Tag: John F Kennedy

The Good News Covenant, Luke 4:14-21 (Ordinary 3 Epiphany 3)

No video this week: on Friday afternoon, while working on this sermon, a workman’s van crashed into our kitchen wall, causing structural damage to our manse.

No-one was hurt. But it does mean I’ve got behind. Anyway, here’s the text of this week’s sermon.

Luke 4:14-21

How did you hear about the assassination of John F Kennedy in November 1963? I am too young to remember how we heard the news in the UK, but I imagine people heard on the next available TV news bulletin. 

But I do know how I heard about the death of Princess Diana in August 1997. I came downstairs that Sunday morning, and as was my habit I turned on the BBC breakfast news. There was the rolling coverage provided by 24-hour news services. 

And I remember how I heard about the death of the Queen in 2023. Debbie and I were sitting in a branch of Pizza Express, waiting for a meal before going to a concert. A news alert flashed up on my phone. 

How did people hear major news in the Roman Empire two thousand years ago? A messenger would come to their town or village and make a public announcement, probably in somewhere like the marketplace. I guess they were a little bit like town criers. They would tell the people that there was a new Emperor on the throne in Rome, or that Rome’s legions had won a great victory against an enemy.

And do you know what they called their proclamations? You do. ‘Good News.’

So when the New Testament speaks about Good News it takes over this model and gives it a refit according to the life and ministry of Jesus. It would be something like this:

‘Good News! There is a new king on the throne of the universe. His name is Jesus. He has conquered sin and death not with violence but by his own suffering love and death. And God has vindicated him by raising him from the dead.’

Jesus speaks of ‘Good News’ in Luke 4, and – to state the obvious – he is by definition doing so before his death and resurrection. But he is telling his hearers about the nature of the kingdom he is inaugurating, including what it is like to live under his reign and by implication what it requires of its citizens. 

Therefore, what we are considering today is both the offer Jesus makes to us by his grace and the call he makes on us in response. 

Firstly, good news to the poor:

I find that Christians go into battle with each other on this one. What is good news to the poor? Is it that we evangelise them? Or is it that we campaign politically for them? 

I think the answer is ‘yes.’ In other words, I don’t see this as an either/or choice.

But we need to understand who people in Jesus’ world would have understood as ‘the poor.’ Certainly, it included the economically poor, but it also it also included those who had no status or honour in society. So we’re not only talking about the destitute, we’re talking about women, children, lepers, Gentiles, prostitutes, and so on. 

And by making a list like that, you will I am sure be saying to yourself, that sounds pretty much like the main constituency Jesus served. He brought the Good News that there was a new king on the throne of the universe to these people, and they welcomed it. This king was for them. They could be citizens of his kingdom. God’s love was offered freely to them in word and deed by Jesus, and they too could enter the kingdom by repentance and faith, just like anyone else. 

The early church clearly followed up on this. When Paul writes to the Corinthians, he observes that not many of them were of high rank. And after the apostolic age, we find former slaves becoming bishops in the church. 

For John Wesley, it all kicked off on 1st April 1739, when, at the urging of George Whitefield, he preached for the first time in the open air to the miners of Kingswood, between Bath and Bristol. The Good News was for them, he realised. And he would later become concerned about their social needs as well. 

If we are to take the mission of God seriously today, we must put this front and centre, because Jesus did. Yet in this country, church historians say that the Christian church has not seriously taken the Gospel to the poor since the Industrial Revolution. John Wesley was probably the last person to do this on a significant scale. 

I am not saying that we are doing nothing in this respect. I am sure some of the people who come to ‘Connect’ fall into the categories I am talking about. As we give a welcome and acceptance to them, we need to find the right ways and times to share the Good News with them. 

And I am aware that this town is very much divided into two halves. But at the same time, it is a town with Marks and Spencer’s at one end and Waitrose at the other. This is the only church I have served where the hand gel provided to the minister before handling bread and wine at communion comes from M and S! 

So allow me to flag this up, because in this area it would be easy for us to lose sight of this important strand of Jesus’ teaching. There are few things more dangerous for Christians than getting comfortable. 

Secondly, freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind:

What did Jesus mean by quoting this from Isaiah? Clearly, ‘freedom for the prisoners’ didn’t mean he went around the jails of Palestine opening prison doors and letting the convicts out. It has more to do with him pronouncing freedom from the guilt of sin in the offer of forgiveness, freedom from the power of sin in his casting out of demons, and freedom from being sinned against by standing for justice and also enabling people to forgive wrongdoers. 

