Tag: John Cleese

Journey To Jerusalem 4: The Gift Of Hope, Psalm 130 (Lent 5)

Psalm 130

I have childhood memories of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Even though our parents didn’t let us watch it, I still heard enough about it. We would ape The Ministry Of Silly Walks in the playground. We recited The Five-Minute Argument. And the Dead Parrot Sketch was our holy text. One of my college friends even rewrote the latter as the Dead Church Sketch. I might still have the script somewhere.

It therefore won’t surprise you to know that Fawlty Towers features among my very favourite ever TV shows. 

And I also like to quote from one of John Cleese’s movies. Not one of the Monty Python films, nor A Fish Called Wanda, but Clockwise, in which Cleese plays the Headmaster of a minor public school, who needs to travel to the annual meeting of the Headmasters’ Conference, the organisation for public school Heads. He is up for an award there. 

But one disaster after another befalls him on the way, and at one dark point he says, ‘The despair I can cope with. It’s the hope that kills me.’

The pilgrims of ancient Israel went to the festivals at Jerusalem to find hope. Today’s psalm reflects that. The kind of hope they sought was similar to that which we seek. 

Firstly, hope for forgiveness:

1 Out of the depths I cry to you, Lord;

2     Lord, hear my voice.

Let your ears be attentive

    to my cry for mercy.

3 If you, Lord, kept a record of sins,

    Lord, who could stand?

4 But with you there is forgiveness,

    so that we can, with reverence, serve you.

If our sins are not forgiven, we have no hope. If we know we have done wrong, then we need mercy. The pilgrims would see God’s forgiveness enacted at the Temple with the sacrificial system. Here, in their culture, it was dramatically enacted that God had dealt with his people’s sins and they were forgiven. 

In the next two weeks we come to our annual remembrance of what God did decisively in Jesus to bring forgiveness. At the Cross, Jesus dies in our place, and he conquers the forces of evil. 

And we should not baulk at the New Testament idea that the forgiveness of our sins comes at a price. It is no coincidence that the Scriptures sometimes talk of this in terms of the forgiveness of debts, both in the Lord’s Prayer and in the parables of Jesus, such as the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant. If I forgive someone a debt that they owe to me, then that is a cost for me, because I absorb that. If they owe me two hundred pounds, then my forgiveness of them costs me two hundred pounds that I no longer have. The New Testament tells us that God in Christ has paid a cost that makes the forgiveness of all our debts to him possible and available. We simply receive this gift by holding out the empty hands of faith and giving our lives over to him and to his ways, not ours. 

We cannot earn this, but we can show our gratitude for receiving this extraordinary gift. As the Psalmist says in verse 4, 

4 But with you there is forgiveness,

    so that we can, with reverence, serve you.

It is by serving God that we live out our gratitude for the hope and new beginnings his forgiveness of our sins gives us. The call to serve in the local church is not merely to fill vacancies, even if it looks like that. It is to express gratitude for the hope God has filled us with. When at the Annual Meeting you hear of jobs that need filling in the church, please see it as an opportunity to express your gratitude for the hope that God’s forgiveness has given you.

And similarly in the community. When an opening arises, this is a way to show gratitude for the hope of forgiveness. We might not see things quite the way Martin Luther did when he said that if there were a vacancy for the post of village hangman the conscientious Christian should apply, but there will be other more palatable possibilities! 

Secondly, hope for life:

5 I wait for the Lord, my whole being waits,

    and in his word I put my hope.

6 I wait for the Lord

    more than watchmen wait for the morning,

    more than watchmen wait for the morning.

People need hope in the sense of having purpose and fulfilment in life. It’s the way God made us. When that doesn’t exist, something is wrong, usually to do with the brokenness of the world God desires to mend and redeem. 

So something like long-term sickness may affect our sense of hope. I read the regular writings of an author named Tanya Marlow, who was once a theological lecturer, but who contracted ME following the birth of her child, and now can rarely get out of bed. If she does so, it’s probably in a wheelchair, and she pays for it in the following days. She writes movingly and passionately on disability issues and has pointed out that the latest Government benefit savings will not always get more people back to work, because many of those receiving them have no chance medically of ever working again. What will that do to their hope?

