Tag: John Wesley

Jesus The True Vine, John 15:1-8 (Easter 5 2024)

John 15:1-8

“Did you see that?”

“Well, no, darling, I’m driving.”

That’s a common conversation when my wife and I are in the car. I won’t tell you who typically says which in that exchange!

“Did you see that?” We had it again the other evening when walking the dog. One of us could see the full moon, but the other was standing a few yards away and couldn’t see it, thanks to some houses.

Did you see that? You know the experience, I’m sure.

I think there’s a ‘Did you see that?’ moment at the beginning of our reading when Jesus says, ‘I am the true vine’ (verse 1).

At the end of the previous chapter, Jesus says, ‘Come, now; let us leave’ (John 14:31b). The implication is that they leave the room where they have had what we call the Last Supper and are now on their way to Gethsemane.

On the way, it’s likely that they would have passed the Jerusalem Temple. And when Jesus says, ‘I am the true vine’, it’s a ‘Did you see that?’ moment, because there was a

massive golden vine that adorned the entrance to the temple.

There is a description of it in the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus:

The gate opening into the building was, as I said, completely overlaid with gold, as was the whole wall around it. It had, moreover, above it the golden vines, from which depended grape-clusters as tall as a man[1]

Did you see that golden vine? The disciples knew that in the Scriptures the vine or the vineyard symbolised Israel, and that’s why there was a golden vine at the entrance to the Temple. But now Jesus says that he is the true vine.

In other words, Jesus fulfils all that Israel was meant to be. And if you want to be part of the People of God, you need to be connected to him.

And further, if we don’t want the vine we are part of to be condemned like Israel the vineyard was in passages such as Isaiah chapter 5, then there are certain ways in which we need to let Jesus’ Father, the gardener, work in us. And there are certain ways in which we need to respond to his work.

Firstly, pruning:

2 He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.

When we read this metaphor about God pruning us, we naturally think of the ways in which God needs to remove sin from our lives. I wouldn’t dispute that, but we hear a lot about that quite regularly and so I’m not going to concentrate on that today. Instead, I want us to think about other ways God works to prune us.

One is when he takes us through adversity. For me, that has been when God has used experiences of ill-health for good. One occasion came when I had a collapsed lung at college and had to face major surgery. On the weekend when it happened, one of my friends was being visited by his father, who had a healing ministry. But when I got back from A and E, Mark’s Dad Reg had gone home.

Eleven days in hospital, a month convalescing, and three months to return to full fitness were not much fun in my twenties. But when I ended up in the ministry, my experience was invaluable when getting alongside others facing major hospital treatment. I guess God had to prune the ‘quick fix spirituality’ out of me.

Similarly, I have not been shy in saying that I come from a family where there is a history of depression. However, it is only in the last twelve months that I have gone public on the fact that I too am diagnosed as someone who lives with the condition. I was very wary about saying that publicly, because I know there are callous people in the church who would say that makes me unfit to be a minister.

But the way it has given hope to others who find the black cloud over their lives means I am glad I let people know. It may be my thorn in the flesh, I wish I didn’t have it, and I’m sure my family also thinks that, but God pruned from me the shallow thinking that unless you are perpetually joyful you are not a good Christian, and this has helped others.

I believe God often prunes good things from our lives for the greater good, just as a good vinedresser will prune good grapes so that others can grow even bigger. God even does that in churches. I know congregations that many years previously began a programme that worked as an outreach. However, these meetings were still going on, even though they now only connected with existing churchgoers. These meetings needed to be pruned. The only question was whether the church would go along with it.

Secondly, remaining:

4 Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me.

If pruning is something that God does, then remaining is something that we do in response. We remain in Christ. We remain vitally connected to Jesus.

One paraphrase of ‘Remain in me, as I also remain in you’ is to say that we make our home in Jesus, just as Jesus makes his home in us. We know that Jesus has come to make his home in our lives when we put our faith in him and our lives in his hands. But there is also a question of us making our home in him. What is that about?

It is going to involve us becoming more in harmony with him. God’s work of pruning us to make us cleaner and more useful in his service is part of it, but it also means that we need to pay particular attention to the teaching of Jesus and his apostles in the New Testament. The church recognised the books that comprise the New Testament as those which faithfully convey the teaching of Jesus, his apostles, and his apostolic circle.

Do you have a programme for reading your Bible regularly, preferably daily? Please don’t be like one woman I knew in a previous church who told me that her sole exposure to the Bible was when she heard it read in church and she didn’t bother with it at home in between Sundays. We need that regular engagement in order to connect with the teaching of Jesus.

And that teaching of Jesus needs putting into practice. That’s where it’s important to involve others. Meet regularly with one or more people and hold each other accountable – kindly, of course! If our small groups really did ape some of John Wesley’s small groups, then this would be part of the meeting every week. We would each talk about how our Christian life was going, what reasons we had for joy where it was going well, and where we were struggling and needed support.

Others do it by having a prayer partner or being part of a prayer triplet. Still others have what they call an ‘accountability partner.’ In one previous appointment I used to meet regularly with the local vicar. We would each talk about how our lives and ministries were going, we would offer reflections to each other, and we would finish by praying for one another.

Please don’t dismiss this as just intense stuff for the hyper-spiritual. We are called disciples of Jesus, which means that we are learners of him or apprentices to him. We need to take this seriously in order to remain in him, to make our home in him.

For this is what puts us in tune with God. If we want the blessing at the end of verse 7, where Jesus says,

ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you

then we need to realise that this only happens after the first half of that verse, where he tells us we need to remain in him and his words remain in us.

So please, let’s take very seriously the importance of remaining in Jesus, making our home in him, by giving attention to his teaching and putting it into practice.

Thirdly and finally, fruit-bearing:

Jesus tells us in these verses that we bear fruit for him as a consequence of pruning and remaining. But what is that fruit-bearing? I want to suggest three examples.

Firstly, it’s about how we conduct ourselves socially in the world. Do we do so with righteousness and justice? In Isaiah 5, to which I referred at the beginning, where Israel is a vineyard gone wrong, the prophet says of God,

And he looked for justice, but saw bloodshed;
    for righteousness, but heard cries of distress. (Isaiah 5:7)

How do people outside the church perceive us? Are we known both individually and as a body to be people who not only stand up for what is right in what we say, but also in what we do? Are we the people in the town who are on the side of the poor, both in our pronouncements and in our actions? Do we treat people well? If we allow God to prune us and if we remain in Jesus and his teaching, then this should be a natural consequence.

Secondly, there is the fruit of our character. You may not be surprised that here I am going to link with what Paul says in Galatians 5 about the fruit of the Spirit. If we are in a vital relationship with God, allowing his indwelling Spirit to shape our lives, then we display love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control.

And remember that it’s the fruit of the Spirit, not the fruits of the Spirit. It is not nine different fruits but one fruit with nine flavours. All of these things are meant to grow in our character as we are pruned and as we remain in Christ, with his Spirit at work in us.

Then finally, the most natural meaning of fruit-bearing is that of bearing seed to produce more fruit. We will have the desire for spiritual reproduction, for seeking to bring more people into that same close relationship with Jesus. It would be good if lives filled with both justice and holy character (the fruit of the Spirit) provoke questions among the people with whom we live and work. We also need to be ready to speak about our faith when the time is right.

Conclusion

Did you see that? Well, if you want to see physical vines and these principles in real life, Hampshire is a good place to be. A quick Internet search led me to a list of six in the county on the Visit Hampshire website.

But do we also see the spiritual application Jesus makes for us? He embodies the true People of God, and to be part of that people ourselves requires our submission to God’s pruning and our making our home in Jesus. What follows from such a relationship is fruitfulness in the form of just living, holy character, and the spreading of the Gospel.

Is that what we look like?

[1] Ian Paul, Jesus is the true vine in John 15

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Mission in the Bible 8: The Great Commission (Matthew 28:16-20)

Matthew 28:16-20

So here it is, the reading most people would have expected as the big one in this series on mission. It’s the passage often called ‘The Great Commission.’

