into exile. They didn’t listen. They thought they could find political solutions to their troubles without changing their ways while continuing to sin.
It didn’t work. The Babylonian army turned up. At this point, a first tranche of Israel has been marched off into Babylon. They are away from the land, which was so central to their religion, because it had been promised to them by God. If they are away from their own land, then surely they are forgotten and rejected by God for ever.
Yet Jeremiah comes with this word and others that looks forward to the future. God has not finished with his people. They may have broken the old covenant, but he will make a new covenant.
And of course, that is what the coming of Jesus at Christmas is about. If you re-read the nativity stories you will see how many of the promises don’t simply look forward to Christianity and the Church (which is the way we often read them) but are promises to Israel. God has not forgotten and rejected his people. His own Son is bringing the promised new covenant.
Now we Gentile believers are grafted onto the vine which is the People of God, and so we too are inheritors of this same promise. When we fail, God has not forgotten us.
If we come to this Covenant Service this morning conscious of how much we have not lived up to our promise a year ago, we come to a God of grace who in Jesus Christ offers us yet another new beginning. Just as we confess our sins every Sunday morning together and receive assurance of forgiveness, so too year on year at this service we shall confess our sins before we renew the covenant and again receive God’s promise of a fresh start.
Every now and again, I come across people in church who believe that God cannot continue forgiving them. A few will even say they think they have committed ‘The unforgivable sin.’ However, Jesus said the unforgivable sin was blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, and if someone is sensitive to their sin then believe me that usually indicates they are also sensitive to the Holy Spirit.
No: to everyone who fails, I believe God invites us to look at Jesus on the Cross and see his arms stretched out wide – so wide they embrace the world, including us.
Those who are excluded from his embrace are those who exclude themselves not simply by sinning but by refusing to accept they have sinned, perhaps painting their sin as righteousness (often self-righteousness), and thinking they have no need to repent.
But to those of us who are acutely aware of our need to repent, God says, I have not forgotten you. I have not rejected you. Come back. You will find I am already waiting for you.
Secondly, God’s New Covenant Means Failures Have New Hope:
33 ‘This is the covenant that I will make with the people of Israel
after that time,’ declares the Lord.
‘I will put my law in their minds
and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
and they will be my people.
34 No longer will they teach their neighbour,
or say to one another, “Know the Lord,”
because they will all know me,
from the least of them to the greatest,’
declares the Lord.
‘For I will forgive their wickedness
and will remember their sins no more.’
Neatly for me, this gives me a chance to link back to my sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, when I looked at the relationship between Jesus and Moses. To recap part of it:
In the Old Testament, people were not saved by the Law but by grace. Keeping the Law did not save people, rather it was a response to having been saved. We can see this by the fact that God only gave Moses the Law for Israel after he had delivered them from Egypt.
Nevertheless, it was external to the people. It showed God’s righteousness, but it did not convey the power to obey it. On the other hand, the Christmas promise is that Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us, and when Jesus returns to the Father that changes to the Holy Spirit, God within us.
Now link that with what Jeremiah records God as saying here. The external Law will be replaced in the New Covenant with everyone knowing the Lord. In other words, the New Covenant promises God’s indwelling of every disciple.
Not only that, we do not have to depend on priests to mediate between us and God – again, because everyone will know the Lord.
We don’t have to struggle to know God, we don’t have to struggle to know his law, and we are also enabled with divine power to do his will.
Yes, we shall still fail from time to time, and God in his mercy will forgive us and lift us up. But we shall also find God’s own strength when we truly want to obey his will.
The Old Covenant was good – it was very good – but the New Covenant is like that moment when you are driving in your car, gently accelerating, but then the turbo cuts in, and whoosh!
The New Covenant contains not only the Old Covenant promises of forgiveness, but the additional promises of God’s presence and power with us. This is God’s side of the bargain. This is his generous, grace-filled offer to every disciple of the Messiah.