Or maybe the existence of sin is what suffocates hope in life. To take a personal example, some people naively say to me, ‘Oh, your work must be very rewarding and fulfilling.’ Well, sometimes it is, but there are other times when the hope is sucked out of me. High upon my list of hope-sucking events have been those times when I have done something that one of my chief detractors in a church didn’t like, and the next thing I knew, I was facing an entirely fabricated Safeguarding accusation. 

Around one such season in my life, I bumped into a friend from the local Anglican church outside the village Co-Op. For a year or so, our children had been at the same school. Asking her what she was doing now, she told me she had left the teaching profession to train in a therapy that made a significant difference in the lives of children and teenagers who were neurodivergent, or who had conditions like cerebral palsy. Now qualified, she had set up her own practice, and saw transformative change in the lives of young people. She told me how richly rewarding this was. While I was delighted for her that God had done something special in her life, my own heart ached. 

Some of us, then, find hope and fulfilment in this life; others of us wait, like the Psalmist did. We rejoice in those who find that God makes their lives worthwhile and rewarding. For those who wait, we believe that God is present in the waiting. We know that ‘hope deferred makes the heart sick’, as Proverbs 13:12 says, and we stand with those who endure such sickness. We believe too that God is present in the cries for justice where sin stands in the way of fulfilled hope. 

Thirdly and finally, hope for the world:

7 Israel, put your hope in the Lord,

    for with the Lord is unfailing love

    and with him is full redemption.

8 He himself will redeem Israel

    from all their sins.

What has all this stuff about Israel being forgiven got to do with hope for the world? Simply this: God chose Israel in order to bless the world. Israel’s so called ‘election’ was not a matter of Israel being saved and others not, but of God working through Israel to bring his salvation to the whole world. If Israel is to be renewed, as the Psalmist here prays, then the consequence is not an in-house bless-up, but blessing that spreads to the world. 

It follows that God’s plans for his people, the Church, are similar. We are a channel for God to bless the nations. The renewal of the church matters, not for our own sakes, but so that God’s mission of blessing all creation may move forward. 

I belong to a network that speaks of ‘local churches changing nations.’ I also support the relief and development charity Tear Fund, which speaks of ‘transforming communities through the local church.’ Here’s what Tear Fund says on the subject: 

Extreme poverty impacts every aspect of a person’s life, devastating families, destroying local businesses, and draining communities of their resources and hope. This overwhelming reality is not God’s plan for our world.

We work through the local church in the world’s poorest countries because they know their communities best. The local church is best placed to recognise challenges and release people’s God-given potential to overcome them.

Transforming Communities is not about giving short-term aid. We train local churches to identify the resources they already have so that they can develop lasting solutions to the problem of poverty. This approach supports communities to rewrite their own stories and build a future filled with hope and opportunity.

How do they do this? Not only do they stand against poverty and hunger, they run programmes to restore broken relationships, support local businesses, and support challenges to injustice. 

We have a part to play in this as the church, too. Not only do we do so by supporting God’s work of hope among the poor, we have a calling to bring God’s hope to our neighbourhoods and community, too. It is fundamental to our calling that God has put us here to bring his blessing and hope to our town. 

It goes without saying that there are already ways in which we are doing that here. I believe that if this church were to close, the town would notice. And I can’t say that of every church, sadly. 

But that doesn’t stop the fact that we are always called to seek the spiritual renewal of the church, so that she may continue to grow in her destiny of blessing the world in Jesus’ name. Let us be grateful for where we are, but let us never be satisfied and sit back. 

Conclusion

I pray that being a part of this worshipping community is something that increases our hope:

  • That our hope in forgiveness increases our gratitude, and that we show that by finding new ways to serve our God;
  • That our hope in life brings fulfilment to us and others, and that we stand with those for whom this is not yet true; 
  • And that our hope for the world is expressed through the ministry of the church here and across the globe, in bringing God’s blessings in Christ to all in need.

Many years ago, Amnesty International used to speak about a ‘conspiracy of hope.’ I think we can go much bigger and deeper than them with our vision of hope, don’t you think?

0

Sermon: If You’re Down In The Valley, Then Pentecost And The Gift Of The SPirit Is For you

Ezekiel 37:1-14

A film I enjoyed back in the 1980s was a comedy called Clockwise, starring John Cleese. He plays Brian Stimpson, the headmaster of an independent school. Stimpson is known for his strict punctuality, something he enforces in the culture of the school.

