Tag: Monty Python

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

Psalm 130

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

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

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

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

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

Firstly, hope for forgiveness:

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

2     Lord, hear my voice.

Let your ears be attentive

    to my cry for mercy.

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

    Lord, who could stand?

4 But with you there is forgiveness,

    so that we can, with reverence, serve you.

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

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

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

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

4 But with you there is forgiveness,

    so that we can, with reverence, serve you.

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

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

Secondly, hope for life:

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

    and in his word I put my hope.

6 I wait for the Lord

    more than watchmen wait for the morning,

    more than watchmen wait for the morning.

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

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

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

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

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

Thirdly and finally, hope for the world:

7 Israel, put your hope in the Lord,

    for with the Lord is unfailing love

    and with him is full redemption.

8 He himself will redeem Israel

    from all their sins.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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Paul’s Favourite Church 4: Shining Like Stars (Philippians 2:12-30)

Philippians 2:12-30

I’ve talked before about how my late father was an amateur astronomer, and how he shared his love of the subject with me as a child. I never picked up his level of interest, but he was understandably proud of one of my sister’s boys who went on to study astrophysics as part of his first degree.

But I still have fond memories of gazing up into a clear night sky with him, while he pointed out various constellations, and the names of the stars.

When my daughter as a teenager started asking me the same questions when we were walking home at night from her youth club, I installed an app on my phone that we could point to the sky and it would show us what all the stars and constellations were.

And recently my wife has been noticing these heavenly objects when we have been out on late night dog walks. So for her birthday I bought her a planisphere, a printed resource that helps you identify the planets and the stars.

I still get a thrill – and a poignant memory – when I see Orion or The Plough. I often think of Psalm 8 and get a sense of wonder and even of worship:

3 When I consider your heavens,
    the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
    which you have set in place,
4 what is mankind that you are mindful of them,
    human beings that you care for them?

In today’s passage Paul doesn’t call us to gaze in wonder at the stars but figuratively to emulate them:

Then you will shine among them like stars in the sky (verse 15b)

In the world, our calling is to shine like stars in a dark sky. We are to be those points of light in the darkness. Rather than just moan about all the darkness around us, we get on with shining with the light of Christ.

We do this, says Paul, under his call to

continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, 13 for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfil his good purpose.

God has saved us for a purpose. He has made us new. Now we live out that newness of life – but not on our own, because God is at work in us to make it possible. And this will make us like shining stars in the darkness of the world.

So what qualities does Paul say will enable the Philippians to shine like stars in their dark world? I think we’ll find that things haven’t changed that much.

Firstly, kindness:

14 Do everything without grumbling or arguing, 15 so that you may become blameless and pure, ‘children of God without fault in a warped and crooked generation.’

Well, that should be a shoo-in, shouldn’t it? Don’t grumble or argue.

Unfortunately, it isn’t in some churches. It is more widespread than some of us would like to believe, especially when we tell ourselves that our churches are friendly and welcoming.

Now I freely admit that as a minister I am sensitive to this one, because we church leaders are often the target of the grumbling, when people don’t like what we do or what we don’t do. You may know the old joke where the question is: ‘What’s the favourite Sunday lunch in a Christian household?’ The answer? ‘Roast preacher.’

And I also know that some of this grumbling comes our way because in these days of declining and aging congregations, people pin massive hopes on a new minister being the one to turn around the losses. Which is why at one previous circuit welcome service I quoted the famous line from Monty Python’s Life Of Brian: ‘He’s not the Messiah, he’s just a very naughty boy.’ The job of Messiah was taken two thousand years ago.

I’m also sensitive to this, though, not for the barbs thrown at people like me, but because in my position I hear the stories of those who have left a church, having been wounded by cruel words and actions. Do you know the damage caused by a harsh word in church?

More positively, did you notice just how highly Paul rates the idea of avoiding grumbling and arguing? He says it contributes to us being ‘blameless and pure.’ So often when we think about what makes us blameless and pure we think about the avoidance of certain ‘big’ sins, not least those involving sexual impurity. And I’m certainly not denying that these things are important.

But here, Paul says that if we want to be ‘blameless and pure, ‘children of God without fault in a warped and crooked generation’’, then saying no to grumbling and arguing in the church is also part of this.

And doing this also makes us shine: we become ‘without fault in a warped and crooked generation’. A Christian community that chooses kindness over harshness will stand out in society. Indeed, we shine like stars in the dark sky.

When we are among our friends outside the church, can we truly say that the congregation we belong to is such a wonderful place of kindness and care, where people are not ripped apart by the words of others but rather are built up? Wouldn’t it be great if our churches were known in their communities as the places where people receive kindness?

Secondly, faithfulness:

Then you will shine among them like stars in the sky 16 as you hold firmly to the word of life.

Faithfulness – to the Gospel: ‘hold firmly to the word of life.’ This isn’t just an internal thing in the church, by the way: it’s also outward-facing, since it can also be translated, ‘hold out the word of life.’ In the church and in the world, we are called to hold faithfully to the Gospel, because that will make us shine like stars in the dark sky.

For too long now, we have heard church leaders say that we should adapt our message to the society we live in, because parts of it are unacceptable today. But the moment we just make Christianity like a religious version of the wider culture, then there is no longer any reason to join the church. Why join something that is just like how you are already, anyway? There is no point.

No: the only hope for the church to be like shining stars in the dark sky is if we keep to the Gospel, even and especially where it differs from the culture in which we live.