Recovery of sight for the blind is a little more straightforward, given the healing miracles Jesus performed. 

But a lot of that might sound a little distant to us. The church limits the number of people who exercise a deliverance ministry because it needs all sorts of safeguards and protections built in. Most of us don’t have a healing ministry, either. I only know for sure of two occasions in my life when I have prayed for someone to be healed and they were. Not that I want to discourage anyone from praying for healing, though: I’m just saying that only a few Christians have an ongoing ministry of healing. 

So what can we take from this? Plenty, actually. We may not all be evangelists, but we are all witnesses who are called to share our faith in word and in deed with people beyond the Christian community. That’s why we’re beginning the Personal Evangelism course tomorrow morning. This is a chance for us to find ways of being able to speak about our faith gently to others. How else are people going to find faith and the Good News of God’s forgiveness in Christ? I encourage you to sign up!

It’s also about our example. When we are wronged, the world will look at how we respond. When terrible things happen, our culture is full of language about certain actions and crimes being ‘unforgivable.’ And while I obviously wish no harm on anyone, our neighbours will be watching us when we suffer wrongly. If they see forgiveness in us, or at the very least a working towards forgiveness, you can be sure it will make an impression. 

Further, we can be involved socially in campaigns for those who have suffered wrongs. Yes, this includes our fellow Christians who are persecuted around the world, but we should not limit ourselves to our spiritual kith and kin. Anyone who is an unjust victim, even if it is someone we don’t agree with, is someone for whom Jesus wants freedom. In fact, standing up for those we disagree with can itself be a powerful witness. 

As for the recovery of sight for the blind, apart from the question of physical healing there is the matter of those who are spiritually blind. Jesus spoke truth to the wilfully blind, such as many of the religious leaders of his day. He also spoke truth to reveal God’s love to those he was calling out of darkness. 

Therefore, we can do two things. We can pray that blind hearts and minds be opened to the truth of God’s Good News. And we can also be the ones who share that truth, backed by prayer. 

Thirdly and finally, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour:

All the talk of releasing and setting free is brought together in the talk of ‘the year of the Lord’s favour.’ And that language is the language of the Old Testament Jubilee. The Jubilee Year, which in the Law of Mosese was to occur once every fifty years. And in that year debts were forgiven, slaves were set free, and land was returned to its original owners. Whether Israel ever truly observed it is debatable, but here Jesus says it’s coming in with his kingdom and so it’s a sign not only of how to live now but also of the age to come. It is a manifesto for how the community of God’s kingdom will be and how his people are to live now. 

The forgiveness of debts was financial. What a test of discipleship to hone in on how attached we are to our money. Will we always stand on our rights, demanding what is ours, or will we forgive a debt?

I saw that demonstrated by my father when I was still living at home in my early twenties. I had a friend who was an only child and an orphan. His father had been killed in a car crash when he was eight, and then when he was fifteen, just before our mock O-Levels, his mother died of cancer. Then in his early twenties he had a broken engagement. With few relatives, he came to live with us for a couple of weeks while he tried to get himself together again. 

But in that time he just expected my mother to do his laundry and cook for him, and he never offered any money towards his keep. After he left to go back to his home, we had a family conference over dinner. What were we going to do about his debt to us?

And my father simply said, ‘We’re going to put it down to God’s account.’ 

And we know Jesus builds that into the Lord’s Prayer: Forgive us our debts, as we forgive those who are indebted to us. Yes, of course it’s a vivid metaphor for the forgiveness of sins and our forgiveness of those who sin against us, but we should never let that fact obscure the challenge of the literal words. 

There is much more I could say about the Jubilee. I could talk about our attachment to the land, which may have implications for our national and international politics. I could mention the ongoing problem of slavery that still exists in our world, and which you might encounter in the staff at the local car wash or nail bar. 

But I don’t have time to go into that. I’ll just say that the way we are willing to forgive and release people, money, land, and possessions will be a powerful witness in our world that frequently talks of things being ‘unforgivable’. 

The Jubilee was part of God’s covenant with Israel. He had delivered them from Egypt, and this was part of their response of grateful obedience to him. In the renewal of our covenant with God, we are called to a similar response, as we also are in bringing good news to the poor along with freedom and sight to people. 