Stimpson is invited to be the guest speaker at an educational conference. However, one obstacle after another puts him more and more behind time to get there – the very worst thing for such a punctual man.

As the stress on him heightens with hopes regularly raised and then dashed, Stimpson says this:

I can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand.

Ezekiel knows something of the oscillation between despair and hope, and what that can do to someone. In the previous chapter, he has had a wonderful message from the Lord about how he will give Israel a new heart and a new spirit. It’s a wonderful message, where God’s people are back in their own land, and no longer in exile in Babylon, as is the case at the time of Ezekiel’s ministry. Imagine how that lifts him up.

Then in here in chapter 37 it begins with ‘The hand of the LORD’ being on him (verse 1), and so surely this exhilarating sense of hope is going to continue. But no. He is taken to a valley – rarely, if ever, a good place in Scripture – and that valley is filled with the dry bones of the dead. Israel isn’t alive. She is dead.

And you realise just how down in the dumps Ezekiel has become when the Lord asks him,

‘Son of man, can these bones live?’

I said, ‘Sovereign Lord, you alone know.’ (Verse 3)

Not much hope there. The vision of the new heart with God’s Spirit inside and God’s people living back in the Promised Land has been sunk by seeing the valley of dry bones. I don’t know, Lord, says Ezekiel, only you know.

I labour the point because something similar can be our experience. We have in a sense gone into exile too in that Christians are now not only a minority in our culture but also increasingly a group that is thought of as evil. Every now and again, though, we see some signs of hope. But then along comes a pandemic, our churches lose a lot of money, decisions and crises that were still potentially five or ten years away suddenly confront us, and even when in-person worship resumes not everybody feels happy to come back. Some of those who don’t return make that decision for obvious medical reasons, but others who don’t show up again are a big surprise.

Are we walking among a valley of dry bones? Sometimes we are.

Is there any solution? Yes there is, but what Ezekiel 37 and the Feast of Pentecost make clear is that it doesn’t lie with us. None of our programmes, none of our wheezes will make a scrap of difference. We are dry bones.

No, the solution comes from God and it is in the shape of his Spirit. There are three prophecies about the Holy Spirit that Ezekiel receives, and each shows what God can do for us when we are open to being filled with the Holy Spirit.

The first prophecy reveals the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of promise:

4 Then he said to me, ‘Prophesy to these bones and say to them, “Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! 5 This is what the Sovereign Lord says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. 6 I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the Lord.”’

7 So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I was prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. 8 I looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them.

It all begins here. The job isn’t finished – those last words were ‘there was no breath in them’ – but here the sending of the Spirit (or breath, it’s the same Hebrew word) is the sign that God will keep his promise to give life to his people.

But the question is, will we seek and pray for the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives? Yes, it’s a work of divine grace, we are dependent on God for the gift of the Spirit, but that happens after Ezekiel prophesies the word of the Lord. So will we seek the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives?

I know some Christians get nervous about the Holy Spirit. There is something about that word ‘Spirit’ and sometimes the Holy Spirit does strange things. However, we shouldn’t expect the Spirit of God to do things exactly our way! The good news is that the Holy Spirit is also called in the Book of Acts ‘The Spirit of Jesus’, so what if the question instead were this: how much do we want the Spirit of Jesus to be at work in our lives?

Or put it this way: if I’m conscious that I’m not as much like Jesus as I might be, then what I need is more of the Spirit of Jesus.

And frankly, which one of us is as much like Jesus as we might be? So don’t we all need more of the Spirit of Jesus?

It’s time to put our fears about the Holy Spirit aside and recognise that we need to be filled and filled again with the Spirit.

The second prophecy reveals the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of power:

9 Then he said to me, ‘Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to it, “This is what the Sovereign Lord says: come, breath, from the four winds and breathe into these slain, that they may live.”’ 10 So I prophesied as he commanded me, and breath entered them; they came to life and stood up on their feet – a vast army.

Now there is life and breath in the bones, and they become not an enormous mausoleum but ‘a vast army’. That is God’s power, the power of the Holy Spirit, at work.