These are the verses responsible for many Christians being called to become missionaries or evangelists. And maybe because of that, a lot of us can feel it isn’t for us. We like to lift the end of verse 20,

And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age

and draw comfort from it, but the earlier stuff, we think, is for others.

But that won’t work. Jesus is addressing the same people throughout. In fact, this teaching is for all Christians. Why do I say that? Two reasons. Firstly, this is the incident that many scholars think the Apostle Paul was referring to in 1 Corinthians 15:6, when talking about the resurrection of Jesus:

After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep.

How many? ‘More than five hundred.’ So it wasn’t just the apostles.

My second reason comes more explicitly from the reading, and it’s found in verse 17:

When they saw him, they worshipped him; but some doubted.

In among the worshippers were the doubters. Whether their faith was strong or weak, Jesus included them in the call.

And as an aside, doubt isn’t the same as unbelief. Doubt means we are still in two minds but could still land on the side of faith. Unbelief is an outright rejection of faith.

Jesus’ call, then, is for all of his followers. Not just the leaders. And not just those with a strong faith. All of us.

Our question, then, is this:  if Jesus is commissioning every Christian here, what is he asking of us?

Some would say there are four commands here: go, make disciples, baptise, and teach. However, it’s not as flat as that in the Greek, which is more like ‘Going, make disciples, baptising, teaching.’ In other words, the main command here is ‘make disciples’, and we make disciples by going, baptising, and teaching.

Hence, it’s a three-point sermon, all about how we are all called to make disciples. Make disciples by going; make disciples by baptising; make disciples by teaching.

Firstly, make disciples by going:

When Jesus tells us that making disciples will involve going, does this mean we all need to go abroad as missionaries? After all, the disciples are going to made from ‘all nations’, Jesus says.

Well, it does mean that for some Christians. Whatever the faults of the missionary movement, we should never throw out the idea that Christianity is a worldwide movement. And it also means we need to welcome missionaries here from nations where the faith is growing. They could reinvigorate us.

But most Christians aren’t called to go abroad, although we might easily be called to move somewhere else in general terms. If we accept that employers can move our jobs, why should we not think that God can call us to a new place to serve him?

Yet generally we will remain where we are. The word for most of us is what Paul tells the Corinthian Christians about their social status:

Brothers and sisters, each person, as responsible to God, should remain in the situation they were in when God called them. (1 Corinthians 7:24)

So how do we go? Most of us go in Christian mission by getting out of our comfortable places to show the love of God on territory where those who are not yet followers of Jesus feel at ease.

We need to ditch the idea that our mission happens on church premises. Maybe a few people will come to events and services that we host here, and perhaps the carol service is our best opportunity, but we must be realistic that fewer and fewer people feel comfortable – even safe – in a church building, and therefore it is our responsibility in the cause of the Gospel to go where they feel happy.

I suspect one of the reasons we have held onto church-based mission is that we are afraid of showing Jesus elsewhere. We end up making all sorts of excuses: a popular one I’ve heard in the Methodist church is that the groups which hire our premises are mission contacts. But they generally hire our halls as a commercial transaction: we have the facilities and a good price. By no means does it necessarily indicate spiritual openness.

Let’s see our going out into the world beyond our own private boundaries as a going with the presence of Christ to live out his way in those places where he calls us. For some, it will be a workplace. For others, it will be a social group like the U3A. Another place will be community groups that we are involved in. Many of us will go in mission in this way when we meet non-Christian relatives and friends.

In all these places Jesus calls us to live as his disciples, to radiate Christlikeness, such that our lives are an invitation or even a provocative question to others. We don’t need to harangue the people we meet, but we do need to be ready to speak about Jesus at an appropriate time.

Secondly, make disciples by baptising:

Here’s where we need to let go of all the sentimental and superstitious detritus that has clung to infant baptism. There is a place for infant baptism, because it arose in the early church when the first generation of Christians wondered about the spiritual status of their children, and they began to regard baptism rather like the way the Jewish faith sees circumcision for boys.

But all the social and superstitious accretions, like the need to be baptised as a baby if you are to have a church wedding in adulthood, or the thought that the unbaptised can’t go to heaven (which falls down the moment you think about the penitent thief on the cross) has obscured the relationship between baptism and discipleship. Baptism, says Jesus, is in the name of God, and the name of God is ‘Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.’

We are one of the Christian traditions that calls baptism a ‘sacrament’, and that’s worth thinking about. Now you hear certain definitions of sacrament as being ‘an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace’ and those are fine, but why the word ‘sacrament’? It comes from the Latin ‘sacramentum’, which was the oath of allegiance that Roman soldiers took to the Emperor. The sacraments are the Christian’s oaths of allegiance. Baptism is the initial oath of allegiance, Holy Communion is the ongoing one.

And that helps us see why baptism is linked to mission. It is the initiation ceremony where someone makes their oath of allegiance to God and his kingdom. It is a radical commitment to which we are calling people. None of this ‘Make a decision for Christ and then wait for heaven’: the early church called people to confess that Jesus was Lord, the very title the Emperor claimed for himself as a sign of divinity. In other words, it was a call to repudiate the powers that be, because confessing Jesus as Lord also meant that Caesar wasn’t Lord.

If we reduce baptism to ‘wetting the baby’s head’, we miss its fundamental message: that the Christian Gospel calls people to confess that Jesus is in charge of their lives and commands their ultimate loyalty, not the idols of our day, be they politics, technology, money, sexuality, or anything else.

This is where we have to be careful in all our talk today about inclusivity, much of which we pinch from the world rather than Jesus. Yes, Jesus wants us to invite all people, but when he welcomed people, such as the ‘tax collectors and sinners’, he did so with a view to calling them to leave behind their lives of sin and follow him.[1] Baptism should remind us of this.

Thirdly, make disciples by teaching:

Our three points are actually in a chronological sequence. Our discipling begins with going in order to reach people, it continues when they make a commitment with the oath of allegiance to Jesus at baptism, and finally the follow-up is our third point: teaching.

We need to get out of our heads the idea that teaching is filling our heads with facts and no more. It’s much more. Teaching involves getting people to learn things that they then apply in life. That is certainly true here in what Jesus says:

and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. (Verse 20a)

Someone who comes to faith in Christ needs to learn how to live the Christian life. In truth, we all need to learn that: to be a disciple of Jesus is to be a lifelong learner.

How does it happen? Only partly from the front on Sunday morning! I hope the sermons do some of the work of explaining what living the Christian life involves, but they are not the whole process. However much ministers should have a teaching gift, the sermon is only the start.

Small groups are a vital part of it. Bible study and fellowship groups are meant to be places where we reflect all the more on the teaching of Jesus, how we are going to put it into practice, and also to be accountable to one another about how we are living out what we have already learned. This is what Wesley did with some of his small groups in the Evangelical Revival in the eighteenth century. A church that is short on small groups, or where the small groups don’t get to grips with what it means to live as a disciple, are seriously lacking.

In one of my previous churches, we asked all the preachers to bring discussion questions based on their sermons so that the small groups could work on putting into practice. It did go a little awry in one group where an elderly man decided this was his opportunity to tear every preacher to pieces – it’s the old gag, ‘What’s the favourite Sunday dinner in a church household?’ Answer: ‘Roast preacher.’ But mostly the groups who stuck to the programme benefitted from it.

One-to-ones can help, too. Matching people together so that a more experienced Christian can nurture and mentor someone younger in the faith is valuable. I gained a lot in my early years as a Christian from the person I described as my ‘spiritual elder brother.’

I hope you can see from these examples that while the minister certainly plays a part in teaching the faith, it is an exercise for the whole church. We do not have to be theological specialists in order to help teach people how to live out the teaching of Jesus. At heart, we just need to love Jesus, want to go his way, and be willing to share our experience of that with others.

In conclusion, Jesus gives us a sequence here for our task as disciple-makers. We begin by going out of our comfort zones to live for Christ in front of the world. We call people not simply to receive the blessings of forgiveness, but to make the baptismal oath of allegiance to Jesus as Lord over all. And then we build relationships with people in the church family where we share our learning how to follow the teaching of Jesus.

