Tag: mission

Mission in the Bible 5: The River from the Temple (Ezekiel 47:1-12)

I’m back, although not fully recovered yet. So here is a slightly shorter than usual Bible talk. Please excuse the regular water-sipping in the video!

Ezekiel 47:1-12

If you ask most average Christians what the main purpose of the Church is, the most popular answer is, worship.

But in this life that is at best an incomplete answer. It may be true in the life of the world to come, but right now there is more than worship to do as the Church. There is mission as well as worship.

Look in our passage how the living waters, the river of God, ultimately coming to symbolise the Holy Spirit, may start flowing at the Temple in Ezekiel’s dream but they don’t remain there. They flow out to bless the surrounding world.

Let’s look at the flow.

Firstly, in the river beginning at the Temple, mission starts at the place of sacrifice.

Ezekiel’s dream or vision is of a rebuilt Temple after the return of Israel from exile in Babylon. It was the centre of worship and the place of sacrifice. Therefore, this vision says that sacrifice is not just about the benefits for the personal worshipper. It goes out and beyond.

As Christians, we see this most clearly in the Cross of Christ. His death ends all need for sacrifices for sin. It was the ‘one full, perfect, and sufficient oblation’ as the Anglican Book of Common Prayer puts it.

We receive the benefits of the Cross when we come to faith and when we confess our sins every week. It is comforting and healing to know that this is the sign of God’s enduring and faithful love for us, the love that anchors our lives.

But for Ezekiel, the river of life begins at the place of sacrifice. And for Christians, the Cross also means that God will pour out his Spirit, and when he does the benefits of Christ’s sacrifice will be seen as not merely for us but for the whole world. It is what happened at the first Christian Pentecost. The Spirit falls, Peter preaches the Gospel, people of many nations hear, and thousands profess faith.

The first thing to remember, then, is that our blessings are not for us alone. That’s why I can’t stomach attitudes to church that sound like consumerism: what’s in it for me? What do I get out of this, never mind anybody else? Perhaps one of the classic examples is the older person in a declining church who says, ‘All I care about is that this church is here to see me out.’ That is a selfishness that cannot sit in front of the Cross of Christ.

Secondly, also in the river beginning at the Temple, we see that mission is launched in worship.

The river of God, the water of life, the Holy Spirit, does not simply bring joy, refreshment, and power to worship. The river flows from the place of worship to the world.

Again, there’s a challenge to our consumer attitudes to church. Worship is not just a personal bless-up. Yes, there are times when God blesses us graciously out of his sheer love for us. And sure, we often come in great need of blessing ourselves. But worship is not fundamentally a ‘getting’ experience. It is a giving experience. And it takes us beyond Sunday, into Monday and on from there.

What happens on Sunday is part of what equips us for Monday. That’s why an organisation like the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity came up with something called ‘This Time Tomorrow’, where a church member is interviewed in the Sunday service, asked what they will be doing in twenty-four hours’ time, and how people might best pray for what they will be doing then.

Or come with me to an American church that has, over the exit from the building, put the words ‘Servants’ Entrance.’ We go out from worship on mission in the world, showing God’s redeeming love in our words and our deeds.

The Holy Spirit is always thrusting us out into the world with the love of God. In the Gospels, after Jesus has his amazing spiritual experience at his baptism, he next goes into the wilderness. Some English translations rather tamely translate the Greek to say that the Holy Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness, but it’s actually more forceful than that. In at least one of the Gospels, the writer literally says that the Holy Spirit threw Jesus out into the wilderness. The ‘throw’ part is related to where we get our word ‘ball’, and it makes me think of a cricketer in the field on the boundary, positively hurling the ball all the way back to the wicketkeeper with considerable force.

You and I have come to worship today for a purpose. Yes, we may need some blessing or comfort, but what we haven’t come for is, so to speak, just to be tickled by God. We have come to encounter the Holy Spirit, who will energise us for our daily witness in the world.

Thirdly, in the river flowing from the Temple, we see that mission is to transform creation.

The river gets deeper and deeper, even to the point where no-one can swim in it. And for someone like me who can’t swim at all in the first place, that’s scary!

But it’s scary in a good way. What we see here is the awesome power of God transforming creation. Take the reference to life teeming in the Dead Sea, where the extreme saltiness is usually a killer. I visited the Holy Land in 1989, and on the day we went to the Dead Sea, some of my friends got into the water and floated – I’m sure you’ve seen pictures of that there. But for me, the salt was so intense even in the air that my eyes stung and I couldn’t even look in the direction of the water to see my friends, let alone take photos on my camera. And I am a keen photographer.

That’s how salty it gets there. So for Ezekiel to see the salt water become fresh and be filled with fish and other creatures is an image of a miracle.

Then look at the trees on the riverbank, which bear fruit every month rather than every year, whose ‘fruit will serve for food and … leaves for healing’ (verse 12). Reading that from a New Testament perspective makes us think of the way this passage is an inspiration for the Book of Revelation, where trees line not a river but the Holy City, and whose ‘leaves are for the healing of the nations.’

Yes, there are marshes where nothing changes, just as there are many who are resistant to the Gospel of God’s grace in Christ that calls everyone to repentance and faith in Jesus. But overall what we perceive in Ezekiel’s vision is a foretaste of the day when God will make the new heavens and the new earth, where everything that is broken in creation is healed, where relationships with God and one another are reconciled, and where all pain, war, and suffering is abolished.

What does that mean for us? It means that our encounter with the Holy Spirit through the Cross of Christ and through worship throws us out into the world as bearers of God’s love in a multiplicity of ways. The Holy Spirit sends us to call people back to God through Jesus. The Holy Spirit sends us to be people who heal relationships. The Holy Spirit sends us to be people of peace, not violence. The Holy Spirit sends us to bring good news to the poor and the wounded. The Holy Spirit sends us to restore broken creation, not because we are afraid of what will happen to this planet, but because we are full of hope about God’s good intentions for his creation.

When we come to worship each Sunday, the presence of God equips us for these tasks. When we leave gathered worship each Sunday, we go as commissioned officers of God’s kingdom.

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Mission in the Bible 2: Chosen to Bless the Nations (Genesis 12:1-9)

Genesis 12:1-9

Last week, when I launched this series, I looked at Genesis chapter 3, where God comes looking for Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden after they have sinned. As such, God is the first missionary and mission is a God thing.

I used a quote from the great Anglican missiologist Dr Chris Wright, who wrote this:

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.

This week, we see God beginning to work out the plan of his mission in co-operation with human beings as he chooses Abram and his descendants.

Now before I get into the heart of this, I think it’s worth addressing one issue about this passage that some Christians are relating to the current violence between Israel and Hamas. It’s one that gets trotted out every time Israel engages in actions that are subjected to international criticism. It’s the first half of verse 3, where God says,

I will bless those who bless you,
    and whoever curses you I will curse;

Some Christians take this as reason for saying we should never criticise Israel, and only ever support her. However, there is a difference between criticism and cursing. If criticising Israel constituted cursing, then the Old Testament prophets ought to be deleted from the Bible, because they do plenty of it! No: we can still make honest moral evaluations of Israel’s actions and be biblical. Cursing Israel should just be invoked on things like the constitutions of Hamas, the Houthis, and other radical Muslims who call for the destruction of Israel.