Doesn’t this speak to another way in which we sense our inadequacy from operating on our own without the Spirit of God? Isn’t it true that so often we look at ourselves in the church and feel powerless to do anything effective in society? Do we feel that our best efforts are feeble in the face of overwhelming social forces that aggressively promote values that are contrary to what we hold dear as Christians? Do we look like a vast army? Probably not, much of the time.

Then think of how it was said of the early church that they had turned the world upside-down. Oh sure, they hadn’t got rid of some vicious Roman emperors, but they had started a subversive revolution at ground level. For all the good the church does today, I have to be honest and say I don’t think we’re leading a Jesus revolution in our day.

Of course, we don’t want to be a vast army in a literal sense. That’s not how God’s kingdom works, as Jesus showed, and as the early church lived. But the battle for what is good, pure, true, and beautiful is one in which we need to be engaged, and we need to fight in a manner like Jesus and the apostles.

So once more, there is really only one solution: to cry out in persistent prayer for more of the Holy Spirit.

The third prophecy reveals the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of prophecy itself:

11 Then he said to me: ‘Son of man, these bones are the people of Israel. They say, “Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone; we are cut off.” 12 Therefore prophesy and say to them: “This is what the Sovereign Lord says: my people, I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them; I will bring you back to the land of Israel. 13 Then you, my people, will know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves and bring you up from them. 14 I will put my Spirit in you and you will live, and I will settle you in your own land. Then you will know that I the Lord have spoken, and I have done it, declares the Lord.”’

It is prophesied that Israel will be back in her land of promise. And a few decades later, it happened.

Not for Christians, of course, is there to be a physical land with its borders somewhere on this planet. Instead, we seek the kingdom of God, where not only God reigns but people walk in his ways and no longer rebel against him. And even inanimate creation is affected, no longer damaged but flourishing. Under God’s reign we have a community of disciples, a community of beauty, of peace, of love, of justice.

We’re a long way short, aren’t we? Not just in society, but in the church. Whatever good things we find in the church, it would take someone with the most rose-tinted spectacles ever made to argue that we were close to the kingdom in all its fulness in the way we live.

Certainly, I believe we’re a long way short. Not only do I as a minister often see the dark side of the church, the longer I live as a Christian the more conscious I am of the ways I fall short.

Either way, there is only one answer, and it’s the one we keep coming back to this week: we need to be more full of the Holy Spirit than we are right now. That is how God changes things for ancient Israel: ‘I will put my Spirit in you and you will live.’

In conclusion, everything points to us needing more of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit isn’t absent from us as with ancient Israel, when the Spirit only came upon selected individuals. In our era, the Holy Spirit comes upon all who entrust their lives to Jesus Christ.

But just as some people have a vitamin deficiency where they need to take more vitamins, so I think the signs I’ve described show that we have a Spirit deficiency.

If there is one thing we could all do that would lead to a major difference in the life of the church of Jesus Christ, it would be that we set ourselves persistently, regularly, and urgently to pray that God would fill us with his Holy Spirit.

Because when he does we shall be more like Jesus. When he does, we shall be more equipped to be Christ’s subversive army of love in he world. And when he does, we shall see more of his beautiful kingdom.

And if the church changes like that, then we shan’t be weighed down with despair, but surrounded by the growing seeds of hope.

0

Sermon: The Resurrection Of Dead Bones

Ezekiel 37:1-14

‘Ello. I wish to register a complaint.

Anyone who ever followed Monty Python’s Flying Circus will soon recognise those words from the famous Dead Parrot Sketch[1]. John Cleese’s character Mr Praline has bought a Norwegian Blue parrot from a pet shop but it proves to be dead. The pet shop owner says, “He’s not dead, he’s resting.” Exasperated, Mr Praline eventually declares the animal to be “an ex-parrot”.

The Dead Parrot sketch came back into my mind as I re-read Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones. A friend of mine rewrote it as The Dead Church Sketch. So for the part of the sketch where Mr Praline complains that the parrot is not moving and he is told that the parrot has been nailed to its perch, we instead hear the excuse that the congregation has been nailed to the pews.