It’s straightforward to describe, but we may feel nervous about putting it into practice. And I think that’s why Jesus’ final words here are

And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age. (Verse 20b)

These are not just general words of comfort, good as they are for that. These words are Jesus’ promise that he hasn’t sent us out on the challenging task of mission on our own. Where we go, he goes. And usually, he’s even gone there ahead of us. We can count on that as we seek to make more disciples.

[1] See Ian Paul, In what way does Jesus ‘welcome’ sinners?

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Mission 1: God The First Missionary (Genesis 3:1-23)

Genesis 3:1-23

On Friday, an advert popped up in my Facebook feed for a company called Mission UK. You may think that’s interesting for a Christian, and especially suspicious for a minister who’s about to preach on the subject of mission, but then I looked at the picture. Mission UK sell … sleep powder. One enthusiastic customer had slept for seven hours straight for the first time in a long time, even sleeping through the loud noise of foxes outside.

They also sell ‘performance-based tea’ – whatever that is.

I just hope you are not going to sleep through this. Because I have an important question.

 ‘Who was the first missionary in the Bible?’ If I ask people that, I get a variety of answers, all wrong. Some say the Apostle Paul. Others say Philip the Deacon in Acts 8 or the Apostle Peter. Still others say, ‘Well the answer must be Jesus!’ A few might go back to the Old Testament and mention Jonah, who is the poster boy for how not to be a missionary!

No. The answer – and you will have guessed if you have seen the title of this sermon – is God. We find God as the first missionary here in Genesis chapter 3:

8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the Lord God called to the man, ‘Where are you?’

God comes looking for Adam and Eve. ‘Where are you?’ This is the missionary God taking the initiative as he comes to look for sinners.

Mission begins with God. He wants to bring fallen people back to himself. He wants people and all creation back under the reign of his kingdom.

That’s why we talk in the church about ‘The mission of God.’ Some people who want to sound clever use the Latin, Missio Dei, but since I never learned Latin at school I’ll stick with ‘The mission of God.’

A great Anglican writer on this subject, Dr Chris Wright, once said:

It is not the church of God that has a mission in the world, but the God of mission who has a church in the world.

Mission is in the very heart of God. It is not raising money to send overseas. It is not simply getting bums on seats. It is certainly not about just waiting for people to come to us. Especially it is not getting people in to do the jobs, otherwise the church will close. Nor is it about hiring our premises to outside organisations.

Mission is God’s heart for the world. Mission is God’s desire to bring everyone and everything under the reign of his kingdom, and it is our calling to participate in that with the help of the Holy Spirit.

So let us understand right from the start of this series that mission is not an optional extra for keen Christians who have an extra dose of enthusiasm. Mission is the church’s calling because it is God’s heart.

I labour this point because it’s so important. Mission is a God thing. That’s why every Christian and every church must take it seriously and make it a priority.

Here are three things from the passage that show the priority of mission for God.

Firstly, God takes the initiative.

God doesn’t come into the Garden of Eden because Adam and Eve have called out to him, telling him they’ve made an absolute pickle of themselves. Far from it: they are hiding (verses 7, 10, 11)! He doesn’t wait for any human initiative. He knows something is wrong, and he comes.

Like everything in the life of faith, God makes the first move. Everything we do in faith is only a response to him.

John Wesley had an expression for this. He referred to ‘prevenient grace.’ If that word ‘prevenient’ sounds a bit complicated, let’s just break it down. ‘Pre-‘ is to come before. ‘Venient’ derives from the French ‘venir’, ‘to come.’ God comes before. Prevenient grace means that God’s grace comes before anything else.

That’s what happens in the picture language of Genesis 3. God takes the initiative when human beings mess up. No wonder I said that mission is in his heart.

Some Christians like to say that mission is about finding out what God is doing and then joining in. Now that can be abused, because some will label anything they particularly like as being something God is doing. But if we look carefully, prayerfully, and biblically at the world we may discern where God is already at work and then we can respond.

So if mission is a God thing, our first response can be to pray, ‘Lord, where are you already at work in restoring people and creation under your kingdom? How can I serve you in that?’

Secondly, God comes to us.

In Genesis 3 God does not summon Adam and Eve to him. He comes to them in the Garden. He goes to where they are.

This is where a lot of our talk about mission is all wrong. We say, how can we be more attractive for people to come to us? But although mission will involve people eventually joining the church, we cannot sit here waiting for people to come to us. It just won’t happen in most cases, unless they already have a church background.

I suspect that a lot of the ‘How can we be more attractive so that people come to us?’ language is more because we are nervous or afraid and don’t want to rise up to the challenge that mission presents us to get out of our comfort zones. But that is our calling if we are to respond to the God of mission as the church.

After all, having recently celebrated Christmas, we should be aware of this principle of God coming to us in the birth of Jesus. My favourite Christmas Bible text is John 1:14:

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.

Do you see? God came to us. Emmanuel, God with us. These are not just words of comfort, these are words of God’s mission. He came to us.

And John tells us that it’s the pattern we are to copy. For the risen Jesus said to his disciples in John 20:23,

As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you.

God sent Jesus to us. Now Jesus sends us to others. We don’t sit on our backsides and wait for them.

I sometimes tell a story about a funeral I conducted about twenty years ago. An elderly church member died, and I went to visit her family, who were not churchgoers, to plan the funeral.

During that meeting when I asked them about the deceased’s life, they told me that church activities comprised her entire social life.

I think they thought I would be pleased to hear that, but I covered my true feelings. Because I was saddened. How can we spend all our time simply on church activities if we follow the God of mission who comes to us and who calls us also to go to people with his love?

How are some of us going to change our priorities? Because we need to.

Thirdly and finally, God provides the solution.

After God has questioned the man and the woman, he speaks first of all to the snake, secondly to the woman, and thirdly to the man about the consequences of sin being present in creation. The curse affects the relationship between animals and humans. It affects childbearing. It makes women subservient to men. It turns work into drudgery (verses 14-19). These things are not God’s best intentions for his creation.

But in the midst of this depressing description of what a world under the curse of sin is like comes one small but dazzling chink of light when God addresses the snake:

15 And I will put enmity
    between you and the woman,
    and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
    and you will strike his heel.’

The offspring of the woman will crush the snake. But the snake will strike where this offspring touches the earth – with his heel.

Christians have traditionally seen this as a prophecy about the birth of Jesus from Mary (the offspring of the woman) and the Cross (where Jesus crushes the power of Satan, but evil strikes him and kills him).

God is so passionate about his mission to redeem the human race and heal creation that he sends his only begotten Son to conquer the forces of evil and reconcile people to himself and to one another.

We do not save ourselves. It does not depend on us. It is all down to God taking the initiative, coming to us, and breaking the power of cancelled sin, as Charles Wesley put it.

It is not up to us to devise clever wheezes or flashy programmes. Our rôle is to respond to the God who moves first by proclaiming Christ crucified, even though the world finds that offensive and foolish. It is nevertheless the only remedy for a broken world. And it is all God’s work, not ours.

So as we set out on a New Year with renewed commitment to Christ, let us specifically renew our commitment to co-operate by the Holy Spirit with the God of mission.

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New Beginnings 1: Isaiah 43:14-21

Isaiah 43:14-21

I was once talking with a Baptist minister friend about what our respective denominations do when one minister leaves and a new minister comes. I extolled the Methodist system where there is little or no gap between one minister going and the new one taking over. It saved congregations from enduring a vacancy or interregnum, I said. 

“But you’ve got that wrong,” he told me. “There is value in a church having a gap in between pastors. It gives them space to grieve the loss of a much-loved minister.”

And I think he had a point. I start with you today only a few days after David completed his time as your presbyter. Not only that, but he is also still in the circuit, and that’s a situation I know all about from the minister’s side. Five years into my last appointment, my responsibilities changed. I went from looking after Knaphill and Addlestone Methodist churches to having care of Knaphill and Byfleet. I missed Addlestone. And they were still close by in the circuit, which made it harder. 