That said, let’s get back to considering what this passage teaches us about mission. We’ll have to say a little bit about the original Old Testament Israel context of each theme that I mention before we understand them in terms of the New Testament and the Church.

The first of three great themes here is what has been historically called election.

When I use the word ‘election’, I do not mean a poll where we choose our politicians. I mean that God elects, or chooses, his people. Here, God chooses Abram to be the forefather of the people he is choosing as his own.

Now some Christians have pushed this to the point of suggesting that God chooses some people for salvation and he chooses all the rest for damnation. Christians such as John Calvin taught this, and later John Wesley argued and disagreed with the followers of Calvin. Wesley said that while he agreed not all people would be saved, God offered salvation to all and it was up to us to respond, to receive God’s free gift.

Because of the Calvinist teaching about election which became expressed as what we call ‘double predestination’ – God predestines some to salvation and others to damnation, as I said – the word ‘election’ has had a bad reputation among people like us who stand in the tradition of Wesley.

But it need not, because it has a positive meaning. Election is not about privilege: it is about blessing. Hear what God said to Abram in the second half of verse 2:

I will make your name great,
    and you will be a blessing.

Election means that God has blessed his people so that they will be a blessing to others.

Now we begin to see why this passage is a missionary text. We are blessed in order to bless others. Sometimes I have done that with a formal blessing at the end of a service: ‘May God bless you that you may bless others.’

We know the incredible blessings of God. We know about his love in creation, his love in sending people in his name over the centuries before finally sending his Son, who even died for us, rose again for us, and even now prays for us before the day he appears again in glory. We know the blessing of the Holy Spirit in our lives if we have given ourselves to Jesus Christ.

And all these blessings are not just so that we can enjoy some self-indulgent spiritual bless-up. God blesses us with the riches of his love so that we can bless others with that love.

It’s why the Bible contains such radical commands as ‘Love your enemies.’ It’s why God placed each of us in the world as well as in the church – so that we have people around us to bless.

In fact, on that subject why not ponder for a moment who you are likely to meet in the next twenty-four hours and consider how you might bless them? What if the church became known as a people who blessed others generously, outrageously, even? And what if at the same time as blessing people we prayed for the opportunity to open up so we can tell people about the source of the blessing, Jesus Christ?

The second theme overlaps with the first, but I’m separating them for convenience. It’s the great nation.

Consider how verse 2 begins:

I will make you into a great nation,
    and I will bless you

The bigger the nation, the more people to bless, and the more who can bless others. Let there be no doubt that in Christian terms, God’s basic intention for the church is for it to grow in quantity as well as quality.

Now I say that in the face of decline that has been going on in our nation for about a century, there or thereabouts. Our numbers are reducing and our average age is increasing. It’s a hard thing to preach that God wants to grow the church when most of the time we see the opposite. Some of us had great hopes for the church when we were younger but have become progressively more discouraged as we have got older.

So let us be honest here about decline as well as growth. Some of the decline is our fault, and some of it is not. To some extent we cannot help it that we live in a society that is increasingly hostile to Christianity. Some of that is a sinful choice to reject God.

But in other ways it is down to us. We have not always been good witnesses. The obvious example of that is the huge number of sexual abuse scandals in churches. There are other factors, too: our unwillingness to share our faith; our ambivalent attitude to strangers; our rejection of core Christian beliefs by trying to make ourselves more like the world – in which case the world says, if you’re just like us then we don’t need to change or join you. And so on.

I cannot guarantee growth to you. If there were a foolproof method, then we would have reduced faith to a form of technology, rather than a mysterious relationship of love.

But we can be intentional about the things that make for growth. We can be disciplined about the ways of growing our spiritual lives – the ‘means of grace’, as Wesley called them. These involve prayer, Bible study, fellowship, worship, the sacraments, fasting, giving, serving the poor, openness to the Holy Spirit, and so on. And we can be intentional about building relationships with people outside the church, as I said in the first point about blessing people and looking for opportunities to share about the source of all blessing.

What we can do, then, is sow the seeds and pray that God will water what we sow.

The third and final theme I want to highlight for mission from this passage is the land.

Verses 6 and 7:

6 Abram travelled through the land as far as the site of the great tree of Moreh at Shechem. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. 7 The Lord appeared to Abram and said, ‘To your offspring I will give this land.’ So he built an altar there to the Lord, who had appeared to him.

We know how important the land was and is for Israel and the Jewish people. When they were exiled to Babylon, it struck at the very heart of their faith. ‘How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’ lamented the Psalmist. The gift of the land was always conditional upon obedience to God’s Law.

And we still see the importance of the land for Judaism in dimensions of the current tragic violence in the Middle East.

But what sense does it make for us as the Church, the people who have been grafted onto the People of God through faith in Christ? We are not an ethnic group. We come from every tribe, and tongue, and nation (Revelation 7:9).

There’s a clue in the way Jesus takes one Old Testament verse and rephrases it. You will know how in the Sermon on the Mount he says,

Blessed are the meek,
    for they will inherit the earth. (Matthew 5:5)

But do you know what Old Testament verse he is amending? It’s Psalm 37:11, which says,

But the meek will inherit the land
    and enjoy peace and prosperity.

Inheriting the land made sense in the Old Testament with Israel. And that it’s the meek who do retains the important truth that the gift of the land is conditional, not automatic. You need to do what God requires.

But for Jesus it’s bigger. The meek will inherit the earth, which makes sense if it’s a multinational people of God. And it also makes sense if that’s at the end of all things, when God will bring in the new heavens and the new earth (Revelation 21:1).

Our inheritance is so much more than what falls within the boundaries of one nation. Our inheritance is the new creation itself.

Well, that’s all fine and dandy, but what does it have to do with mission? It means that our calling is to take as many people as we can on the journey to the new creation. That doesn’t mean simply that we say, get your sins forgiven and have a ticket to heaven when you die.

It certainly does include our sins being forgiven, but it is so much more. The vision of the new heavens and the new earth where God has made everything new is the hope that inspires us to say that this is what the kingdom of God looks like in all its richness and fulness, so let’s start working for the kingdom now.

And so what inspires us and what we urge people to do is not only come to Jesus for the forgiveness of sins, but also to come to him to find fulfilment and true purpose in life by building for his kingdom. Be made new by the Holy Spirit, and work for a world where sickness, sin, poverty, and other curses no longer exist. There really is nothing like it.

That’s why God chooses us. That’s why God wants us to grow. This is God’s mission. And he wants us to bless the nations with him.

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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 4: You Have Not Been This Way Before (Joshua 3:1-17)

Joshua 3:1-17

The late American church leader John Wimber used to say that Christians are like people who go down to the quayside, expecting to board a ship that will take them on a luxury cruise, only to find when they get there that their ship is gunmetal grey in colour. It’s a battleship.

He used to recall how, when he first found faith from a background as a rock musician (he was the keyboard player for the Righteous Brothers), he would go to church and hear all the Bible readings about Jesus and the apostles performing great miracles of healing. And he would say to the other church members, “Great! When do we do this?”

To which they would reply, “Oh no, we just talk about it.”

At some point for Christians, the rubber has to hit the road. We’re good at talking, planning, and preparing. But actually ‘doing the stuff’? Hmm, that’s a bit radical.

