Tag: new heavens and new earth

Harvest Festival: A Harvest of Restoration, Joel 2:21-32

Joel 2:21-32

Many years ago, listeners to Radio 4’s Sunday morning service choked on their corn flakes when the minister leading a harvest festival announced: “And now, the children will bring up their gifts.”

I am glad I never witnessed that!

At harvest festival, there are certain themes that we regularly celebrate – not least the goodness of God in creation but also God’s concern for justice, because not everyone receives what they need from the harvest of the land. These are important themes to consider, even if harvest festival as we know it was merely the invention of a Victorian clergyman in the Cornish village of Morwenstow in 1843. In case you ever need to know it for a quiz, his name was Robert Hawker.

But our reading from Joel prompts another harvest theme, and that is restoration.

The context of Joel’s prophecy is that a locust swarm has invaded the Holy Land, devastating all the crops, and leaving the people facing starvation. Joel says that this is a warning from God to call the people back to him in repentance, although it’s hard to be sure what particular sins have been committed. Part of their returning to the Lord includes fasting – which they may already have been doing involuntarily due to the food shortages.

But now it appears God has heard their cry for mercy. Crops are growing again and he has driven out the locusts. In this context we hear the wonderful words of restoration in our reading. The people truly have reason to give thanks for having crops to harvest again.

Moreover, Joel tells the people that God’s restoration project is bigger and better than they ever asked or imagined. What does it include?

Firstly and most obviously, restoration of the land:

We hear that once again there will be pasture for the wild animals, autumn and spring rains, threshing-floors filled with grains, and vats overflowing with new wine and oil, and that these are reasons for rejoicing, not fear (verses 21-24).

We are used to supporting charities that help with disaster relief – whether it’s earthquakes, floods, droughts, or war. But in the popular mind we are often only thinking about helping those who are in trouble there and then. Yet many of these organisations will want to be in the affected areas for the long haul. Providing temporary accommodation, food, and medical help is only the beginning for them. They know there is a rebuilding job to be done. It’s not for nothing that ‘All We Can’ used to be called the ‘Methodist Relief and Development Fund’.

So, for example, if I visit the ‘Stories’ section of Tearfund’s website, then yes, I will find one account of emergency relief in South Sudan following floods. Homes, infrastructure, and farming land have all been destroyed, and relief workers are trying to bring in temporary shelters, food supplies, and clean water.

But I will also find the story of a small church in Bangladesh that is transforming its village. Many of the people come from lower castes. One consequence of this is they are often not well educated. Only menial jobs are available. But the outcomes from this church of just 33 members studying the Bible have been listed by their pastor:

‘We have seen financial development along with spiritual development.

‘We don’t only do church-based work, we also do various other things outside of the church. For example, we plant trees on behalf of the church. We also do awareness work about hygiene – not only in our congregation, but we also discuss these things in our community. We teach health awareness about toilet issues, such as having to wear sandals, what to do before going to the toilet, and having to use soap after coming back from the toilet.’

Their communication with the government has led to 24 new homes being built. With a water supply that contains toxic levels of arsenic and iron, they have built a water pump. They soon plan to campaign against child marriage.

All this is because they believe in a God who restores the land. God wants to make his creation new. If a small church of poor, uneducated people can make such a difference in their village, what can we do? By all means let us give our harvest gifts, but can we not be more ambitious than that?

Secondly, we have restoration of the people:

In verses 25-27 we hear that God will repay the people for the years the locusts have eaten. They will eat again and praise God. Twice he says, ‘never again will my people be shamed.’

There is a human toll to disasters: not just things like hunger, but also shame. Given that Israel had suffered the plague of locusts due to some unspecified sin, there will have been shame at the wrongdoing. The Gospel says that in Jesus God restores us from the shame of our sins. Those burdens we have carried are ones we can lay down at the foot of the Cross and find them burned up by the holy love of God. The blood of Jesus deals with them – for in the Old Testament blood symbolises life and Jesus replaces our shame with his life.