So if today you are feeling the loss of David, and are wondering what things will be like with me, when I am largely an unknown quantity to you, I want to say I get it. 

You may not be wild that the first thing I want to highlight from Isaiah 43 is God telling his people to put the past behind them.

            Forget the former things;
    do not dwell on the past. (Verse 18)

This needs handling carefully. There are good ways to relate to the past, and bad ways.

But make no mistake, God is serious about us putting the past behind us. In the passage, the ‘former things’ he tells Israel to forget are when he parted the Red Sea for them and then closed it over the pursuing Egyptian army. It’s like he’s telling them to forget the Exodus – the central event in Israel’s history and the focus of the Passover. It would be like telling Christians to forget Good Friday, Easter, and Holy Communion – and did you notice how Jesus in the Luke reading referred to his forthcoming death and resurrection as his ‘departure’, or his ‘exodus’?

Of course, the Lord doesn’t mean it completely literally that Israel should forget the Exodus. Later in the chapter, he talks about Israel’s need to remember. This is shock language to get over a point, just as Jesus’ teaching, including his parables, often included shock language to make a point. 

We need to distinguish between living in the past (which is unhealthy) and learning from the past (which is life-giving). We live in the past when we make past events romantic and perhaps perfect when they probably weren’t. They become a mental prison for us. They crush our imagination and hope. 

For example, in one previous circuit there where I served there was one vociferous elderly lady who would not stop going on about the time when the Sunday School at the church had a hundred children in it. She expected us to get back to those days, and she loaded guilt on those who were serving in the Junior Church. She expected our two children, themselves only just on the cusp of starting school, to be among the pioneers!

Whatever you have enjoyed and appreciated in the past at this church, please do not allow those memories to blind you to what God wants to do today. 

Our reasons for living in the past are often not good ones. It may be that we don’t like the way things are going in our world today and that we fear the future. Well, there are bad trends in our society, but no Christian has reason to fear the future. We believe the future is in God’s hands. 

Indeed, one of my favourite quotes for sermons (and I’m nervous about playing this card right at the beginning of my ministry here!) is from the American preacher and sociologist Tony Campolo. When asked how he could be so positive and hopeful in a dark and depressing world he replied, “I’ve read the book and I’ve peeked at the final chapter: Jesus wins!”

So don’t live in the past out of fear. 

And don’t live in the past out of a sense of comfort. Yes, there are uncertainties ahead of us, but we are people of faith. We are called to put our trust in Jesus. Don’t go back in your mind to a comfortable time in the past in preference to trusting him. That isn’t our calling. 

The best thing to do with the past is to learn from it. We can learn about strengths and weaknesses in our lives, and in our families and institutions that influence us. 

Most important of all, learning from the past means we look back at what God has done in Jesus Christ, and we learn more about the character of the God that we love, trust, and serve. Isn’t that what we do in reading Scripture, for example?

So that’s my first point – let’s put the past behind us. Learn from it, yes, but live there, no. 

The second of the two things I want to emphasise to day is look for what God is doing now.

            See, I am doing a new thing!
    Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness
    and streams in the wasteland. (Verse 19)

In the case of Israel, they were in exile in Babylon at this time and had been so for a few decades. Older generations were dying off. New generations were being born there who had never seen the Promised Land. But now God promises to take them home: that’s what the way in the wilderness is. Our best guess is this prophecy came about ten years or so before they began to return. 

Maybe you are disillusioned about the state of the church today. I certainly get that way at times! There is a sense in which we are in exile, too. We are now a minority in our nation and our culture. Most people are not religious. We are strange to them. Sometimes they regard us as a threat. There may be Christian elements embedded into our unwritten constitution, as we saw in some ways at the coronation of King Charles earlier this year. But in practice, we are anything but a Christian nation (whatever that is, anyway). Spiritually, we live in exile. 

And when you live in exile for any length of time, either hope starts to fade, or we chase the latest fad, or we try to ape the culture we are living in. None of these is a good Christian response. 

We do need to live in the alien culture and to bless it, as Jeremiah told the first batch of Jewish exiles in Babylon, when we wrote them a letter. (You can read it in Jeremiah 29.) We can even get involved in its structures and power, as Daniel and his three friends did. What we can’t do is absorb the values. 

What will that look like for us? The COVID pandemic taught us the importance of the digital world as a way people live and communicate today. It doesn’t replace meeting together physically but is added to it. We are called to live in a hybrid of the two. 

We also look at how we can bless people outside the church today. We may or may not agree with their lifestyles, but we can still bless them. For instance, in my last circuit in one village the churches took boxes of chocolates to all the local shops and businesses at Christmas. We told them how much we appreciated them and that we were praying for them to prosper. We also gave them an email address if they wanted to send us any prayer requests. 

We get on with doing things like this while we wait for a word from the Lord about the new things he wants to do with us and among us. They won’t be any old crackpot thing that someone suggests, but they may surprise us, and they will certainly be consistent with what we know about his will and character from Holy Scripture. 

Indeed, we shall need to be people who are soaked in the Scriptures in order to test various claims when they come along, saying, ‘This is what God is calling us to do today.’ We shall need to echo the cry of John Wesley when he prayed, ‘O Lord, make me a man of one book.’

It may even be that, just like the Jewish exiles in Babylon, the older generations like many of us die out and God does his new thing predominantly with younger generations who will be the vanguard of his renewal. Older forms of church like ours might go and the newer churches replace us. But if that is what takes the Gospel into a new day and age, we should rejoice. God did that when he raised up Methodism. He may do that again. 

Of this I am sure: God’s new thing will involve us going outward with his redeeming love and not merely inward to a religious club.

So in conclusion, are we ready to leave the past behind, learning from it but not living in it? Are we willing to hear God speak of his new thing and test all claims to it by Holy Scripture? And in the meantime, will we hear the call to bless this alien culture we live in?

So now you know why the hymn before the sermon was ‘Lord, for the years.’ Let us echo the final two lines in our lives and in our life together: 

            Past put behind us, for the future take us,

                        Lord of our lives, to live for Christ alone. (Timothy Dudley-Smith)

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We Are Being Watched, Matthew 5:13-20 (Ordinary 5 Lent -3 Year A 2023)

Matthew 5:13-20

Earlier this week I was at the Byfleet Tuesday Fellowship where over a series of meetings I have been telling them the story of my life and faith. Bit by bit, episode, by episode, this week we finally got to the point where my family and I arrived in this circuit in 2010 – which was probably a good point at which to end.

One of the hymns we sang on Tuesday was ‘Blessèd Assurance’, for its theme of testimony and those lines, ‘This is my story, this is my song.’ I hope that in hearing my story people heard how my story fits into the bigger story of Jesus.

We’ve been tracking the story of Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel in recent weeks. A fortnight ago, we heard how Jesus came into Galilee of the Gentiles with a proclamation that was to begin forming his community of light, a community that forms through repentance. Last week (if you watched my video) you’ll know I preached on the opening of the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus shows us what the repentant life with him looks like.

This week, Jesus tells us what the community of light is meant to look like to the watching world.

Firstly, says Jesus, his people are the salt of the earth.

13 “You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.

Now before we think about the salt, I want us to think about the earth.[1] The word here could just mean the soil, or it could mean the land, be that the local land where they are or the land of the whole world.

If it’s the local land, then it would be an image of Israel. Remember that before Jesus ever said, ‘Blessèd are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth’ (Matthew 5:5), the Psalmist had said that the meek will inherit the land (Psalm 37:11). The land was so crucial to Israel: it was, after all, the Promised Land. If that’s what we’re talking about here, then Jesus is seeing his people as a renewal movement within the people of Israel. And I guess initially that’s what Christ-followers were.

But I mentioned a fortnight ago that Matthew has the mission to the Gentiles in view. He emphasises that Jesus comes to ‘Galilee of the Gentiles’, and he ends his Gospel with the Great Commission. So in the long term the earth here is surely the whole world. We are to be salt in the whole world. This is an image of the mission to which Jesus calls us.