What I’ve said so far in my three previous sermons about New Beginnings was potentially challenging, but it could just be treated as preparation. Israel still had to take that final step of entering the Promised Land. We have to take that final step from theory to practice.

So yes – we must not live in the past but look to what God wants to do today. Yes – we must live by faith in what God says he wants to do, and not be constrained by fears based on our human limitations. And yes – we need courage and obedience to the Scriptures, all nourished by the promise of God’s presence.

We have to do something new. ‘You have never been this way before,’ say the Israelite officers to the people (verse 4). But that’s no excuse for staying put. This goes way beyond just singing an unfamiliar hymn! It means getting out of our comfortable space in church fellowship and taking God’s redeeming love in Christ into the world in both our deeds and our words.

Here are four things that Joshua 3 teaches us we need in order to live out our calling in the world.

Firstly, follow God’s lead.

“When you see the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God, and the Levitical priests carrying it, you are to move out from your positions and follow it. 4 Then you will know which way to go, since you have never been this way before. But keep a distance of about two thousand cubits between you and the ark; do not go near it.”

The ark of the covenant is the portable presence of God with Israel, especially in the centuries before the Temple is built at Jerusalem. For the ark to go ahead of Israel is to signify that God goes ahead of them. Their calling is to follow God’s lead. God will lead them forward into the land.

The Christian call is also to follow God’s lead. He leads and directs the mission to which he calls us. We don’t invent things and just do what we fancy. We seek God’s lead and we respond.

That is built right into all Christian theology in one way or another. In the Methodist tradition, we talk of God’s ‘prevenient grace’, which means that God acts graciously before we ever do anything.

There are some similarities in the way Christians widely talk about mission today. We say that Christian mission is the mission of God, not our mission. We are called to find out what God is doing, and join in.

But how do we do that? Well, there is no getting around the need to practise what Wesley called ‘The means of grace’ and which modern Christians ecumenically call ‘The spiritual disciplines.’ It means actively seeking to be in tune with God. That requires a serious commitment to prayer and to meditating on Scripture. It’s no good thinking that we can just tick those off as done on Sunday mornings in the service, these need to be daily personal habits.

There are many ways to practise these disciplines, and we shall vary according to our personalities and gifts how we do them. I don’t have time to list different options now, but speak with me if you want some ideas.

What is certain is that the church sinks without them.

Secondly, imitate God’s character.

5 Joshua told the people, “Consecrate yourselves, for tomorrow the Lord will do amazing things among you.”

To consecrate oneself is to dedicate oneself to God’s service. It is to be set aside for holy work. It is not just for the priests (or modern-day ministers, for that matter!) but for all of God’s people.

God’s mission is not something that merely requires a certain amount of religious competence. It needs character, too: God’s character. God’s mission is to make all things new, and that includes our character. If we are to be in harmony with God’s purposes, we need to grow in his likeness and utterly dedicated to his cause.

If you want an engineer or a plumber, character may not matter, only their competence. But not with the mission of God. It requires a people who are growing in Christlikeness.

So we are called to consecrate ourselves before God does amazing things among us.

Joshua does not tell us here how the people did this, but we may have a clue from a similar event. When they had arrived at Mount Sinai after leaving Egypt, Israel had been called to be consecrated at the foot of the mountain while Moses climbed up to meet with God. How did they do it then? By various forms of fasting. Not simply fasting from food, but married couples also abstained from marital relations.

Fasting takes various forms. We can fast from food, from marital relations, from TV, from gadgets, and so on. In each case we are giving up something good for a season to concentrate on something far better and much more important. That’s why when we fast we also pray.

And as we show God just how serious we are about his will by abstaining from something good in order to find extra time for prayer, so he will respond to a commitment like that by forming us more like his Son through the gift of the Holy Spirit in us.

It is no good being recklessly unholy when God turns up in power to do amazing things. If we are, either his power will burn us or in his mercy he will not act powerfully at all.

But if we long for God to act in power, we need to consecrate ourselves.

Thirdly, grow in faith.

8 Tell the priests who carry the ark of the covenant: ‘When you reach the edge of the Jordan’s waters, go and stand in the river.’”

Have you noticed the similarities and differences in this passage with the account of Israel crossing the Red Sea out of Egypt into the wilderness? Here at the end of their wilderness wanderings, they are again faced by a mass of water, and the waters divide.

Only this time, Joshua’s command differs from that of Moses. At the Red Sea in Exodus 14, Moses told the frightened people that all they needed to do was stand still and they would see the deliverance of their God. But here, the command is not to stand still at the water’s edge.

On this occasion, however, they don’t get to wait on dry land. Or at least, the priests are going to need some towels afterwards, because they have to go and stand in the river before God divides the water this time. They were called to do something more by faith before God enacted his promise.

Faith, like love, is something that needs to grow. If I still loved Debbie the same amount today as I did on our wedding day, our marriage would be long over. If I still had the same faith that I had on the day I was confirmed and received into Methodist membership at the age of sixteen then my faith would have collapsed years ago. It is for good reason that God calls us to grow in faith.

In my first circuit as a minister, I got involved in some youth ministry that worked across most of the churches in the town. We began by holding Sunday night youth services, but they became a bit cheesy, and in order to challenge ourselves in a more difficult situation, we then hired a vacant shop in the town. We couldn’t use as much gear, and so we did what we called ‘Worship Unplugged.’ If any of you remember the MTV Unplugged shows from the 1990s, you’ll have an idea of what we did.

But we had too many numbers to cram into the shop, and so we moved to the church hall at the URC. Again, that was fine for a time, until the numbers made that venue too uncomfortable. There was only one venue in the town that would hold us, but it required a step of faith. It was the local nightclub.

One of our team, a Christian businessman, approached the nightclub owner, and he said he was willing to take our booking for one Sunday night a month. He would provide bar staff who would only sell non-alcoholic drinks on those occasions.

There was just one thing: the fee he wanted went beyond our existing budget.

This was the time which we identified as our ‘put your feet in the water’ moment. God wanted us to go further than we had before. We agreed to the terms for the nightclub without having the money.

But when we did, another Christian businessman in the town stepped forward and underwrote the project.

If you want to go forward in faith (and why wouldn’t you?), then is it time for you to get your feet wet, metaphorically speaking?

Fourthly and finally, remember God’s deeds.

12 Now then, choose twelve men from the tribes of Israel, one from each tribe. 

What’s that about, then? The twelve men get mentioned but then Joshua goes back to talking about the priests.

We find the answer in chapter 4, which we didn’t read. These men take stones from the river and create a memorial to the miracle God does here.

Why? This is no monument or museum. This is no living in the past. This is about learning from the past. It is easy to forget what God has done. In later Old Testament times, tragically the prophets record that Israel had forgotten her God. Not that she forgot God existed, but she forgot what God had done for her. And when she did, she went off the rails spiritually.

We need to do something similar, because it stirs our faith to believe again in a God who does mighty things. The supreme memorial for Christians is of course Holy Communion, when we remember what God did for us in Christ at the Cross.

But we need to create smaller memorials too, by recording things God has done individually for each of us. Here’s how I have found that to be important.