So when we come to renew our promises today, I want us to realise that we are not coming to a severe God who is ready to stoke the flames of Hell the moment we let him down. He is the God of mercy and love who has provided everything we need through the Cross of Christ. Forgiveness comes there. The restoration of our relationship with God comes there. The gift of the Spirit follows.
If we remember that this is the nature of our God who calls us to reaffirm our covenant with him, then perhaps we shall be more ready to make those challenging promises.
After all, we’re not making a New Year’s Resolution, we’re responding to God’s grace.
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.
Demi Lovato and the Community of Light, Matthew 4:12-23 (Ordinary 3 Epiphany 3 Year A 2023)
Light.
Here is a quote that a friend of mine posted on Facebook the other day:
I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness for it shows me the stars.’
(Og Mandino)
It resonated with me as I read today’s passage in Matthew 4, where the evangelist quotes the famous words of Isaiah,
the people living in darkness
have seen a great light;
on those living in the land of the shadow of death
a light has dawned(Matthew 4:16/Isaiah 9:2)
We associate those words from Isaiah with Christmas. I have picked them for most carol services. For Christians, they are a prophecy of the Messiah, Jesus.
But the New Testament doesn’t connect them with the birth of Jesus. Their association with Christmas comes not from Scripture but from their use in Handel’s ‘Messiah’[1]. In the Bible, Jesus is only revealed as the light coming to the people in darkness when he begins his public ministry here.
Yet here’s the thing about Jesus coming as the great light in the darkness: he has come to form a community of light, because in the next chapter he will tell his disciples they are the light of the world (Matthew 5:14-16).
So what Jesus is doing in today’s reading is setting down the foundations for his community of light. Here are three of those foundations:
Firstly, repentance.
17 From that time on Jesus began to preach, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’
The kingdom of God has come near, so repent. At its core, the word repent means ‘a change of mind’, both in the English and the Greek of the New Testament.
But repentance is not just an intellectual change. It is such a change of mind about life and truth that our lives and conduct change, too.
Why? Because ‘the kingdom of heaven has come near.’ That is, the king himself has arrived, and his name is Jesus. Just as Roman heralds would go through the towns and villages to proclaim the accession of a new Emperor, so Jesus announces his own coming as king. And if there is a new king on the throne of the universe, then it is his will that is to be obeyed, rather than whoever or whatever we were following before – our own self-gratification, the disordered self-centredness of society, or the lies of the enemy.
For the community of light that Jesus is beginning is the kingdom of God community. It is what the great American Free Methodist scholar Howard Snyder called, ‘The Community of the King.’
When we gather on Sunday for worship or in a small group in the week, we are gathering as the community of King Jesus. We are light to the world by living out our allegiance to him, not by making the faith easier to believe as we compromise with the standards of the world. All that does by definition is expand the darkness. Being the light requires being different, and that means repentance. And not one-off repentance, but something we keep coming back to throughout our lives.
Most of us probably have a good idea about things we need to change in our lives to bring them under the rule of King Jesus. The difficulty may be in where to start! So let us ask the Holy Spirit for guidance about our next steps in repentance.
Secondly, fishing.
19 ‘Come, follow me,’ Jesus said, ‘and I will send you out to fish for people.’
I have only been fishing once in my life. I was on a mission trip to Norway and our church hosts took us fishing in a fjord. If we didn’t catch any fish that afternoon, we wouldn’t eat that evening. Fortunately, we caught enough – although I only contributed one.
It’s the same for the church. We need to fish in order to live. We can’t wait for people to come to us. For too long we did that, and it was an act of complacency in times when people had some similarities to us and sympathies with us. Those days are gone.
It’s pretty likely that Simon Peter and Andrew heard Jesus’ vision of fishing for people as a sign that they would be sent to the Gentiles. For in the Old Testament, to be delivered from the waters was to be delivered from foreigners. There is some similar New Testament language in the Book of Revelation. And Gentiles were sometimes compared to terrifying mythical sea creatures.[2]
We need to get beyond our existing boundaries, says Jesus. It’s no good just spending time with our own kind. The Good News is for all. Matthew has already referred in this passage to ‘Galilee of the Gentiles’. In his birth stories, it is the Gentile Magi who worship, not the Jewish teachers. And at the end of his Gospel we shall have the Great Commission to go into all the world. It all begins here.