So we need to know what the salt is. We know how salt had various uses, the main ones being as a seasoning, a preservative, and as a fertiliser. I am going to dismiss the first two of seasoning and preservative here, partly because they refer to food whereas Jesus is talking about salt of the earth, and that’s where it was used as fertiliser.  Besides, it makes little sense to talk of the Christian calling as merely seasoning the world or preserving it. We are not here simply to make the world more flavoursome, or to preserve it, when there is much wrong with it. It is not our calling to bless everything that goes on in the world.

No: if we are salt of the earth, then Jesus means that we are fertiliser. The kingdom community is divine fertiliser. We enable life and growth where there is death and despair. Ultimately, that life only comes in Jesus Christ. We point people to that by our words and deeds. Food banks and the like are signs and pointers to the life of Christ in the midst of death and hopelessness. We also need to speak about the life Christ brings.

So a church community is meant to be fundamentally outward-looking. A fellowship that only looks inwards on itself is one where the salt has lost its saltiness. That may seem strange to us, who are used to our salt largely just being made up of one chemical compound. But in the days of Jesus salt was often found in a mixture with other minerals, and it could be dissolved out of it.

To us, salt losing its saltiness is absurd. Jesus would say to us, a church that only looks in on itself and does not make outreach a priority is equally absurd. Such a church cannot offer life, because it has dissolved the life out of itself.

Secondly, says Jesus, his people are the light of the world.

14 “You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. 15 Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. 16 In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.

Go back two weeks again in our story. Jesus has come to Galilee of the Gentiles to bring light to those living in darkness. Now, he says, that’s the ongoing task of his people. While in John’s Gospel Jesus owns the title ‘Light of the world’ for himself, here in Matthew he gives it to his kingdom community.

Sometimes we’re happy at the thought that Jesus is the light of the world, but we baulk at the fact that he called his church to be that light, too. It would be easier and more comfortable for us if our faith were just a private thing. We wouldn’t have to worry about being a good witness and what reaction we might get to that in society.

And there are factions in our society who would like us to adopt that attitude. Groups like the National Secular Society and others argue that faith has no place in public life. Either they don’t understand what faith is, or they don’t want to understand.

Jesus says, we are going to be seen – both as individual disciples and as a community of believers together. It will be our good deeds that shine light into a darkened world. We are not doing them so that people praise us, as Jesus condemned some religious leaders for doing: we are doing good deeds so that people may ‘glorify [y]our Father in heaven.’

Do we want to make a first step in changing this world for the better, for the glory of God? Surely we do. Then we need to think, talk, and pray about what good deeds would show up as light in our dark world.

So let me remind you of some of John Wesley’s most famous words:

Do all the good you can,
By all the means you can,
In all the ways you can,
In all the places you can,
At all the times you can,
To all the people you can,
As long as ever you can.

I think Jesus would approve of those words.

Thirdly and finally, Jesus calls us to be better than the Pharisees.

Jesus says he hasn’t come to abolish the Jewish Law but to fulfil it, that we should therefore not dilute it, and that in fact our righteousness needs to exceed that of the Pharisees and teachers of the Law (verses 17-20).

We need to hear this, and hear it carefully. Jesus is not saying that we should obey every Old Testament law, for he said that the food laws were no longer necessary (Mark 7:1-22) and the New Testament generally sees his death on the Cross as fulfilling the sacrificial laws.

Therefore, we need to read the Old Testament and its laws carefully. As Dr Ian Paul says,

… God looks on the heart as well as the hands. We must, in our reading of the Old Testament, always move from ‘What does it say?’ through ‘What is the intention?’ before we ask ‘What is God saying to us now?’[2]

The bottom line is that we cannot be casual about our conduct. Just because we believe in grace, mercy, and forgiveness does not mean we can live carelessly. That will not shine light into darkness. That will simply make us hypocrites, just as Jesus often said the religious leaders of his day were.

No. In God’s grace and mercy in Christ we do indeed find forgiveness and many a fresh start in life after we have messed up. But that grace then calls us to aspire to a higher standard. If all we are called to be as Christians is ‘nice’ then what makes us shine as the light of the world?

That’s why the early church gave dignity to the dead by taking funerals for those not considered worthy of one in the Roman Empire. That’s why they also took care of babies abandoned to die because they were the wrong sex or in some other way did not fit their parents’ aspirations.

Friends, if we are called to bring life to our world and shine in the darkness, how is the Holy Spirit calling us to a higher standard than mere religion?

It’s a question we need to ponder.

[1] Here and in most of what follows I am dependent on Ian Paul’s blog post ‘Being distinctive as the people of God in Matthew 5’.

[2] Ibid.

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When Someone Says No To Jesus, Luke 9:51-62 (Ordinary 13 Year C, 2022)

Luke 9:51-62

What should we do when people say ‘No’ to Jesus? Or maybe they don’t say a clear-cut ‘Yes’?

It’s a question that troubles many Christians. Sometimes that is because the person saying ‘No’ is a loved one.

Our reading from Luke today deals with that issue. Both parts of the reading are relevant to this question, both the Samaritan villages that do not welcome the disciples, and the three people who in Jesus’ eyes display inadequate commitment. Each of the two parts says something distinctive about how we respond.

Part 1: Judgement Is Above Our Pay Grade

As Jesus sets out for Jerusalem, he sends messengers ahead of him, but despite this in one Samaritan village they do not welcome him (verses 51-53). Imagine civil servants and royal equerries being sent to a town ahead of a visit by the Queen, doing all the donkey work, then the Queen arrives and people throw bad eggs and rotten tomatoes at her. It’s a bit like that.

You can understand James and John asking Jesus, ‘Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven to destroy them?’  (Verse 54)

You can understand their reaction all the more when you remember that elsewhere in the Gospels Jesus had a nickname for those two. In Mark 3:17, he called them ‘sons of thunder.’ What does that say about them? Were they like first century Hell’s Angels, riding into the village in their leathers and on their Harley Davidsons? Were they more like punks, spitting at people they didn’t like? It’s not a flattering nickname, and a desire to call down fire from heaven on an unwelcoming village seems perfectly in step with the name.

So if you thought of John as the gentle apostle who wrote about love, think how much he was transformed over the years!

And surely to reject Jesus is to reject salvation? So isn’t judgement the natural corollary? Wasn’t there a logic to what James and John suggested?

Perhaps we can identify with them more than we might easily admit. Think of a time when you were rejected. Did you have unworthy thoughts inside you about the people who did that to you?

Or remember a time when one of your children was treated badly by someone. What did you want to do to the perpetrator? You might not have said it out loud, but somewhere inside you there was probably a rage against that person, and you began to imagine what you would like to do to that person if you have the guts and if you thought you could get away with it.

I will confess to you that I am like that. You may have me down as a placid character, but don’t anyone dare mess with my children, even though one is now an adult and the other will be in a matter of weeks. I sometimes think I could write the script of an 18-rated film if I followed all my darkest imaginings.

But Jesus rebukes them (verse 55) and he and the disciples move on to another village (verse 56). We don’t know what Jesus says in his rebuke, but we can probably infer.

We know that Jesus spoke clearly about God’s judgement at the end of time. If I recall correctly, all but two references to Hell as a consequence of judgement in the Bible are on the lips of Jesus. He didn’t mince his words. Yet he didn’t endorse what James and John said. Instead, he moved his disciples on elsewhere.

I think the inference is very clear. We may indeed be upset, but let us leave judgement to God and move on. This is not a way of making excuses for people, but it is to say that judgement in the hands of God will be righteous and holy. In our hands it is imperfect at best, and at its worst descends into naked revenge.

Think for a moment: we know that God is holy and God is loving. What better character could there be to exercise judgement than the One who perfectly embodies those qualities? Do we measure up? No.