Like many ministers, I have on more than one occasion become discouraged and considered resigning. If that shocks you, then you would be even more shocked to know the substantial percentage of ministers who have felt like that.

But when I have been down in the depths, on some occasions Debbie has said to me, how can you consider such a course of action when you look back at all the ways in which God guided you into this calling? My metaphorical memorial stones brought me back – even if reluctantly at times!

What are your memorial stones? If you don’t have a heap of them, then perhaps now is the time to start collecting them.

Because it’s time to set out on that new beginning to which God has called us, following his lead, living in his ways, stretching our faith, and being sustained by remembering his mighty deeds.

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New Beginnings 2: Moving On (Deuteronomy 1:1-46)

Deuteronomy 1:1-46

“Are we nearly there yet?”

I’m sure you recognise that as the frustrated cry of a young child on a car journey. I’m pretty certain those words came out of my mouth when I was small.

A frustrated child would have been driven mad by the antics of ancient Israel:

2 (It takes eleven days to go from Horeb to Kadesh Barnea by the Mount Seir road.)

3 In the fortieth year, on the first day of the eleventh month, Moses proclaimed to the Israelites all that the Lord had commanded him concerning them.

Forty years to travel a distance that should have taken them eleven days. And now Moses preaches this recent history back to the Israelites by recognising this trait in them: 

6 The Lord our God said to us at Horeb, ‘You have stayed long enough at this mountain. 7 Break camp and advance …

God is calling them into a new future, a future of blessing, in the Promised Land. But they are resistant.

And that makes this a good passage to look at in the second of my sermons on New Beginnings at the start of my ministry here. Last week, I talked about how we must leave the past behind, learning from it yes, but living there no, and seek the new thing God wants to do in our day and age. (You can watch the video or read the blog). This week, I want to talk about moving on, and the spiritual qualities we need.

Here are four important things we need to practise.

Firstly, every member ministry.

In verses 9 to 18 we read of how Moses was overloaded and how he shared the leadership and pastoral care of the people. He knew the whole enterprise would grind to a halt unless he stopped everything funnelling through him. 

I once heard about a vicar who would go to the bottom of his garden every morning at 10:30 to watch the Inter-City express train whizz past. Someone asked him why he did so.

He replied, “I want to see the only thing in this parish that moves without me pushing it.”

I think Moses felt like that, and so he drew on the gifts and talents of others. He wasn’t worried about keeping all the glory for himself. 

At Monday’s welcome service I said how such occasions made me uncomfortable. The very fact that ministers get public welcome services but others don’t tends to raise people’s expectations of people like me. 

But, I said, we are not your saviours, because the job of Saviour of the world is not vacant. It was taken long ago by Jesus. Ministers come alongside to help lead the work of the kingdom, we don’t come to save your church. 

So – I won’t be the first preacher to say this to you, but it bears regular repeating – have you considered what your talents and spiritual gifts are? And have you offered them in the service of God’s kingdom? We are all what the Bible calls ‘vessels of honour’ who have the privilege of serving Christ in response to his great salvation. 

How does that work out for you?

Secondly, obedience.

After the spies come back with some beautiful fruit from the Promised Land and their message that ‘It is a good land that the Lord our God is giving us’ (verse 25), how does Israel respond? Moses says,

26 But you were unwilling to go up; you rebelled against the command of the Lord your God.

Let us not think that once we have received salvation we can behave as we like. Obedience is not what earns us the love of God, but it is the way we show our gratitude for the salvation we have received. It’s no accident that Israel receives the Ten Commandments after being set free from Egypt, and not before. 

And there’s a very specific command here that Israel disobeys: to take the presence of God into the world where he is not yet known, and where people at the time worshipped other gods, false gods. Oh no, they said, we’ll stay among ourselves here where we’re comfortable. 

And God gets mad. 

I was once asked to conduct the funeral of an elderly church member, and so I arranged a meeting with her family to discuss the service and talk about her life. When her grown-up children, who were no longer churchgoers, were telling me about her, they said one very striking thing.

They told me that the old lady’s whole life had been based on the church and its activities, even her social life.

I think they were trying to impress me, but inside my heart sank. Just as Israel had a command from God to get into the Promised Land, so we have a command from Jesus to get into the whole world with his redeeming love. 

It’s so easy just to have a nice quiet life with our Christian friends, but all of us are called to show and tell the Gospel in our words and deeds. There are people around us who need some demonstration of God’s love, and we are the people to do it. 

I was so sad when I heard one of the lecturers where I trained for the ministry say, “I don’t have any non-Christian friends.” What a tragedy for the Gospel that was. 

There are many ways we could explore this question of obedience, but let’s just concentrate on this for now: how are our lives shining with the Gospel in the world?

Thirdly, gratitude.

It’s more than disobedience to take the presence of God into the world, says Moses. He goes on to say, 

27 You grumbled in your tents and said, ‘The Lord hates us; so he brought us out of Egypt to deliver us into the hands of the Amorites to destroy us.

Grumbling, rather than gratitude, characterises Israel here. 

Please don’t misunderstand me. There are times to complain. We should not always let lazy or malicious people mistreat us or others. There are issues of justice to take into account.

But there is a grumbling negativity that pervades some Christians and some churches. Nothing is ever good enough for some people. 

In one church I had people refuse to take on a role with teenagers. Two of those I approached declined, giving the same reason. 

“I’m not taking that on just to be ripped to shreds at Church Council by [Name].”

And when we did get someone else to do the job, guess what happened to them?

When we consider all that God has done for us in Jesus Christ from creation to redemption to the gift of the Spirit and the promise of a New Creation, surely our default attitude in the community of faith needs to be one of gratitude. It will show in our worship. It will come through in our relationships and our sense of community. It will be a shining witness to the world. 

When I was a child, I recall my maternal grandmother, who lived with us, singing the old chorus ‘Count your blessings’ around the house. The thought of counting our blessings and being surprised how much the Lord has done is a good principle. Put into practice, it changes the atmosphere in a place. It brings a kingdom atmosphere, I might say. 

In saying all this I don’t want to minimise the hardships and struggles that some of you are doubtless facing. But I do want to say that the sort of church which can survive and thrive in the future is a grateful one. There is more than enough of the grumbling spirit in the world. Let’s live – as one Christian leader once put it – ‘in the opposite spirit.’

Fourthly and finally, faith.

Here is the last issue that Moses and God have with Israel:

28 Where can we go? Our brothers have made our hearts melt in fear. They say, “The people are stronger and taller than we are; the cities are large, with walls up to the sky. We even saw the Anakites there.”’

29 Then I said to you, ‘Do not be terrified; do not be afraid of them. 30 The Lord your God, who is going before you, will fight for you, as he did for you in Egypt, before your very eyes, 31 and in the wilderness. There you saw how the Lord your God carried you, as a father carries his son, all the way you went until you reached this place.’

32 In spite of this, you did not trust in the Lord your God, 33 who went ahead of you on your journey, in fire by night and in a cloud by day, to search out places for you to camp and to show you the way you should go.

Fear replaces faith. Israel sees the task ahead purely in terms of what they can or cannot do on their own. They do not see that when God commands something that seems to be humanly impossible, that same God will provide the means to achieve what he has commanded. Israel does not trust its God. Paralysing fear takes over.