And if you don’t believe me, then listen to the respected historian Tom Holland. He has been on quite a journey in his thinking and in his life. In 2016, he wrote,

It took me a long time to realise my morals are not Greek or Roman, but thoroughly, and proudly, Christian.

He realised that we owe the good things in our society to our Christian foundations and began an excursion into the message of Christianity.

Recently, he has publicly urged churches to ‘keep Christianity weird’, and to ‘preach the weird stuff’. All those crucial values we cherish actually have their basis in the weird stuff of Christianity like the miraculous, not least the resurrection, ascension, and second coming of Jesus.

The church leaders and members who trumpet how the resurrection is just a way of saying someone stays in our memory, or that the ascension is a fairy-tale and the second coming is science fiction are not doing the church any good at all. They are doing the church a grave dis-service. They are removing all power from the Gospel and leaving it like a limp lettuce leaf.

If anyone comes into your church’s pulpit and starts preaching this stuff, do not just dismiss it and say, ‘It’s interesting to hear diverse opinions’, or ‘Let’s live with contradictory convictions.’ No! See them for what they are: wolves in sheep’s clothing.

Let’s stay faithful to the Gospel in all its weirdness: that’s where the power to transform lives is.

Thirdly, service:

Here I’m thinking of what Paul says at the end of the reading about Timothy and Epaphroditus. Paul says that Timothy will be concerned for the Philippians’ welfare, that he doesn’t spend his time on his own interests, and he has a track record of serving (verses 20-22). Epaphroditus, who didn’t enjoy good health, almost died for the Gospel and risked his life to help Paul (verses 26-30).

It’s not enough to be ‘nice’, which might be what you would think had Paul stopped after his admonition to avoid grumbling and arguing. A faith based on Jesus, who suffered and died on the Cross, cannot be reduced to ‘niceness.’ Timothy and Epaphroditus, with their modelling of selflessness and sacrifice, show such a faith in action.

People like Timothy and Epaphroditus are true Christian heroes. These are the kind of people we rightly celebrate. We write books about them. We use them as sermon illustrations! They are exceptional.

But why are they exceptional? Isn’t their example simply what should be the Christian norm? Aren’t their lives of service, sacrifice, and risk-taking the natural consequences of Jesus’ teaching and example?

And if they are, then why aren’t more of us like them?

Is it that it’s easier and more comfortable to opt for niceness rather than sacrificial servanthood? Have we bought into ‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild’ but not the rest of him? Are we keen to scoop up the blessings of faith while not taking the responsibilities and the challenges?

Jesus certainly shone like a star in the dark sky, and so as we work out our own salvation, that is going to involve beginning to imitate him. That’s what Timothy and Epaphroditus did. They found ways to imitate Christ, and in doing so they shone brightly.

So I wonder in what ways Jesus is calling us to imitate him? Who are we being called to serve, as Timothy did? For whom are we being called to take risks, as Epaphroditus did?

And let’s remember that both of these men had their frailties. We read explicitly here that Epaphroditus had his health issues. We read in other New Testament Epistles that Timothy was timid. These were not people who were somehow genetically wired to be heroes. They had the same imperfections and weaknesses that we have.

Much as we might like to believe otherwise, the New Testament doesn’t have two categories of Christians: the ordinary ones, for whom a fairly modest standard of lifestyle is required, and the keen ones, who are held to higher standards, and in whose reflected glory we can bask. Jesus never made divisions like that.

The call to kindness, to faithfulness to the Gospel, and to sacrificial service is for all of us. Do we want to shine like stars in the dark sky? Or do we want our light to be snuffed out?

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Sermon: The Resurrection Of Dead Bones

Ezekiel 37:1-14

‘Ello. I wish to register a complaint.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Because,” said Moody, “I leak.”

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

The second prophecy. Ezekiel sees some movement:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can we pray that? We need to.

The third prophecy:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[1] Script here.

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

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

[4] Adapted from Clive Calver, Sold Out.

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Links

OK, here’s another round-up of links I found during the last week. Have fun.

A Theremin (remember Good Vibrations?) inside a Russian doll. (Via Mojo.)

A friend of mine once rewrote Monty Python’s Dead Parrot Sketch as the Dead Church Sketch. But now we learn that the ancient Greeks pre-empted the dead parrot sketch.

Jesus spoke about lust as ‘adultery of the heart’. Now, a ‘virtual affair’ in Second Life has led to a divorce.

The Today programme on BBC Radio 4 ponders great drum solos.

Remember the Johnny Cash song ‘One piece at a time’? Well, a Russian Orthodox church has been stolen, brick by brick.

Once it was pizzas looking like Jesus, now it’s Buddha bee hives.

You want a prayer movement – how about this? Artist creates ‘public prayer booths’ in NYC. They look like phone booths, apparently.

If only this were true: hoax New York Times newspaper proclaims end of Iraq war.

My father has a life-long interest in astronomy. Doubtless he will have been excited to read about the Hubble Telescope spotting a planet orbiting the star Fomalhaut and the planetary system discovered by the Gemini Observatory in Chile. (Both links via Personal Computer World‘s weekly email.)

Ruth Haley Barton has written on the loneliness of leadership: loneliness drives us to seek the presence of God rather than any notion of the Promised Land.

Unhappy people watch more TV. ‘TV doesn’t really seem to satisfy people over the long haul the way that social involvement or reading a newspaper does,’ says researcher John P. Robinson.

Go on, you want to make cake in a mug.

MyBloop – unlimited free online storage, max file size 1 GB. Via Chris Pirillo.

Twenty hated clichés. In contrast, here are James Emery White’s top five irritating Christian phrases.

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