In Ezekiel 37 the prophet encounters a vision of a ‘Dead Church’, or Dead Israel to be more accurate. A Dead People Of God. He is taken back and forth among the bones to make it clear that the people of God in exile in Babylon are ‘dead’. Spiritually dead.
The vision is appalling and offensive. You didn’t leave dead bones out in the air: the Jewish custom was (and still is) to bury the dead within a day or two of the death. And contact with dead bodies made a Jew ritually unclean, so to leave them out like this for so long increased the number of people who would be made unclean by coming near them.

More offensive than the implications for Jewish ritual law is the message of the vision: the people of God are dead.

Somewhere among our struggles for the future of Church is a similar fear. Declining church numbers. The lack of under-40s. Does The Future Have A Church?
The historian Callum Brown said in his book The Death Of Christian Britain that he could envisage the disappearance of Christianity from this nation. Ten years ago Archbishop Cormac Murphy O’Connor spoke of our faith as having been ‘almost vanquished‘.

We’re beginning to look like a pile of dead bones out in the air.

Might we turn on to Ezekiel again and see whether God might bring a similar message of hope in the face of devastation to us?

Three times God tells Ezekiel to prophesy. The first occasion is this:

Then he said to me, ‘Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.’
[Verses 4-6]

To dead bones comes the promise of life. Life will enter the dead by the breath of God, that is, his Spirit. It’s the same word in Hebrew for wind, breath and spirit. Just as the Spirit brooded over the waters at creation and God put his breath in the man so that he might have life, so to have new life – spiritual life – requires the breath or Spirit of God.

Somebody once said that if the Holy Spirit were taken from the Church, ninety-five per cent of all activities would continue just the same. Was that person right? Instead of defining the Christian life as life in the Spirit, we have defined it by busyness and by whether the church has a full and varied programme of activities.

In my last circuit the ministers had to give reports to every Circuit Meeting on the ‘new initiatives’ in each of our churches. Healthy church life was
measured in new programmes and projects, not in signs of the Spirit. Eugene Peterson says,

Along the way the primacy of God and his work in our lives gives way ever so slightly to the primacy of our work in God’s kingdom, and we begin thinking of ways that we can use God in what we are doing. … [I]t turns out that we have not so much been worshipping God as enlisting him as a trusted and valuable assistant.
[Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places, p 124.]

The Old Testament calls God the Helper of Israel[2]. Some English translations of the New Testament call the Holy Spirit the Helper[3]. But this should not be taken to justify that subtle shift from utter dependence upon God to regarding him as an accessory. When we treat the Spirit of God like that, we end up as dead bones.

Ezekiel calls us, then, to receive the life of the Spirit and stop depending upon our dead ways of doing church and being Christian. We fill our empty lives with busyness and possessions, when the only fullness that will satisfy is the fullness of the Holy Spirit.

Some will object and say that throughout the Old Testament the Spirit was only given to certain people and at certain times. In our era, living after Pentecost, the Spirit has been given to all who believe and we who have faith in Christ have already received the Holy Spirit. In response I offer a favourite story.
The evangelist D L Moody was once taken to task for the way he preached on Ephesians 5:18, where Paul says, ‘Be filled with the Spirit’. Moody pointed out that it could be translated, ‘Continue to be filled with the Spirit’, and accordingly encouraged his listeners to be filled again with the Holy Spirit.

Afterwards, a minister berated him, saying, “I received the Holy Spirit at conversion. Why are you telling me to be filled with the Spirit again?”

“Because,” said Moody, “I leak.”

Have we leaked the Spirit? Are we living by faith in dependence upon the power of the Holy Spirit? How many of us can honestly say, “Yes”?

The second prophecy. Ezekiel sees some movement:

So I prophesied as I had been commanded; and as I prophesied, suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. I looked, and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them; but there was no breath in them.
[Verses 7-8]

‘But there was no breath in them.’ Devastating. That which the bones most desperately need – breath – is still absent. What next?

Then he said to me, ‘Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.’ I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude.
[Verses 9-10]

‘Prophesy to the breath.’ And if the breath is being summoned prophetically by Ezekiel, then we have here something like that ancient prayer of the Church, ‘Come Holy Spirit’ (‘Veni Sancte Spiritus’), so often used at ordination services. In our terminology, Ezekiel is praying, “Come, Holy Spirit.” It’s an ancient prayer that has come back in popularity in the last twenty years or
so, largely thanks to the late John Wimber and the Vineyard Movement.