This is certainly something we see in churches, and it inhibits their mission. It may even be the beginning of the death of those churches. 

Perhaps you have come across churches where they have been offered a great refurbishment and rebuilding project that will reinvigorate their premises for mission. Their existing building is getting old and expensive to run. Although a lively and loving community worships there, the local community looks at the building and thinks it’s closed. What do they do?

They can choose between fear and faith. Fear says, ‘We can’t do this. It’s too much money and too much work for the people we have.’ Faith says, ‘What is God saying to us here? If he is calling us to do this, then we will.’

Fear says we can’t. Faith says God can – provided it’s what he has said. 

Hudson Taylor, the famous nineteenth century missionary to China, once said this:

God’s work done in God’s way will never lack God’s supply.

Conclusion

Perhaps, like Israel at the beginning of Deuteronomy, we are on the verge of something new. Will we embrace these qualities and go forward with God?

  • Every member ministry, where all our gifts contribute
  • Obedience, to take the love of God into the world
  • Gratitude for all God has done for us in Christ
  • Faith, to run with whatever God calls us to do, even if it stretches us.
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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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Remaking The Church, Luke 15:1-10 (Ordinary 24 Year C 2022)

Luke 15:1-10

At the recent Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops from around the world, Stephen Cottrell, the Archbishop of York, said,

McDonald’s makes hamburgers
Cadbury’s makes chocolate
Starbuck’s makes coffee
The Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela make music
Heineken makes beer
Toyota makes cars
Rolex makes watches
The church of Jesus Christ makes disciples. That is our core business.[1]

It seems important to go back to this at a Covenant Service where we renew our commitment to Jesus in the light of his commitment to us. He calls us to make disciples.

But how?

Later in the same address Cottrell describes a conversation he had once on Paddington train station while waiting for a connection to Cardiff. A woman asked him why he became a priest. I won’t quote his whole answer, but essentially he said that it was a combination of God calling him and his own desire to see change for the better in the world.

The woman then said to him

that when she met people of faith, she found they fitted into two categories. It either seems like their faith is like their hobby – either they go to church on Sunday but it doesn’t change their life on Monday, or “they embraced their faith so tightly, it frightens everyone else away.”  I have seen these extremes, and she said to me “is there another way?”

The woman identified two wrong responses to finding Christian faith. What is wrong with them?

The hobbyist who comes on a Sunday but doesn’t let it affect her way of life is someone who has not understood the Gospel. Or she may have understood the Gospel, but has chosen to look the other way.

As we have been seeing in Jesus’ teaching in recent weeks, that just isn’t a valid response to his coming. Yes, God loves us before we ever love him, but just because he meets us as we are doesn’t mean he wants us to stay as we are.

An essential element of Christian faith is embracing God’s agenda of transformation for us. That’s what makes sense of renewing promises at a covenant service. We recognise once more the enormity of what God has done for us in Christ and we respond.

Call it an argument from silence if you will, but in the two parables we read the thought of there being no action in response to the missing sheep or the missing coin is just not countenanced. Finding the love of Jesus puts us on his team. We are co-opted into his mission.

So a good thing to reflect on for all of us this morning is this question: what part am I playing in the mission of God as a response to God’s love for me?

Let me put it bluntly. How are we ever going to do more than just survive as a church unless more people step up to the plate? Right now we have a small group of people doing most of the work in this church. I can tell you, some of them get very tired! I lose count of how many hats some of them are wearing.

Friends, we need to lift burdens if we are to do more than just limp along as a church until we finally close.

But, you say, like so many people here I’ve got older. I don’t have the strength to do something vigorous.

That’s not a problem. Because you can begin with something simple that you can do. Even going on the tea and coffee rota would help. You can do that, can’t you? Don’t you make hot drinks for yourself at home? Then you can do it for your friends at church. And by doing so you can free up some of the people who are working to the bone in this church.

Similarly, you read for pleasure at home, or you may read for grandchildren. In that case, you can go on the rota of Bible readers for Sunday services. We have such a small rota of willing readers, but you could expand it. You do it at home, you can do it here.

And these are just simple jobs in the church. I’m not even asking you to be an evangelist at this point! But know this one thing. A Christian cannot be a hobbyist. We are on duty for the King.

The other group the woman who talked to Archbishop Cottrell identified were those who “embraced their faith so tightly, it frightens everyone else away.” Now these people do appear in our reading! They are there in verse 2:

 2 But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, ‘This man welcomes sinners, and eats with them.’

For shorthand, I’m going to call this second group of people of faith the Pharisees.

There’s a big question here that we don’t always see: why on earth would the Pharisees condemn Jesus’ missionary outreach activity? They were a missionary group themselves. In Matthew 23:15 Jesus notes this:

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are.

As I’ve said before, the Pharisee movement had been founded a long time before as a way of renewing the Jewish faith and bringing it back to basics. They were also missionary.

But they didn’t like Jesus’ methods. They had so longed for the renewal of Jewish faith but hadn’t seen it come to fruition. I think they had become frustrated, and with that cynical.

Not only that, because they had lofty aims they then became superior and self-righteous as they blamed others for the failure of their hopes.

And in that superiority, they refused to mix with those who failed to live up to their standards. Why would Jesus do differently from them? And perhaps embarrassingly, how come he attracts people and they don’t?

This toxic combination led to their condemnation of Jesus.

I want us to be passionate Christians, not hobbyists. Christianity is not a leisure activity, it’s a way of life. But there is danger when our passion gets misdirected when disappointment sets in. Then we start hurling insults from our ivory towers and we begin plotting against those who do things differently from us.

No wonder some Christians and some churches take on toxic atmospheres. No wonder some of those Christians and some of those churches end up committing spiritual abuse.

So if my plea to the hobbyists is to embrace the mission of God, my plea to the Pharisees is to keep your hearts tender and full of grace before a merciful God. If you recognise Pharisee tendencies in yourself, please remember that you too are a sinner in need of God’s grace. You too are a beggar seeking bread.

And let that open you up to the loving heart of God that sends us on  his mission.

But finally we come to Jesus, and his attitude is represented by the actions of the owner of the sheep in the first parable and the woman in the second.

For someone to own a hundred sheep in Jesus’ day meant they were very wealthy. The typical family owned ten to fifteen. Perhaps Jesus made the number so large in his story as to make his point all the more strikingly to his listeners.

And when you hear of the woman’s ten coins it is a mistake to think of ordinary loose change. Either these were her savings or they were the dowry money given to her by her husband when they married, which some women wore around their neck.[2] The lost coin is valuable!

The parable of the lost sheep shows how Jesus will not simply be the chaplain to those who remain safely at home. He cares for the lost.

The parable of the coin takes this a little further and shows us just how valuable to him those lost from his love and the family of God are.

All this means that if we are to renew our commitment to working out the teaching of Jesus, then we need to rethink the priorities of the church.

If you ask many Christians what the main purpose of the church is, they will answer, ‘worship.’ I remember that coming out at the top of a survey in my home church, for example.

But is that right? Might we learn from the Westminster Catechism, the document so beloved of Presbyterian Christians? It said that ‘the chief end of man’ (please excuse the exclusive language of a bygone day) was ‘to glorify God and enjoy him for ever.’