When someone we know rejects Jesus, or rejects us because of Jesus, then we leave the judgement to God. We pray a prayer of relinquishment, handing them over to God, who is best placed to deal with them in righteousness and love. ‘Lord,’ we say, ‘ will you please deal with this person? You will do what is wisest and best.’

And then, like Jesus with his disciples, we move on. We may or may not move on geographically, we may simply move on emotionally. But to move on is healthy. Leave the situation behind with God. He knows best what to do so that person might find him, or if their heart has become hardened towards him.

So concentrate on someone or something else. There are so many people who need to come into contact with the love of God, and he uses us to do that. He may have a new challenge for us.

Part 2: Don’t Lower Your Standards

When we get on to the brief exchanges Jesus has with three people who apparently do want to be his followers but whose offers he does not take up (verses 57-62) it’s important to remember that Jesus often teaches by saying extreme things to make a point. In English we call this ‘hyperbole’, and it was very common in Jewish teachers.

So when he tells the first enquirer that the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head (verse 58) he is making a big, cartoon-like statement to make that person realise that following him risks involving considerable inconvenience and discomfort. Don’t come this way if you just want life’s creature comforts, says Jesus.

And when we look at the life of someone like the Apostle Paul, we see someone for whom that was profoundly true. Paul talked about physical danger, imprisonment, threats to his life, being stranded at sea, sleeplessness, hunger, and thirst all in one passage, for example (2 Corinthians 11:23ff). It’s not exactly the way to the good life as is commonly conceived by people today!

If you follow me, says Jesus, you’re not signing up for an easy life.

Then when the second person wants to bury his father, Jesus says that the man cannot put social norms and expectations above following him. The man can’t have been talking about the actual burial of his father, because that happened within twenty-four hours of the death. This was necessary in a hot climate, and to this day Jews and Muslims bury their dead much quicker than we do.

So the only burial the man can be thinking of is what happened later when the bones of the deceased were transferred from their own grave to a communal ossuary in the village. There was no requirement in the laws of Moses for a son to do this, it was a matter of social custom. Jesus says you can’t elevate that over following him. He is Lord.

The third person makes what also sounds like a reasonable request, to say goodbye to his family, but Jesus’ response about not looking back when you have put your hand to the plough (which was a well-known ancient proverb) indicates that Jesus thought this person was easily distracted from the cause of God’s kingdom. And you can’t do that. You can’t be half-hearted. You can’t say, well I’ll come to church when I feel like it. Or, I’ll do what Jesus wants when it doesn’t get in the way of what I want to do.

I want to suggest to you that Jesus’ approach is the opposite of what we typically say today. We are so desperate about our declining and aging numbers that we say Jesus welcomes all, but we drop the obligations that Jesus puts on disciples.

But here’s the paradox: the grace of God is free, but it costs us all we have. A church that preaches free grace but not discipleship is not preaching the Gospel.

Hear it again: the grace of God is free, but it costs us all we have.

John Wesley knew this, and he structured the early Methodists accordingly. We have heard a lot about the small groups he set up, but he set up more than one kind of group, and they had different purposes. So the class meeting was the one open to all, including those enquiring after the faith – or, as Wesley put it, ‘Those who desire to flee from the wrath to come.’

But the band meeting was for those who were seriously committed to Christ. In the band meeting members held one another accountable for their Christian lives each week. They did so in a confidential relationship. Even to this day Methodist ministers will sometimes say to each other, ‘I want to speak in band.’ This means they want to speak confidentially.

When someone is unwilling to accept Jesus’ challenging standards for discipleship, it is the wrong response to lower the bar. Jesus never did that. When the rich young ruler walked away, Jesus didn’t chase him and say, I didn’t really mean you had to give up all your possessions. Just ten per cent will do.’

When people are reluctant to follow Jesus, yes of course we remember that God’s grace is freely offered to all, but we must also remember it will cost us everything.

If someone says no to that, we leave the judgement to God and we move on.

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The Transfiguration of Jesus and our Spiritual Experience of God, Luke 9:28-36 (Last Sunday Before Lent, Year C)

Luke 9:28-36

In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.

I began to pray with all my might for those who had in a more especial manner despitefully used me and persecuted me. I then testified openly to all there what I now first felt in my heart. But it was not long before the enemy suggested, “This cannot be faith; for where is thy joy?” Then was I taught that peace and victory over sin are essential to faith in the Captain of our salvation; but that, as to the transports of joy that usually attend the beginning of it, especially in those who have mourned deeply, God sometimes giveth, sometimes withholdeth, them according to the counsels of His own will.

Longstanding Methodists should recognise that extended quote as coming from John Wesley’s Journal for the date 24th May 1738, the date we sometimes call his conversion.

And I read it today as an illustration of Christian experience. His heart is strangely warmed. Yet on the other hand he then expects to be filled with joy but he isn’t, and he learns that sometimes God gives joy and on other occasions he doesn’t.

This live experience of God is something Wesley emphasised as a way of knowing God and his ways in addition to the classic triad of Scripture, the traditions of the church, and human reason.

And if the story of the Transfiguration is about anything, it’s about Peter, James, and John having a vivid experience of God. I think it gives us a good vantage point from which to consider why God does and does not grant us significant spiritual experiences.

Firstly, a spiritual experience is about grace.

Peter, James, and John are not chosen due to their merits or superior spiritual status. No, they are simply chosen by Jesus to accompany him. No more.

We need to remember, then, that if someone has a profound experience of God they are not to be thought of as somehow better than the rest of us. For those who do have the privilege of such things, it can be tempting to think that they are closer to God than others. But it isn’t necessarily the case. A spiritual experience is not a badge to wear, it’s a gift to receive with gratitude. And like Wesley in his analysis of joy, we may or may not know why God has granted it.

If you want any evidence that Peter, James, and John are not of a higher status than the other disciples, you have only to look at what happens after this incident. They come down from the mountain to find the other disciples failing to cast a demon from a boy. But do Peter, James, or John with their extraordinary encounter intervene and sort it out? No. They are no more competent than the rest of the Twelve. They have not been elevated by what happened on the mountain.

If you are granted some special meeting with Almighty God in your life, do not set yourself up as better than your brother and sister Christians. Instead, appreciate the wonder of God’s grace.

And if you come across someone who has a dramatic appointment with God, then equally do not regard yourself as inferior, and do not be envious. And I know this one: I’ve sat in meetings where speakers have picked out people to give them prophetic words from God, but they never pointed to me. Was God not interested in me? Was I not special to him?

But it is all about grace. God has his purposes. Sometimes we understand them, sometimes we don’t, but grace is at the heart of his actions.

Secondly, a spiritual experience is a glimpse.

What do we make of Peter’s blabbering suggestion to put up three shelters – one for Jesus, one for Moses, and one for Elijah? Even Luke says that Peter didn’t know what he was saying. (Verse 33)

It could be some kind of monument. There are examples in Scripture of people building something to commemorate a particular divine encounter. But the trouble with monuments is we turn them into museums, and we don’t continue with a live, on-going relationship with God in Christ, we just look back with Instagram filters to the past and appoint curators instead of prophets.

I think the New Testament scholar Ian Paul has got it right in assessing Peter’s mistaken suggestion when he writes,

He has not yet understood that this is a momentary drawing back of the curtain, giving him and the other two a glimpse of the heavenly reality of who Jesus really is, but that this is not the end of the story—yet.

‘A momentary drawing back of the curtain.’ Peter, James, and John catch a glimpse of what is to come. It isn’t now, but it’s a sign of what’s to come.

So any Christian who tells us that we should be living in a permanent state of bliss and of heightened spiritual experience is wrong. The end of the story hasn’t happened yet. We know it will come, and occasionally God grants us little foretastes to assure us it’s on the way. But right now we cannot spend all our lives on the mountain in the cloud of glory.

That isn’t meant to be an excuse for those of us who want the very minimum experience of God: those of us who want enough of God to be forgiven but not so much that we are challenged; those of us who are happy to give him Sunday but not Monday to Saturday.