But, you say, I’m not the sort of person for that. May I remind you that neither were Simon Peter and Andrew? It was unusual for a rabbi to come and recruit disciples. Normally young men chose a rabbi to follow. The fact that these young men are not following a rabbi but out in the working world tells you they weren’t the brightest talent. But Jesus called them.
And Jesus calls us, too. He reminds us that we know people beyond the boundaries of the church who need the love of Jesus.
Remember, if we don’t do it, we starve, we die.
But how? That leads to the third foundation of the community of light, word and deed.
23 Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and illness among the people.
Now perhaps you hear that and say, ‘But I can’t preach and teach. And I’ve prayed for friends and family who are sick but none of them has got better. So how can I follow Jesus?’
Well – we don’t all have the same gifts, but the common thread is this: we take the light of the kingdom community beyond its boundaries by sharing the good news in word and deed. We may each have different ways of doing that, but a commitment to sharing God’s love in word and deed is the key principle. Although you should never write off the power of the Holy Spirit, of course!
Even though our wider society and culture turns increasingly away from Christian values, and even as it adopts a less and less friendly attitude to the church, we cannot go out into the world with our heads down. Nor as Christians can we go into the world with the thought that these people are so negative against us that we are going to curse them. We show love, even to our enemies.
A Bible passage I’m sure I’ve mentioned before to you but which is one of my favourites for understanding our calling today is Jeremiah 29. The prophet Jeremiah writes a letter to those of his people who have been forcibly taken into exile from the Promised Land to Babylon. Rather than cursing their captors, Jeremiah tells the exiles to bless them and to seek their welfare.
I think that’s one place where we start today. Here’s an example to make us ponder.[3] Last week, the Advertising Standards Authority banned poster adverts for the latest album by the pop star Demi Lovato. The album is called ‘Holy F*ck’ and portrays her in sexual bondage gear on a bed shaped like a crucifix as if she is on the Cross, like Christ. So pretty repulsive, and you can see why the ASA banned the posters for their offence to Christians.
But this is a young woman who, after becoming a child TV star, developed eating disorders and was subjected to sexual abuse. As she tried to cope with the pain, she became addicted to drugs and suffered mental health issues. A heroin overdose nearly killed her. She sustained brain damage and temporary blindness.
Her manager encouraged her to attend a church Bible study, and for a short while she felt close to God. But on the new album she sings that ultimately she felt like she didn’t fit in at church.
In our world, there are plenty of broken people who think they don’t fit in with church. Most of their stories are nothing like as dramatic as Demi Lovato’s. But they need God’s healing love showing to them and explained to them. They need the light of Christ, and his community, the light of the world, are the people to do this.
That means us. We are the community of King Jesus, not a religious club.
[1] I owe this insight to Ian Paul at https://www.psephizo.com/biblical-studies/the-calling-of-the-first-disciples-in-matthew-4/
[2] Ian Paul, op. cit., citing Chad Bird via Peter Leithart.
[3] What follows is based on James Emery White at https://www.churchandculture.org/blog/2023/1/19/a-prayer-for-demi-lovato
Restoring Work (Easter 5 Resurrection People 6) John 21:1-14
Christians are a little too good at times at keeping God in a box. One of the ways we do that is we put him in a church box. The only place we think we’ll encounter God is in a church setting.
But people who do that haven’t read the Gospels very carefully. Much more of the action with Jesus is not at the synagogue or the Temple but in daily life.
And if the Resurrection (and the Ascension) make Jesus present everywhere then we can meet him at the breakfast table, at the shops, and at our place of work, as the disciples did here.