I’ll leave aside ‘enjoying God’ for another time. But ‘glorifying God’ is more than Sunday worship. Certainly we glorify God in worship, but we also glorify him when we spread his name in the world and witness to it in our words and deeds. We glorify God when we share Jesus’ heart for those who are lost from him, as we see in these parables.

What if God’s vision for our church were a reordering of our life so that we glorified him every day and everywhere? What if we reordered our church around the glorification of God rather than the gathered worship of God?  

To do that, we need to put away our ‘hobby’ approach to religion and repent in humility of our ‘Pharisee’ tendencies.

Then we need to embrace the heart of love Jesus has for the world.

So what about it? Who fancies remaking the church?

[1] https://www.premierchristianity.com/bishops-should-always-have-the-name-of-jesus-on-their-lips-archbishop-of-yorks-message-to-church-leaders/13569.article

[2] On both the number of sheep and the nature of the coins, see https://www.psephizo.com/biblical-studies/the-short-parables-of-the-lost-in-luke-15/

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A Meze Meal of Mission, Luke 10:1-20 (Ordinary 14 Year C 2022)

Luke 10:1-20

The first time I was invited to a meze meal at a Greek restaurant, I was daunted when I saw the menu. Twelve courses? How on earth would I get through all that?

But I need not have worried. For if any of you have had a meze meal, be it Greek or Turkish, you will know that the many courses are small in size. They are more like taster menu size.

And not only that, they arrive thick and fast. So if you try one thing and don’t like it, then you don’t have to worry, because in a few minutes another dish will be served and you may well like that better.

Today I want to give you a meze sermon. My thoughts on this passage have turned into a series of several short reflections. There won’t be twelve, though!

And while I don’t want you to sit in judgment on the Word of God, I do encourage you to see as we go along which points nourish you, which themes are relevant and challenging to you, and which ones are of lesser importance to you now.

As you will have realised, the overall subject of the reading is the mission of Jesus.

Firstly, mission is about partnership:

After this the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them two by two ahead of him to every town and place where he was about to go. (Verse 1)

No big names here. We don’t know the names of the seventy-two. And they don’t go alone, they go in partnership.

There is no need to wait for the next big evangelist to come along and hire a huge venue in which to preach if we want to reach out to the community with the love of God.

I have nothing at all against the Billy Grahams of this world. They have had a good effect on millions of people. But they were of their time, when radio and television were exploding. They may no longer be of our time now, either.

And Jesus didn’t use this method much. Yes, there were a few times in the Gospels when large crowds gathered to listen to his teaching, but mainly he sends his disciples into the world with his message.

Wherever we go in the world, we have opportunities to speak about Jesus. It’s important that we cultivate our relationships in the world for this sake.

I talked about this in a meeting when I was at theological college, and afterwards one of the lecturers came to me and confess, “I don’t think I have any friends outside the church.” How sad. We will never make an impact on the world if we don’t have non-Christian friends.

Where are your non-church friends? Could you and a fellow Christian build a relationship with them and support each other through the challenges of outreach?

Secondly, mission is about prayer.

 He told them, ‘The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field. (Verse 2)

I think you know by now that one of the things I am tired and despairing of in the church is the attitude that says we can correct all the things that are wrong in the church or the world with the right techniques or money or publicity. Some have called this ‘the technological fallacy’, because it forgets the supreme rôle of people.

But above all human beings is Almighty God, and it is to him we must turn if mission is going to make a difference. When we have realised that all the technology and the latest fads and fashions will not rescue us, perhaps we will remember that our primary task is spiritual, and it requires a spiritual approach.

We can pray in a number of ways as part of God’s mission. We can pray for those we know and love who do not yet know God’s love in Christ. We can pray that our church will be led by the Holy Spirit in what we do to bring God’s love to our community. We can pray for the wider church in our nation and around the world: what might she be doing to proclaim God’s redeeming love and to demonstrate it?

So who are you praying for? And how are you praying for the church’s involvement in mission?

Thirdly, mission is a priority.

Go! I am sending you out like lambs among wolves. Do not take a purse or bag or sandals; and do not greet anyone on the road. (Verses 3-4)

Look at how Jesus doesn’t want the seventy-two to be distracted. Minimal money and possessions. No distracting conversations on the way that will delay you.

Do we really make mission a priority in the church today? What do the agenda of our business meetings tell us about what we consider important? How much time and money are we spending on showing people outside the church the redeeming love of God in Christ? And how much time and money is going on keeping ourselves comfortable?

So now that we are living without COVID restrictions (would that we were also living without COVID itself) what are the activities we can undertake that will provide a bridge to those who need Christ? The more we go on the more we shall have to do things beyond the boundaries of the church building, because this is an alien and unsettling place for members of the unchurched generations.

But we may also be able to remain invitational to some extent. David Voas, Professor of Population Studies at the University of Essex, wrote this in an Anglican document:

Inviting friends to church does not come easily to most English people, which is partly why it is helpful to have non-threatening halfway house events like carol services as a draw. A corollary of the social difficulty of extending invitations is the reluctance to refuse them. Ours is a culture in which asking is a powerful act: it is hard to do but correspondingly hard to decline.[i]

Fourthly, mission is about prevenient grace.

When you enter a house, first say, “Peace to this house.”If someone who promotes peace is there, your peace will rest on them; if not, it will return to you. Stay there, eating and drinking whatever they give you, for the worker deserves his wages. Do not move around from house to house. (Verses 5-7)

The Gospel is a message of many blessings. It includes peace with God and one another. It includes healing of every kind. So if we want to know whether it is worth giving our time to a particular place or person or family, we look for signs of responsiveness to that good news. Is that something these people desire? Is it something they would love to emulate? If so, then it is worth our time.

Why? Because these are signs that God has been at work before we got there. God is now bringing us in to use us in finishing the job.

Last week we talked about moving on when people reject Jesus, and he still allows for that here in what he goes on to say about those who are unwelcoming and the prospect of judgment. But since we majored on that last week, let’s concentrate more on the idea that we look for signs that God has already prepared people for his Good News.

It’s what John Wesley called ‘prevenient grace’. It is grace that comes before anything we do. God always acts first in salvation, we only respond. If someone finds faith it will not be our doing. Instead, God will have been at work in them before we show up and do our part.

So we bless people with peace. We seek healing and all other kinds of blessings for them. If God has been preparing them we will see some evidence and then we should remain and persist. If there is hostility, we move on and warn them of the consequences if they do not repent.

Fifthly and finally, mission is about peace.

I’ve just said that peace is part of the Gospel. In fact, it’s pretty central. The wonder of the Gospel is that God gives to us before we give to him. He even gives before we are worthy – if ever we are, anyway.

But for all that, it’s easy to get wrapped up with what we have done – especially when things are going well, as the seventy-two found out here.

The seventy-two returned with joy and said, ‘Lord, even the demons submit to us in your name.’

He replied, ‘I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. I have given you authority to trample on snakes and scorpions and to overcome all the power of the enemy; nothing will harm you. However, do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.’ (Verses 17-20)

Just as we proclaim a Gospel that is about God’s grace and mercy rather than human merit, so we need to keep within that. It is dangerous to rejoice in anything other than that, says Jesus. If you start rejoicing when everything is going well, you will falsely attribute success to yourself, rather than to God using you. And if you do rejoice when things go well, what will you do when things go wrong? The sense of your value and worth to God will oscillate. You will be unstable.