But it is to say, let’s keep spiritual experiences in perspective. We can expect they will happen from time to time (although we cannot predict them). But they happen to keep us oriented towards God’s great future. The true fruit of a powerful divine experience is that we live more passionately for Jesus and his kingdom as a result.

Thirdly and finally, a spiritual experience is an encouragement.

The context is important here. Just before this incident Jesus has given his first prophecy to his disciples that he is going to Jerusalem where he will be betrayed, suffer, die, and be raised again.

It’s picked up in the reading, when Moses and Elijah talk with Jesus:

They spoke about his departure, which he was about to bring to fulfilment at Jerusalem. (Verse 31)

His departure? Well, remember there’s an Old Testament book called ‘Departure.’ Exodus! And that’s the Greek word here: exodos. Just as God set his people the Israelites free from the oppression of Egypt in the Exodus, so now his Son will set people free from the oppression of sin by his own exodos at Jerusalem, in his cross and resurrection.

But to face that is terrifying. Nowhere do we see that more clearly than when Jesus prays in Gethsemane. I believe that to help him face that terrible time the Father grants his Son a profoundly close encounter, where he affirms him above all others – even above Moses and Elijah:

A voice came from the cloud, saying, ‘This is my Son, whom I have chosen; listen to him.’ (Verse 35)

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that some of the most vivid accounts of people meeting with God come from the testimonies of the persecuted church. These are folk who need the encouragement to stand firm, even in suffering for the name of Jesus. The spiritual experience is not some heavenly tickling just to make us feel good. Often God makes himself known in the most powerful way to those who most need that encouragement.

Certainly, I can look back on the deep experiences of God I have occasionally had and realise that several of them were clustered around a very dark time of my life. God reminded me he was still there and he still had his hand on my life, no matter what I was going through.

As we conclude, note how the story ends:

When the voice had spoken, they found that Jesus was alone. The disciples kept this to themselves and did not tell anyone at that time what they had seen. (Verse 36)

They don’t go back and boast about it. Maybe they sense what I said at first that these experiences are about God’s grace, not our merit. Perhaps they realised the privilege they’d been granted in being given a glimpse of how the great story ends. They might also have felt encouraged, even though doubtless they still didn’t understand the necessity of Jesus suffering.

But I pray that we’re all open to whatever God is saying and doing when he interrupts normal service with something special.

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The Baptised Life (Luke 3:7-18) Advent 3, Year C

Luke 3:7-18

A favourite story I like to tell about the birth of our son concerns the first time we took him as a baby to one of the churches I was serving. One man looked at him, then looked at me, and said: “Don’t you ever bring a paternity suit against your wife over this lad, because the judge will take one look at him, then one look at you, and laugh the case out of court.”

Even now, seventeen years later, you can see the physical resemblance. You would do all the more if you’d known me at that age. We may have different colour hair, but his hair colour comes through from my father’s side of my family. He is a mathematician, as I was. He is blue-eyed, like me. He is left-handed, as I am – albeit that he is more like my father, who was a relatively ambidextrous left-hander, whereas I am much more left-handed. Like my father, he has an excellent sense of direction and is extremely good at navigating with maps.

But he won’t make his way in life based on whose son and grandson he is. That will depend more on how he uses his gifts, talents, and opportunities.

And John the Baptist is trying to get over something similar to his hearers in our passage today. He tells people who claim they are the offspring of Abraham that they are more like the offspring of snakes. You can have all the religious heritage you like, he says, but it counts for nothing if you’re not living a transformed life. Being raised in the Jewish faith won’t count for anything on its own. Being baptised won’t mean diddly-squat unless your life changes. (Verses 7-9)

It’s something that is painfully relevant to some of the pastoral conversations I have when I first meet people in Methodist churches. It’s not uncommon for people to tell me how they’ve been a Methodist for decades, maybe all their lives.

And I wonder, why is that the first thing they want to tell me about themselves? Because it won’t count for anything with Jesus – unless, of course, they are faithfully living according to the life-changing teaching and spiritual experience that John Wesley underwent and then taught to others.

So you were baptised a Methodist? Well, big deal. Actually, nobody is baptised a Methodist, they are baptised into the Christian faith.

But if you were brought to church as an infant and a minister poured water on your head in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, then it doesn’t matter one bit that the Methodist Church says that any administration of water in the name of the Trinity is a valid baptism, because John the Baptist says that baptism only matters if you go on to lead a baptised life.

So enough of all this claiming of a religious heritage as if it’s a ticket to heaven. It’s nothing of the sort. Presenting your baptism certificate will not work in the way that showing your passport does at Immigration Control in a new country. All that God accepts as the passport to glory is a life of repentance and faith, a baptised life more than a baptised body.

If you want to come to a minister and start telling us that you’ve been a Methodist for fifty years, then make sure you’re actually living as a Methodist in the sense John Wesley taught. Make sure that you come to God not dependent on your own good works, but by faith in Jesus who died for you. Be thankful for his forgiveness and show it by your love for God and for other people. After all, Wesley was fond of quoting from Galatians: ‘The only thing that counts is faith working through love.’ Seek a constant renewing and reordering of your life, joining a small group of other Christians where you each hold one another accountable. Be generous and have a concern for the poor. Share your faith with others.

If you think that’s a bit strong, look at what John the Baptist required of the people who came to him for baptism. They were to share with the poor, not cheat, be truthful, and avoid greed. That wouldn’t be a bad starting place today, either! (Verses 10-14)

And if that’s the sort of person you are, then I’m highly likely to believe that you’re a traditional Methodist! That would show the kind of spiritual DNA that Wesley wanted to see replicated in people.

But if all you can do is wave a baptism certificate or produce your latest membership ticket with a flourish, well, John Wesley would have had harsh words for you and so too would John the Baptist. Both of them would have warned you about the judgement that Jesus will bring.

And so John talks about how Jesus the Messiah will come to baptise with the Holy Spirit and fire – with fire being an image of judgement. He talks about how he will separate the wheat into the barn but burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire. It’s a challenging and powerful description of Jesus. (Verses 15-17)

Of course, some people won’t have it. They will say, that can’t be Jesus, he was all about telling us to love one another. Well he was about teaching us to love, but he also had strong words for those who would not love. He had particularly harsh words for those who used their religion for their own power or to put others down. Jesus was absolutely clear in his teaching that if you claim to be a disciple of his, then it needs to be seen in the way you live.

So all the people who call him ‘Lord, Lord’ but don’t do his bidding will have a shock. All the people who can’t be bothered to be prepared for his coming like the five foolish virgins in the parable will find that their future is not what they complacently assumed.

I have to ask myself, how am I preparing for the coming of Jesus? Not in the sense of, have I bought all the presents I should for Christmas, but in the sense of, am I adjusting my life to make it more fit for the arrival of the One who is King of Kings and Lord of Lords?

Do you ask yourself the same sort of question? Because we all need to do so.

This is why historically Advent has not been a time for feasting on mince pies but rather a season of penitence, like Lent. Preparing for the coming of the Messiah is a challenging matter.

But Jesus does come with the Holy Spirit. We are not left with only our own feeble power to alter our lives. When Jesus challenges us, he also provides the strength we need to make those changes. And we find that ability and energy in the gift of the Holy Spirit.

I want to conclude by saying that all week the ending of the reading has puzzled me.

18 And with many other words John exhorted the people and proclaimed the good news to them.

Good news? It doesn’t much sound like good news, does it, all this fire and brimstone preaching?

But it is good news. It is good news in the ancient sense, in the way the term ‘good news’ would have been used in the Roman Empire. When a Roman herald arrived in a place and said he was going to proclaim good news, it would be the announcement that there was a new Emperor, or that the armies of Rome had won a great battle against an enemy.

In that respect this is good news. It is the news that the kingdom of God is arriving in the person of the King himself, Jesus. It will later become the news that the king himself has won the greatest battle of all on the Cross against all the forces of evil. And it is the good news that in the reign of King Jesus he brings love, justice, reconciliation, harmony, healing, and much more.