Again, certain people will object. They will again say we are living in a post-Pentecost world where the Holy Spirit has been given and is already present. Why say, “Come, Holy Spirit” when the Spirit is here anyway?

Because we are distinguishing between the general presence of the Holy Spirit and the Spirit’s particular actions and interventions. We are not simply seeking the general presence of the Holy Spirit, but the manifest presence. We need to experience the Spirit at work in our lives and in our midst. Dry bones need to know that the breath is coming into them.

But how do we know when the Holy Spirit has manifestly come? In the Book of Acts there seems to be a common denominator of bold speech in the name of Jesus. It may be the gift of tongues, it may be preaching, it may be courageous testimony.

Other occasions in church history have seen obvious signs that the Spirit was at work. We think of Wesley having his heart strangely warmed and also the dramatic effect upon listeners to his preaching as they sensed the gravity of their sin before God and their need of salvation. We saw it a few years ago with the dramatic phenomena of the so-called ‘Toronto Blessing’.

There are, then, clear signs in history of the ‘manifest presence’ of the Holy Spirit. But the Spirit also comes quietly, and it is not for us to choose whether the mode of his coming is quiet or dramatic. The ‘fruit of the Spirit’ – his work in us to produce Christ-like character – is a slow process, just like the growth of ordinary fruit. There may be few outward, visible signs when this work begins or continues.

What matters is that we are open to God to do his work in and through us as he sees fit, and not be limited by our restricted vision, our fears or our prejudices.

We recognise that we need the Spirit’s empowering, and refuse to be complacent. The Holy Spirit may be ‘the Helper’, but he is not our ‘Santa’s little helper’. He is one Person of the Trinity. When we pray, “Come, Holy Spirit,” we are saying, “Come, Holy Spirit, in whatever way you see fit, and to do whatever work you see fit.”

Can we pray that? We need to.

The third prophecy:

The story so far: Ezekiel has seen the deadness of God’s exiled people. He has firstly been summoned to prophesy their need for the breath or Spirit of God. Secondly he has prophetically called on God’s Spirit to fill them.

But what now? The loss of hope still needs addressing. It’s no good bringing God’s people back to spiritual life if they are still left in their sense of despair. So this is how the vision concludes:

Then he said to me, ‘Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.” Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord God: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am theLord, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act, says the Lord.’
[verses 11-14]

Ezekiel addresses ‘the whole house of Israel’ and he brings them good news. Their new life in the Spirit will involve being placed on their own soil again.

But for that to mean something for us as Christians, it needs translating. Although Christianity has continuity with the Jewish faith, it does not share the promise of physical land.

Our inheritance is both now in Christ and future in heaven. If the Spirit of God places Christians ‘on their own soil’ now, it may or may not indicate a revival of Christianity in our land. But it will mean renewed confidence in Christ. It will mean a sense of hope about our faith that goes beyond the personal hope of glory. It will mean being positive about Christ rather than forever being on the defensive. It will mean boldness to speak of Christ even when we might face opposition, because we know the Holy Spirit will give us the words. It will mean finding ways to live for one another and not for ourselves, as the Early Church did soon after Pentecost, in defiance of our consumerist culture. It will mean the Sermon on the Mount becoming a lived-out reality now.

Are we seeing these things now? How do we measure up? For however far we fall short of these signs of the Spirit, that is the indication of how much we need to be filled with the Holy Spirit.

So let us pause. If we are not showing all the signs of life in the Spirit that Jesus would wish us to then now is not the time to rush on. Let us stop and drink from the rivers of living water that he gives us.

Perhaps you’re like a guy called Charlie. He worked in a laboratory. After a Christian meeting he asked the visiting speaker this question: “It says of the early disciples that people took note that they had been with Jesus. How come no-one says that about me?”

The preacher prayed with him. Nothing spectacular happened at the time.

But a few days later, one of his work colleagues said to him, “Charlie, what happened to you the other night? You’re a different kind of Charlie.”[4]

For those of us who want to be a different kind of Charlie, this is the hour. Come, Holy Spirit, breathe life into us. May we be planted in the soil you have prepared for us.

[1] Script here.

[2] Deuteronomy 33:29; Isaiah 41:13-14; Hosea 13:9

[3] Where others say Comforter, Counsellor or Advocate – John 14:15, 25; 16:7.