No, says Jesus, rejoice that your names are written in heaven. This is what anchors us – the grace and mercy of God to us in making us his own, despite our sin. It’s what we proclaim as the Gospel. And it’s what keeps us on an even keel.

Never lose the joy and wonder that goes with that. It will make people wonder about you – in a good way!

[i] From Anecdote to Evidence: Findings from the Church Growth Programme 2011-2013, quoted at https://www.paulbeasleymurray.com/2022/06/30/develop-an-invitational-culture-or-die/, accessed 1st July 2022.

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Leaders of the Opposition – dealing with resistance to the Gospel (Mark 6:1-13)

Mark 6:1-13

Are you a glass half-full person or a glass half-empty person? I know plenty of people of both persuasions.

As some of you have heard me say before, I come from a family which has a history of depression, so you can imagine there can be quite a bit of half-empty in the Faulkners.

But I also have friends who are entrepreneurs and who can find opportunities even in a crisis. I think of one particular friend whose business collapsed when the first COVID-19 lockdown happened, but he saw new and different opportunities in the changed circumstances, and soon he had invented two brand new businesses plus a new expression of an old business.

Both incidents in our reading today contain the possibility or the reality of difficulty for the Gospel. Jesus doesn’t get anywhere when he returns to his home town (verse 5), and he warns the disciples that they may have to shake the dust off their feet against those who refuse to listen to them (verse 11). In both cases the narrative teaches us important things about following Jesus’ call to mission.

Firstly, let’s consider Jesus at Nazareth.

5 He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few people who were ill and heal them. 

Only a few people were healed, Jesus? Goodness me, we’d settle for that! It would be an improvement for us, unlike you!

So what’s going on? We have the corrosive acids of cynicism and unbelief. Cynicism from a crowd who think they know all about Jesus when actually they don’t. They think he’s still the carpenter’s son. They take offence – he can’t be any better than us! (Verses 2-3)

Unbelief? Jesus was amazed at their lack of faith (verse 6), but it follows on from their cynicism. If they’re refusing to believe Jesus is anything more than just local lad made good, they will not have the openness to have faith in him and thus receive the blessings he has for them. What a contrast from the many times Jesus says to some individuals, ‘Your faith has made you well.’

If even Jesus can have this experience of running up against a spiritual brick wall in people then at least let that help us take heart when we are attempting to share our faith and no-one wants to know. How we would love them to respond! We might even be desperate for a response! But it isn’t in our hands.

Some of this is about recognising the rôle of free will and of accepting that we cannot force a response. We have to ask ourselves whether we have been truly faithful to the Gospel, because that’s our task.

None of this should stop us praying for the Holy Spirit to be at work. If people are going to respond to Jesus then the Spirit needs to be at work in them before we even open our mouths. This is where John Wesley famously believed in what he called ‘prevenient grace’, where the word ‘prevenient’ is made up of ‘pre’ (i.e., going before something or someone) and ‘venir’, the French verb ‘to come’. The Holy Spirit comes first. Before we even get into the nitty gritty of reaching out to people with the love of God in our words and our deeds we need to pray that the Spirit of God will go ahead of us.

So when we are in mission mode, our task is fidelity to the Gospel. We leave the response to the people’s free will, but we pray that the Holy Spirit will get to them before us and prepare their hearts, otherwise no positive response to Jesus is possible.

But I think before we leave this first of the two episodes we need to reflect on the story in a different way. When I realised that as I said Jesus’ hearers ‘think they know all about Jesus when actually they don’t’ a nasty chill went up my spine.

Because I thought that could describe us.

We think we know all about Jesus, and like them we rarely if ever see him working any miracles among us. Could it be that we’ve deceived ourselves and we don’t know Jesus as well as we think?

Sadly, I think that’s possible. I listen to some Christians describe their understanding of Jesus and it’s very limited, if not downright partial. They just take on the bits of Jesus that they like and they discard the rest in much the same way that we put leftovers from dinner in the food recycling bin.

So as well as encouraging us to be faithful in sharing the Gospel and leaving the results to God while praying for his Spirit to be at work, I also want to issue a challenge today. How many of us have become complacent about Jesus? How many of us have remained with little more than a Sunday School image of him? How many of us go on seriously engaging with Jesus as portrayed in the four Gospels? How many of us are willing to let Jesus reshape our image of him instead of us persistently making him in our image?

It’s imperative we let Jesus challenge us into appreciating a more fully orbed understanding of him, because we can’t afford to proclaim a fantasy Jesus to the world. And praying to a fantasy Jesus will get us nowhere: we certainly won’t see any miracles.

Secondly, let’s consider the disciples on mission.

Humanly, it seems surprising that Jesus entrusts his mission to his disciples at this point. As one scholar says,

Heretofore they have impeded Jesus’ mission (1:36-39), become exasperated with him (2:23-25), and even opposed him (3:21). Their perception of Jesus has been – and will continue to be – marked by misunderstanding (8:14-21).[1]

Fancy Jesus choosing a motley crew like that and entrusting them with his mission! But that’s exactly what he does. This bunch of incompetents is sent out by Jesus to the nearby villages with his message in word and deed.

The Christian church still does similarly crazy things at time, often with young people. My first ever trip abroad was to Norway with a project of the European Methodist Youth Council where young people got used to mission by becoming missionaries in a foreign land during the school holidays.

Later, I would be involved with a Youth For Christ centre where the team spearheading our outreach was drawn entirely from young people in their late teens and their twenties who were taking gap years to offer themselves to the church.

As you can imagine, many of these people (me included) were rough around the edges, but God used us.

What excuse, then, do those of us have who have served Christ for many decades?

And it’s the real thing, too, not a trial run. The simplicity of their sending is similar to the simplicity with which the Israelites had to leave Egypt. This is therefore like a new Exodus. That makes it highly significant in a Jewish context. The clueless disciples get a central role in Jesus’ kingdom mission.

But – just like Jesus – they may encounter difficulty:

11 And if any place will not welcome you or listen to you, leave that place and shake the dust off your feet as a testimony against them.’

That’s quite a sign, to shake the dust off their feet against those who don’t believe:

This is a searing indictment since Jews travelling outside Palestine were required to shake themselves free of dust when returning home lest they pollute the holy land.[2]

In other words, if people rejected the message, treat them like they are heathens, even if they are Jews living in the Holy Land!

Jesus prepares them for the worst, just as he has suffered rejection at Nazareth. Don’t waste your time with such people, he says, move on to where it will be more fruitful.

Local Preachers and ministers might identify a little bit with the disciples here: we have all known congregations that have been resistant to our preaching of the word. I think there are serious questions about whether the denomination should pour resources into such churches.

In that sense, those we send out on mission should be able to know that they can move on from the places of resistance and opposition to those where the Holy Spirit is at work with the prevenient grace we talked about earlier. I once heard about an Anglican curate who had a terrible time in his first parish. On the day he moved out, he drove to the edge of the parish boundary, took off the socks he was wearing, and threw them down as a sign of shaking the dust off his feet against those who had mistreated him.

All that said, the disciples with their half-baked faith see amazing results.