In our commitment this morning, may these be formed as our continuing participation in God’s mission. For then we will be proclaimers of Good News today.

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Sermon: Overcoming Barriers To Spiritual Harvest

Jonah 4

Recently, for her bedtime stories, Rebekah has asked me to read some episodes from a children’s Bible that was written by the well-known Christian author Jennifer Rees Larcombe. We have been going through some Old Testament stories, and in particular she couldn’t wait to hear how Queen Jezebel came to a grisly end. For Rebekah, there was a real sense of justice in seeing a wicked person get her comeuppance.

However, when we got to Jonah and the part of the story where the Ninevites repented and God withdrew his threat of judgment, my beloved daughter was outraged. It just wasn’t right that God loved wicked people, in her estimation.

Just like Jonah himself in chapter 4.

So we come to this chapter today at the end of this short series, and we do so on Harvest Festival weekend. That is quite deliberate, because the Book of Jonah is about God’s desire for a spiritual harvest – for many more people to know his love and follow Jesus. That is, of course, often the theme of the Gospels where Jesus uses a harvest story in his parables.

This chapter could be conceived as being about the barriers to the spiritual harvest, and our first barrier is at hand here, in the way Rebekah echoed Jonah’s self-righteous anger.

I ended last Sunday morning’s sermon on Jonah 3 with these words:

I mean, you wouldn’t resent other people coming to share in the same privileges of the Gospel as you know, would you? It would be absurd.

Wouldn’t it?

I could tell from many people’s body language that they agreed. It would be absurd to resent other people finding the love of God. But I ended that sermon that way deliberately, so that we could build up to the shock of finding that Jonah actually is a resentful, angry, self-righteous man. (Apart from that, he’s quite nice!) In the first three verses of chapter 4, he complains to God about his mercy towards the heathen sinners of Nineveh.

But self-righteousness is dangerously common among religious people, and Jonah is a warning to us. It’s amazing and heartbreaking to see the way the concern for a righteous life loses its bearings and becomes judgmental. Jonah forgot that he was a sinner who had been rescued by the grace of God through the merciful sending of the big fish who saved him from drowning. He forgets he is a rescued sinner. He reverts to type. He says to himself, “I am one of the chosen ones. I am righteous. These Ninevites are wicked sinners. I enjoy the love of God. They should not.”

I’ve seen it time and again in Christian circles. You will know if you read my life story in the church magazine that when my life went awry due to a neck problem at 18, I took a job in the Civil Service. I worked in Social Security. (No, please come back! Please talk to me!) I recall being on holiday one year where a Christian woman asked me what my work was. On replying that I worked in Social Security, she said: “At least you’re the right side of the counter.” Clearly to her, every benefit claimant in the country was a despicable scrounger. Hardly the attitude of heart needed for reaching out with the Gospel of God’s love in Christ.

Or I think of a church coffee morning Debbie and I attended once. The doors were open in the hope that passers-by would drop in and meet the church members, in the hope that eventually they would come to church. But as we listened to the ordinary conversation, with its routine criticism of anything young people liked, or – and this was the deal-breaker for me – their disdain for gadgets (!), we knew that church would need a lot of prayer for it to connect meaningfully with the world.

Contrast that with the man I met once when he and I were both in-patients on a hospital ward together for several days. Before we were discharged, he gave me his business card so that we could stay in touch. After his name were the initials ‘SSBG’. I couldn’t fathom what academic or professional qualification that might be, so I asked him. SSBG, he told me, stood for ‘Sinner Saved By Grace’.

That is where we all have to begin if we desire a spiritual harvest. Unlike Jonah, we need to remember that we have been rescued by God. That needs to engender humility in our lives. The great Sri Lankan Christian D T Niles once said that evangelism was ‘one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread’. In the economy of God, it is the spiritual beggars who see the harvest. He calls us to humility.

We can notice the second barrier to a spiritual harvest in Jonah when we come to verse 5. After God asks him in verse 4, “Is it right for you to be angry?” we read,

Jonah went out and sat down at a place east of the city. There he made himself a shelter, sat in its shade and waited to see what would happen to the city.

In other words, Jonah left the city. The harvest had come when he had been in the city. Now he was outside, whingeing.  Often the religious believer stays outside the places that need the Gospel and fires darts of criticism from a safe distance. Isn’t it better to be cocooned warmly with other Christians, enjoying fellowship?