How do we feel about that? Are there times when we would rather he wasn’t there? I remember a Christian businessman saying, ‘On Sundays, my priorities are first, God, second, my family, and third, my work. On Mondays, those priorities are reversed.’
Does this truth make us feel uncomfortable, or is it good news? If, like that businessman, we’re clearly uncomfortable with the prospect, reflect with me now, because actually, it’s good news that the risen Lord is present everywhere, including work.
Firstly, the risen Lord is present to guide our work.
Peter and the lads are experienced fishermen. By going fishing at night they have opted for the time commonly accepted to be the most productive for fishermen on the Sea of Galilee. Yet they catch nothing. Not even some plankton.
Why on earth – apart from desperation – would they take instructions from Jesus, who had been a carpenter, not a fisherman? What does he know?
Well, he must know something, because one of those little unexplained details of the story is that he has already got some fish and is cooking them on the beach!
Of course, as readers of the Gospel, we know he’s more than a carpenter, he’s the Risen Lord. Those pesky fish that Peter and his friends are trying to catch are part of the creation he oversaw.
And furthermore, in that creation the human race was assigned work as a good thing, for it was part of the stewardship of creation under God which is the human calling.
So it makes complete sense that the risen Lord is interested in the disciples’ fishing work. It isn’t inferior because it’s not overtly religious. It isn’t inferior because this is what several of them left to follow Jesus. It’s still valuable as part of what makes for a flourishing world as God designed it.
The same is true for us, whether we do paid work or whether we volunteer, whether we need the income, or whether in retirement we are free to dedicate our time to other causes.
Therefore our risen Lord has a genuine interest in our work, and that involves him guiding us in that as much as in any church decision. Our work is to be a matter for prayer as much as any other aspect of our lives.
Are there areas of our paid work or our volunteering where we are struggling? Have we thought that this was secular and not religious, and therefore not brought it to God? That would be a sad mistake.
You may be an employee or self-employed. You may be a business owner. Or you may be a student. Or you are using free time to make a difference as a volunteer. Jesus is risen and alive and cares about what you are doing. Don’t be afraid to involve him. He wants to be involved.
So bring him that staffing decision. Bring him that knotty problem your lecturer set. Bring him the moral issue you’re wrestling with. He is interested, and he is present to help.
Secondly, the risen Lord is present to give purpose to our work.
I once had a manager who was the sort of person who lived to work. This was a problem for most of her staff, who generally worked to live. The office was everything to Mrs Freeman, and she couldn’t understand those who didn’t see it that way.
Why were the rest of us different? Well, for a few, they had spouses who earned a lot more and so their earnings weren’t a life and death issue. But for many, it was because work was not a place of fulfilment but of frustration or tedium. It certainly wasn’t a fulfilling experience.
I think many people would identify with the latter group. We’ve replaced the Seven Dwarfs’ song ‘Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work we go’ with ‘I owe, I owe, it’s off to work I go.’
And as I’ve said to you before, I’ve had that same experience of frustration and tedium in the ministry just as I did in the office. Those who romantically look on at my work and think it must be some kind of uninterrupted heavenly bliss have never got close to a manse family.
I have also testified before that the Bible verse which just about kept me going during the worst of times was 1 Corinthians 15:58, the climax to Paul’s great chapter on the Resurrection, where he says that a great consequence of Christ being risen from the dead is that our labour is not in vain.
If you remember the sin of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3, you will recall that when God finds them he pronounces various curses on them and the snake. One of those curses is that Adam will find work to be frustrating. The Good News of salvation in the Resurrection reverses this curse, just as it reverses our separation from God by sin.
We heard that promise when we also read Isaiah 65:17-25 in the service:
21 They will build houses and dwell in them;
they will plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
22 No longer will they build houses and others live in them,
or plant and others eat.
For as the days of a tree,
so will be the days of my people;
my chosen ones will long enjoy
the work of their hands.
23 They will not labour in vain,
nor will they bear children doomed to misfortune;
for they will be a people blessed by the Lord,
they and their descendants with them.