So – let’s by all means anticipate possible opposition or resistance to the Gospel, but let’s leave things in the hands of the Holy Spirit to work miracles in people’s hearts and minds, and let’s also be willing to walk away from those who are hostile to our faith and go somewhere fruitful.

[1] James R Edwards, The Gospel According To Mark, p177f.

[2] Edwards, p181.

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Video Worship – A Conversation Can Change The World

This week’s video worship is based on the story of Philip introducing Nathanael to Jesus. Here’s the video; the text of the talk is below.

John 1:43-51

This simple story may make us nervous. Some of us find it difficult to share our faith. So to hear a story which makes the importance of faith-sharing clear and which makes it sound effortless for others may give rise to concern.

But as we make our way through John’s narrative I hope to show you that this is actually quite an encouraging account of sharing Jesus with others.

Chapter one of the story is about conversation. Jesus’ approach to Philip is conversational:

43 The next day Jesus decided to leave for Galilee. Finding Philip, he said to him, ‘Follow me.’

The same could be said of Philip’s approach to Nathanael:

45 Philip found Nathanael and told him, ‘We have found the one Moses wrote about in the Law, and about whom the prophets also wrote – Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.’

Take a moment to consider something about Philip and his background.

44 Philip, like Andrew and Peter, was from the town of Bethsaida.

He is from up north, away from the sophisticated south around Jerusalem where all the movers and shakers lived. He and Andrew have Greek names, and given that parts of Galilee had been influenced by Greek culture you might say they have a less than entirely kosher background. Therefore, they are not likely to be fluent Jewish theologians, able to express the pure faith eloquently and defend it academically.

In other words, they are like many ordinary church members.

But what Philip (and Andrew) can do is talk simply and honestly with people about why Jesus is important to them. Philip has a simple faith, and he can tell Nathaniel that he believes Jesus is the fulfilment of all his hopes.

And that is something we can all do in ordinary conversation. It doesn’t have to be forced. We don’t have to steer the conversation. We are not all evangelists but we are all witnesses and we can say what Jesus means to us.

That might be quite significant at present. What if Christians were saying how their faith in Jesus has held them up through the coronavirus pandemic?

We don’t know whether people will react positively or not, but we’re not responsible for their reactions: they are. Our responsibility is to be a witness to Jesus and all he has done for us.

Chapter two of this story is about cynicism. Nathanael’s initial response is indeed negative:

46 ‘Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?’ Nathanael asked.

It’s pretty disdainful, isn’t it? Nathanael comes from a village nearby, namely Cana, and perhaps there was some rivalry. But Nazareth was certainly what we might call a ‘humble’ place. In Surrey terms, Jesus’ upbringing was more Sheerwater than Virginia Water.

What do we do when the response to our conversation about Jesus is this kind of cynicism? I can tend to get defensive or alternatively walk away when people get cynical with me, but Philip was a better man than I am. His reaction is simple (and perhaps quiet):

‘Come and see,’ said Philip.

He doesn’t press Nathanael for a decision. He doesn’t demand immediate acceptance. He knows if Nathanael is to follow Jesus he must embrace the decision for himself. ‘Come and see.’

How can we say ‘Come and see’ to cynical friends today? The pandemic makes it particularly hard, because we can’t invite someone to church or to a small group. But in the present circumstances we could point them to suitable videos online or to books.

And the sheer fact that we can simply say, ‘Come and see’ in a way that shows we don’t feel threatened may be its own witness to what the peace of Christ in our hearts does for us.

Chapter three is about encounter.

47 When Jesus saw Nathanael approaching, he said of him, ‘Here truly is an Israelite in whom there is no deceit.’

48 ‘How do you know me?’ Nathanael asked.

Jesus answered, ‘I saw you while you were still under the fig-tree before Philip called you.’

49 Then Nathanael declared, ‘Rabbi, you are the Son of God; you are the king of Israel.’

Cynical Nathanael has his world rocked.

Cliff Richard once covered a Christian song called ‘Better than I know myself.’ The chorus said, ‘You know me better than I know myself.’ This is what Nathanael discovers about Jesus, and it stuns him.

And Jesus knows him not only as cynical Nathanael, but as ‘an Israelite in whom there is no deceit.’ He sees not merely the sin but also the potential for goodness.

Effectively by saying that Nathanael has no deceit in him, Jesus is giving a big compliment: he is telling him that he is better than the founder of Israel, Jacob, who spent so much of his life deceiving family members. That’s quite something to say to someone who has been sitting under a fig-tree – the usual posture for someone seriously studying the Jewish Law.[i]

St Augustine says that he was reading beneath a fig tree when he heard the call of Jesus to ‘pick up and read’ the New Testament.[ii]

Augustine had led a sexually dissolute life to the distress of his mother Monica, but the voice of Jesus changed everything. And although he remained imperfect and didn’t resolve all his personal issues in this life, he became one of the greatest ever church leaders and Christian thinkers the world has seen.

We cannot manipulate people into the kingdom of God, and we shouldn’t try. Our rôle is to tell people how Jesus has made a difference in our lives and to invite them to ‘Come and see.’ It’s then up to Jesus to do the rest and for people to decide whether to respond. So we simply pray for him to reveal himself to the people with whom we have shared our faith.

Chapter four, the final chapter of this story, is about revelation.

50 Jesus said, ‘You believe because I told you I saw you under the fig-tree. You will see greater things than that.’ 51 He then added, ‘Very truly I tell you, you will see “heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending on” the Son of Man.’

You may remember that the comedians Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse created two characters called Smashie and Nicey. They were old, hammy disc jockeys, allegedly based on Dave Lee Travis and the late Alan Freeman. Every sketch finished with them playing the same record on the turntable – Bachman Turner Overdrive, ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet.’

Well, ‘you ain’t seen nothing yet’ could be a summary of Jesus’ response to Nathanael’s confession of faith in him. Jesus this is bigger than just you and me. I have come to connect heaven and earth – hence the angels ascending and descending on him.

Mission is more than just the personal relationship between an individual and Jesus, important as that is. Mission connects us with the vast, eternal purposes of God to reconcile heaven and earth and to make all things new. When Jesus calls someone to have faith in him, he calls them to play their part in those eternal plans.

Indeed for some, that is the appeal of the Gospel. While many may be drawn by the promise of sins forgiven, others connect with Jesus when they realise that he gives them a purpose in life that goes way beyond what an ordinary career can offer.

So one former acquaintance of mine has a global ministry of speaking and writing on creation care. His concern for the environment has spanned decades and it all goes back to a faith that believes in a God who wants to make all things new.

Another acquaintance found his career changing from being a professional theologian to one with a passion for adoption and fostering. He set up a charity and has recently handed over the leadership of it, because he has been appointed as a government adviser on adoption and fostering. Where did it all come from? A big picture of a God who wants to bring reconciliation and healing everywhere.

Now doesn’t that make you wonder? What if we spoke more about what Jesus means to us? What if some people, even though cynical, were willing to be introduced? What might Jesus do in their lives? How might he use them for good as he brings together heaven and earth?

It all starts with an ordinary conversation.

[i] Richard A Burridge, John: The People’s Commentary, p45.

[ii] Ibid., citing Confessions 8:28-29.

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