[4] Adapted from Clive Calver, Sold Out.

5

Sabbatical, Day 24: No Sleep Till Brekkie, More Lectures And The Bristol Tourist Trail

I don’t do well on first nights in new locations. Not on the evidence of this sabbatical, anyway. Having barely slept before 4 am on my first night at Cliff College a fortnight ago, I didn’t sleep before 1:30 here, then woke at 5:30 with a vile headache. (Not that I know what a nice headache would be, you understand.) At 7 am, I decided I needed a large dose of tannin, so I took the pint-sized mug I’d brought from home and made my first tea of the day. The pain slowly subsided over a period of several hours, until it was gone by late afternoon.

Trinity does worship differently from my time. Twenty years ago, nearly everything was Alternative Service Book. Except when Paul Roberts inflicted chanted Book of Common Prayer services, that is. Though the ASB has been replaced in the C of E by Common Worship, the college seems to have themes for particular weeks. This week it’s Iona Community worship, widely popular in many parts of the British church but something that drives me nuts. I have no problem with a liturgy that emphasises social justice and makes no division between work and worship. However, I have found several of their liturgies and some of their songs hectoring and lecturing. Not only that, the confession used this morning was fundamentally inadequate. I like the mutual confession approach of Iona (service leader confesses and congregation pronounces forgiveness, then the process is reversed), so I’m not critical of everything. But this confession started from the point that we had hurt ourselves, then others, then the world. Absolutely no reference to the rupture between humans and God that is central to confession. Remind me never to use it in worship.

There were good things – not least the brief testimony of a student as to what God did in a prolonged experience of a spiritual desert. And the guy who read the Gospel reading did so with great feeling. Those were highlights.

Lectures were more relevant this morning. The operating paradigm (I’m at a theological college – out come the long words!) was still that of the large church, but I felt that more of today’s material was translatable or adaptable. We began with a session on team leadership and issues around teams. We then looked at how to run a meeting, largely taken from the old John Cleese video ‘Meetings, Bl**dy Meetings‘. Finally, a few thoughts about some common mistakes made by leaders.

This afternoon had an optional session. I opted out. It comprised some BBC videos on assertiveness training. While that’s an area I could do with improving in, I needed some air and some exercise to counter the effects of the much improved food. I decided I would try to find some old haunts. Off I went across the Clifton Downs, down two roads whose names may just betray Bristol’s slave trade past – Blackboy Hill and Whiteladies Road – and on down, eventually to Park Street, where I used to frequent three shops. I knew that SPCK would have been long gone after the business atrocities that have been inflicted on that chain of bookshops. Sadly, Rival Records is no longer around – I remember buying Bruce Cockburn‘s World Of Wonders in there during my first year. And the Evangelical Christian Literature bookshop is now a branch of Wesley Owen, stocking everything from N T Wright to Joel Osteen. Insert words such as ‘sublime’ and ‘ridiculous’ as you see fit. I think I’m right in remembering that ECL had been founded by George Mueller.

Not being home today means I’ve missed Shrove Tuesday with the family, but Debbie told me tonight she and the children had decided to postpone pancakes until Saturday. I’m glad they have. Pancakes and their toppings are one of those simple pleasures where it is a joy to see the fun Rebekah and Mark have. Two small pancakes with toffee ice cream here at lunch time were delicious, but no replacement for being with the children. As to toppings generally, I’m a fan of those English Provender jars – no, not the garlic, ginger or horseradish, rather the raspberry coulis or the Belgian chocolate sauce. The latter has been harder to find in the supermarkets recently, though.Looking at the website tonight, I’ve noticed they now do a Fairtrade chocolate sauce, though.

More seriously, I had to miss a hospital out-patient’s appointment Rebekah had this afternoon. Eighteen months ago she had grommets inserted in her ears after protracted episodes of glue ear and consequent poor hearing. They still haven’t solved the problem. One grommet fell out a few months ago, and today they could see congestion in it. She may have to have more grommets fitted, poor lass. Recently, we’ve let her start answering the telephone, but conversations with her are punctuated with “What did you say?”

Tonight, I’ve just spent the time quietly reading. Next stop a spot of supper then an early night, I hope, to catch up on last night.

10

Create a website or blog at WordPress.com

Up ↑