Surely Peter and his colleagues in the boat had a sense of this when they dragged their huge catch to shore. After the fruitlessness of the night, now their purpose was fulfilled. They had fish. They could sell fish. They could make a living.
Not everything will be put right now. The vision of complete fulfilment awaits the ‘new heavens and new earth’ of which Isaiah 65 and Revelation 21 speak. (Which implies, by the way, that there will be work to do in the life to come – but it will be fulfilling work.)
However, we can ask the risen Lord whose resurrection promises that coming new heavens and new earth to help us find purpose and meaning in what we are doing now. It may be the chance to serve. It may be creative management of the earth and its resources.
Sure, while sin lasts there will still be frustration. But as the new creation begins to poke through, the risen Lord will bring purpose and meaning to what we do. Let us ask him to make that clear for us.
Thirdly and finally, the risen Lord is present to bless our work.
One hundred and fifty-three fish! Bulging, over-filled, and heavy nets! This is clearly way more than a normal catch!
Over the centuries, various scholars have tried to find symbolic meaning or significance in the number 153, and maybe that’s not surprising, given the many layers of meaning we often find in John’s Gospel. However, those attempts have largely failed, and perhaps we just need to default to a simple explanation.
Somebody counted the fish. The risen Lord had blessed the work of his disciples’ hands.
In Ephesians 3:20 the Apostle Paul tells that prayer can lead to God doing
Immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us.
There is no reason to confine that promise to church work. Paul places no such limit. And this story shows that we can seek God’s blessing through the risen Christ in every part of life, including work such as paid employment, studies, and volunteering.
How significant might that be in the economic situation we are now facing? As prices increase at a rate we haven’t seen for thirty years, as manufacturers’ costs go up, and as household budgets get squeezed to the point where more families are having to make impossible choices, would this not be a great time to ask the risen Lord to bless our work?
So what are the needs of your employer, your educational institution, or your charity? Pray that the risen Lord will be present to bless.
Yes, let’s increase the range of people and causes that we pray God will bless. Not churches and the sick, but all sorts of elements in society. As you walk along the high street in the village, why not pray a blessing on the businesses? OK, there will be one or two whose business you will consider inappropriate for blessing, such as the betting shops, but why not pray that blessing?
The prophet Jeremiah told those Jews who were forcibly taken into Babylonian exile that they should ‘seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which [God] has carried [them] into exile’ (Jeremiah 29:7).
This makes for an interesting challenge: instead of complaining about our society, why don’t we instead pray blessing upon it through the risen Christ?
In conclusion, because the risen Christ is present everywhere to bless we need to get rid of our old sacred/secular divide. Jesus doesn’t see things like that. As one preacher once put it, ‘The only thing that is secular is sin.’
No, see the whole creation as the arena for our risen Lord to be at work, because his Resurrection is the first sign of him making that entire creation new.
And let that vision of the Risen One who transformed the fishing expedition of his friends be one that inspires us to pray and to believe that he also wants to transform our work, our studies, our volunteering, our work in our homes and families.
Because all of those are part of the creation he is renewing. Let’s join him in his work – in prayer and in action.
Sabbatical, Day 75: Re-Imagining Persecution; Funeral Music
Two different blog posts today show how two different communities wrongly thought they were victims of persecution. Firstly, Michael Spencer shows convincingly that evangelicals were not killed for their faith by the two teenage gunmen at Columbine. Nor was it about video game nasties, atheism or the occult. The information has been seeping out for years, he says, but a major piece in USA Today has put it all together. Yet because many of the victims were related to local churches, a quick assumption was made. A mythology grew up, books were published, songs were recorded.
Secondly, there has been outrage in recent days over the removal of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender books from Amazon’s best-seller list. Search for #amazonfail on Twitter and you’ll find thousands of upset tweeters. But today comes the news that it wasn’t the consequence of anti-gay policies. It was a technological error. Clay Shirky, himself strongly in favour of gay rights, reports the truth in detail.