Well, OK, there’s not much fellowship in Jonah chapter 4, but I hope you take my point. We do all our relating to people who do not share our faith, whether positive or negative in tone, from the outside. We even see that in the typical language we use about wanting more people in our congregations. We say things like, ‘How can we attract more people to come to us?’ Yet note those words ‘attract’ and ‘come’: our assumption is that we are here, and people need to move in order to be part of us.

In one previous circuit, I knew a group of Christians who left the United Reformed Church in the town, because they said they believed God was calling them to reach out with the Gospel to a needy housing estate in what was otherwise a generally prosperous town. They hired the St John Ambulance hall, and began weekly Sunday afternoon meetings. They also ran the Alpha Course. There was only one problem. None of them ever moved onto the estate.

We cannot expect a spiritual harvest if we ‘leave the city’, if we don’t get involved in the middle of people’s lives rather than staying at arm’s length and expecting them to come running gratefully to us. Those of you who were at the welcome service three weeks ago may recall I made reference in my short speech to John’s Gospel. In John 20, the risen Jesus says to the disciples, ‘As the Father sent me, so I send you.’ Therefore, I said, to know how Jesus sends us, we have to know how the Father sent him. And for that we go back to John 1, where we read, ‘The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.’ Jesus’ approach to mission was very largely ‘go’. It was to live among the people he wanted to reach.

So if we desire to see a spiritual harvest of people finding faith in Christ and following him, we need to abandon the ideas that a church needs to put together an attractive programme so that we can invite people to enticing events. It is less important to build programmes than to build people.

You will hear more from me on this particular theme as we get to know each other. Do not ‘leave the city’. Be part of the city. Bless the people who do not yet know the love of Christ. Make your lives the kind that provoke questions. And then be ready to answer them.

The third barrier to a spiritual harvest that Jonah demonstrates comes in his attitude to the mysterious Jack and the Beanstalk-type plant (maybe a gourd, maybe a castor-oil plant) that God causes to grow and then wither (verses 6-8). Jonah enjoys the shade it provides, but starts moaning again when it has gone. God brings him up short in the final three verses of the story:

But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the gourd?”
“It is,” he said. “And I’m so angry I wish I were dead.”

But the LORD said, “You have been concerned about this gourd, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. And should I not have concern for the great city Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left—and also many animals?”

In other words, the barrier here is that Jonah has a consumer’s attitude to God. Jonah is happy when God does something for him. But when God doesn’t, or when he requires him to do something unappealing, he wants out.

It’s the same attitude we see in Christians who frequently move church, because no church ever satisfies them. Their assumption is that they are consumers, and they should be satisfied by what is provided. So you hear Christians saying, “We left that church because we weren’t being fed.” Well, what happened to feeding yourselves? Mature Christians should have cultivated ways in which they take on board spiritual nurture for themselves! Any idea that it should all be spoon-fed to them is quite outrageous! The job of the pastor – the shepherd – is not to feed the sheep, but to show them where they can feed themselves.

Faith is not simply about what we can get out of God. If you remember the famous words of John F Kennedy, “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country” could be translated into spiritual terms. “Ask not what your God can do for you – ask what you can do for your God.”

Now don’t misunderstand me. Of course we should rejoice and seek the many things God does for us and wants to do for us. But when we simply turn the spiritual life into ‘what I can get out of it’, we have missed the demands of discipleship, and especially the call for discipleship to be practised in a missional way in the world. Those who think that Jesus and the church are here simply to provide for their spiritual preferences are the very people who are usually a barrier to church growth. They so absorb the time of others and distract good Christians from better purposes that they wring the life out of Christ’s church.

All of which rolls us round quite neatly to the theme of harvest. Today, we celebrate what – by the grace of God – we can give, so that others may flourish. Commonly, we think of that in physical and material terms. We give food, money or other items so that the needy may receive what they need.

But there is a spiritual parallel. As we seek not be spiritual consumers but spiritual givers, people who are keen to see what we can do in the service of God’s mission, then other people will receive their spiritual needs. They will find the love of God in Christ for the first time and commit their lives to being disciples of Jesus. They will ‘grow in grace and in the knowledge and love of God’. They too will become missional disciples.

And if too we have been people who have chosen the path of humility, not self-righteous anger; and if we have been people who have not ‘left the city’ for the Christian ghetto but dwelt in the midst of humankind in all its needs; then might we not indeed begin to see a spiritual harvest, and – unlike Jonah – rejoice in it?

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