Therefore when we are challenged to repent and to reorder our lives, the call is to bring our lives into step with the kingdom of God – that is, to be loving, to pursue justice, to work for reconciliation, to bring harmony, to exercise healing, and so on.

If we are to prepare for the coming of Christ, then this is the kind of life to which we are called.

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Wealth and Discipleship (Mark 10:17-31) Ordinary 28 Year B

It’s the story more commonly known as ‘the rich young ruler’ this week. What do we learn about discipleship from it?

Mark 10:17-31

In 1978, a landmark book on Christians and simple lifestyle was published. Entitled ‘Rich Christians In An Age Of Hunger’ and written by Ronald Sider, one of the most startling quotes in the book is this:

What 99 percent of all Western Christians need to hear 99 percent of the time is: “Give to everyone who begs from you” and “sell your possessions”.[1]

And maybe that’s why today’s passage is so uncomfortable for us. We see what happens to the rich man in this story, and we fear Jesus might require the same of us.

So what does our reading teach us? Well, its theme is discipleship, so the question is, what does it teach us about discipleship?

Firstly, we learn that Jesus comes first. That’s the essence of discipleship. We see this in the way that the man has obeyed all the commandments – well, at least outwardly. Jesus even throws in a commandment that isn’t one of the Ten Commandments when he includes ‘You shall not not defraud’ (verse 19) – or, as some manuscripts put it more fully, ‘You shall not defraud the poor.’

Yet that’s not enough, according to Jesus.

21 Jesus looked at him and loved him. ‘One thing you lack,’ he said. ‘Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.’

It’s not simply that the man is expected to follow the religious rules, even if he can keep them. He has to obey Jesus.

That gets to the heart of Christian discipleship. We can’t appear before God and say, ‘I kept the rules. I was a good, moral person.’ Plenty of people think that’s what makes a Christian, but it isn’t, according to Jesus. We cannot pride ourselves on our character and think that’s what earns us a heavenly pass. It isn’t. At the Last Judgment, there will be millions of so-called ‘good people’ who are on the wrong end of Jesus’ verdict.

Why? Because they didn’t put him first. They didn’t listen to him and do what he asked them to do. The rich man wanted to inherit eternal life, but he didn’t want to put Jesus first.

And as he learned, putting Jesus first means sitting lightly to other things. They must not compete for our affections. What we have is not ours anyway, but something which God has entrusted to our care. If Jesus needs it for something else, as here, then the Christian disciple needs to obey her Lord.

Among the wider group of his disciples, others treated wealth and possessions differently. We hear at the end of our reading from Peter about how he and the Twelve have given up so much to follow him. We know from other parts of the Gospel such as Luke 8 that others put their wealth at Jesus’ disposal in other ways, such as the women of means who provided for him and his entourage. Each of them in different ways was putting Jesus first.

Perhaps each of us should pause and consider what is stopping us from putting Jesus first in our lives.

Secondly, we learn that Jesus’ love is uncompromising.

Did you notice that? I didn’t say ‘unconditional love’, which is what we often talk about. I said, ‘uncompromising love.’

I think it’s quite amazing that we read ‘Jesus looked at him and loved him’ at the beginning of verse 21. We know how Jesus was concerned for the poor. It would have been easy to be aggressive and hateful towards a wealthy person, such as this man – and indeed I have often seen Christians show naked hostility towards rich people.

I could have been like that. I grew up in very modest circumstances in north London. My parents were children during the Depression of the 1930s. My father’s father was out of work for five years. My mother was born to a single parent on a council estate. It wasn’t until he got to around the age of 60 that my father felt his salary was comfortable – and then depression took it from him as he had to retire early.

So you can imagine that coming to an area like this in Surrey as we did eleven years ago was potentially problematic for me. There were certainly aspects of local expectations and lifestyle that neither Debbie nor I liked then, and we still don’t.

But Jesus loved the rich man, and so must I. The difference is the kind of love Jesus offered him.

For we talk so readily of ‘unconditional love’ and we say, ‘Jesus loves us just as we are.’ And while that’s true so far as it goes, it’s only a half-truth. Just because Jesus loves us as we are doesn’t mean he wants to leave us like this. In fact, he loves us too much to leave us as we are. And he couldn’t leave the rich man in slavery to his wealth and his property.

So Jesus doesn’t offer the kind of love which says, ‘I love you as you are,’ with the silent implication that people can stay just as they are. He offers uncompromising love where he says, ‘I love you so much, but I won’t negotiate how you live, this is what I require of you if you are truly to follow me.’

Now that poses a problem for us when we think about wanting to welcome people into church, but maybe John Wesley had a helpful approach to this. As you know, he was big on putting people into small groups for the sake of their spiritual growth, but what a lot of people don’t realise is that he had more than one kind of small group. The one most people have heard of was the ‘class’, and there was only one requirement for joining a class, which was that essentially you were a spiritual enquirer.

However, if you were clearly a committed disciple of Jesus, there was another group for you, and that was a confidential group called the ‘band’.

Maybe we need to maintain these distinctions today. The rich man in our story would have made it into the class but not into the band, and then he would have even left the class.

What we need to remember is this: the love of Jesus is unconditional in that it is offered before we ever loved him, but it is also uncompromising because it calls us into the lifestyle of a Christian disciple.

Thirdly and finally, we learn that Jesus’ grace is transformative.

I’m thinking here of the conversation Jesus has with his disciples after the rich man has gone away. In the light of Jesus’ standards they wonder who can possibly be saved, and Jesus replies that what is humanly impossible is nevertheless possible for God. (Verses 23-27) Then Peter talks about all the sacrifices he and the other disciples have already made in order to follow their master, and Jesus promises them a mixture of rewards and persecution in this life, but unfettered blessing in the life to come. (Verses 28-30)

Contrast all that with the weak and insipid way we talk about grace in the church today. A recent Methodist document simply defined grace as ‘God’s unconditional regard towards people.’ Rather like the ‘God loves us as we are’ thinking we just considered, it’s only a partial truth. Grace is not only the way God reaches out to us and accepts us, it’s the way in which he changes us and fulfils that desire of Jesus’ uncompromising love to see us transformed.

You see, while discipleship requires commitment and effort from us, we all know our propensity to fail – that’s behind the disciples’ despairing comment, ‘Who then can be saved?’ But ultimately, we’re drawn to discipleship by the call of Jesus, and we’re enabled to be disciples by the Holy Spirit. So in the final analysis, it’s the work of God doing something good in us that we don’t deserve. And that’s grace. God makes the impossible possible.

But not only that, says Jesus, this grace shows that discipleship is more than the costly decisions we make to follow him (although that is part of it). As the New Testament scholar James R Edwards puts it,

But to conceive of discipleship solely in terms of its costs and sacrifices is to conceive of it wrongly – as though in marrying a beautiful bride a young man would think only of what he was giving up. … the reward of eternal life makes the sacrifices of discipleship look insignificant in comparison to the lavish blessing of God.[2]

God will bless the disciples of Jesus in this life, although there will still be the troubles of persecution, and he will bless again in the life of the age to come. That too is grace, along with the way grace enables and empowers us to walk the path of the disciple.

To conclude, let’s go back to where we started. Do we all have to sell our possessions? It depends on what Jesus asks of us, because to be a disciple means putting him first and following his will for our lives, rather than simply keeping a set of religious rules.

The thing is, his love meets us where we are but also draws us on into that life of imitating Jesus. And that call is one we will fail, but that’s where his grace comes in – again, meeting us where we are but transforming us and blessing us beyond description.

That, in outline, is the life of a Christian disciple.

[1] As found at https://brettfish.wordpress.com/2015/11/20/sell-all-of-our-possessions/

[2] James R Edwards, The Gospel According To Mark, pp 316, 317.

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Video Sermon: How Do We Understand The Presence Of God?

Continuing with the story of Moses and the Israelites, this week we arrive at Exodus 33:12-23.

However, rather than explore this story, I’m taking up one important theme in it – the presence of God – and giving a sketch of that subject as it appears through Scripture.

I hope you find these thoughts helpful in your own life.

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