Here, then, is an issue where the evangelical community and the gay community (if both are truly communities, but that’s another issue) have something in common. Both have reasons for presupposing that opposition is persecution. Evangelicals are fuelled by church history and parts of the Bible; gay people have very recent history that predisposes them to the assumption.
To speak personally about this, I remember a few weeks after the Columbine shootings seeing a report on BBC television’s Newsnight which cast doubt on the martyrdom theory. At the time, I just assumed it was simply the BBC’s liberal bias against conservative Christians and dismissed it. I found the testimony of Cassie Bernall‘s family to her faith as a reason for her killing as more persuasive. I am not remotely suggesting they were insincere or dishonest at all, but now it seems I have to admit the BBC was right. They were modelling good reporting rather than showing bias.
Isn’t it true, though, that Christians – even in the West – are facing more opposition? Yes, it is, and I have argued frequently that our best posture for shaping our witness today is that of exile. It is a view eloquently given biblical and historical precedent in Patrick Whitworth‘s book ‘Prepare for Exile‘. However, there is a vast difference between that posture and that adopted by the wider Christian community in the wake of Columbine. Exile requires humility. It embraces the fact of being a minority in a ‘Babylonian’ culture. In contrast, according to Spencer, American evangelicals interpreted Columbine as part of the disastrous ‘culture war’. That meant taking a stance from a position of power, not of weakness. Ordinary people in society often have little sympathy for those in power.
And power seems to have been one of the mistakes in the pro-gay protests against the Amazon error, according to Shirky. Amazon is now seen as a large corporation and thus not worthy of sympathy.
Of course, it’s ironic to suggest evangelical Christians and gay people are or have been in similar positions. There is mutual suspicion, if not worse, between the groups, although Tony Blair thinks that situation is softening with younger evangelicals. It may even be the traditional Christian position on sexuality that helps send the church into exile, given recent trends in legislation. I’m thinking about laws that prevent discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation and the way they have affected organisations such as Catholic adoption agencies. Not that all Christians are agreed on this matter, as we know so painfully. I still hold the traditional conviction, much as I would sometimes like to believe differently, because it would ease my tensions with today’s society. However, quite a few friends who read this blog disagree with me. That is just a microcosm of the bigger picture.
What, then, if there is opposition? One thing’s for sure: a ‘culture war’ power play is just not the way to react. Whitworth suggests new attitudes, spirituality and approaches to mission in his book that I cited above. With regard to attitudes, he cites the Beatitudes and Jeremiah’s letter to the exiles in Babylon as decisive for Christians. That means humility, the acceptance of persecution and a willingness to hunker down for the long haul (contrary to certain prophecies of revival, I wonder?).
Might we have a more Christlike witness if we took this approach?
…………
Co-Operative Funeralcare have done another survey on popular music and hymn choices at – er, funerals. Church Mouse has the chart rundowns and some commentary. This would be the excuse opportunity for me to re-run my favourite funeral music story.
About ten years ago, a woman asked to have Celine Dion’s (hideous) ‘My heart will go on’ played as we brought her mother’s coffin into the crematorium chapel. When the undertaker, pallbearers and I were ready outside the chapel doors, I gave the nod to the crematorium attendant.
The music began. It was Celine Dion. It was ‘My heart will go on.’ Only trouble was, it was the dance remix.
As drums thumped all over the melodramatic Canadian warbling, one pallbearer looked at me and said, “Do we have to take the coffin in at that tempo?”
“No,” said another, “It’s the deceased knocking, wanting to get out!”
How I remained calm and dignified to take the service, I’ll never know. It was all I could do to suppress laughter.
The next day the bereaved woman kindly phoned me to thank me for the service. I thought I ought to raise the issue of the music delicately. “Did you notice it wasn’t the normal version of the song but the dance remix?”
“No.”
“I just thought I ought to mention it in case anybody was upset by what happened.”
“Oh no,” she said, “it wasn’t a problem. Besides, my mum was a bit of a goer, and she’d have loved it!”
Big Circumstance 