But shame is not limited to the guilty. Tragically, it is also felt by those who have been sinned against. If you have been following the news story about the monstrous abuse perpetrated by the late Mohamed al-Fayed, the former owner of Harrod’s this week, and if you have heard the stories of women coming forward to say they were raped by him, then time and time again you will have heard those women say that one of the reasons they said nothing for years was their sense of shame. Abusers control their victims by seeking to transfer shame onto them.

And here the Gospel is again by definition Good News for the shamed. Jesus is as much in the business of healing the broken as he is of forgiving sinners. We know that from the Gospels, don’t we?

Many years ago, I read a book called ‘The Locust Years’. It is the story of a woman called Jacqui Williams who went travelling in the United States but became caught up in the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church – the cult popularly known as the Moonies. They took over her life, reducing her to an existence of little more than selling flowers, sweets, and trinkets on the street to support the cult’s income. When she had to return to the UK to renew her visa, she thankfully found faith in Jesus and her new-found Christian faith was her liberation. The book is called ‘The Locust Years’ after this very passage in Joel with God’s promise to restore the years the locusts have eaten – in her case, her time with the Moonies.

The Christian Church is about the business of seeing people restored in Christ. And if we’re not about that, we barely deserve the name ‘church.’ What used to be called ‘the harvest of souls’ is the restoration of people through the love of God in Christ. It’s why John Wesley said we had no business except the saving of souls.

Thirdly and finally, we have the restoration of all things:

Here we’re moving to the famous verses at the end of the reading (28-32) about God pouring out his Spirit on all flesh – sons and daughters, old, young, and servants alike. And I hope you’re thinking, ‘I hear that every year on Pentecost Sunday, because Peter quotes it in his sermon.’

It’s set in the middle of language about ‘the great and dreadful day of the LORD’ and contains references to the sun being turned to darkness and the moon to blood. The nature of this language is clearly not literal. After references to the sun going dark and the moon turning to blood, do not expect someone like Carol Kirkwood or Elizabeth Rizzini or Tomasz Schafernaker to pop up and add, ‘These will be followed by sunny intervals and scattered showers.’

So we’re in ‘end times’ language here, but that doesn’t mean a short countdown to the Second Coming. We have been in the end times since the Resurrection, and that’s one reason this language occurs at Pentecost. God’s kingdom has come and is coming, but it’s overlapping with the old order of things.

Therefore, God’s goal of ‘making all things new’ with a new creation that includes new heavens, a new earth, and a new Jerusalem that we read about in Revelation 21 doesn’t just all pop up at the end of history as we know it. That stuff begins now. Salvation and deliverance in every form have begun.

Hence, even now God wants to bring restoration in every way. And we the church are his agents of transformation. You name it, God wants to do it. The restoring of relationships with him. The restoring of relationships between people. The restoring of our broken relationship with creation. The restoring of the body. The restoring of a just and peaceful society. All these (and probably more!) are the many and varied harvests of restoration which God desires.

Naturally, not all of these things will come in all their fulness before Jesus appears to wrap things up. Don’t we all have the agonised experience of unanswered prayer? But let’s go for as much as we can get. Let’s not give up in despair, because some things have gone wrong. Let’s set out on this wonderful ministry of restoration that we have been given as the people of God. With the help of the Holy Spirit who is poured out on us, as these verses from Joel say, let’s confront the brokenness of this old order with the ministry of restoration that Jesus began and entrusted to us.

Who knows how much of a harvest we might see?

0

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.

2

Restoring Work (Easter 5 Resurrection People 6) John 21:1-14

John 21:1-14

Christians are a little too good at times at keeping God in a box. One of the ways we do that is we put him in a church box. The only place we think we’ll encounter God is in a church setting.

But people who do that haven’t read the Gospels very carefully. Much more of the action with Jesus is not at the synagogue or the Temple but in daily life.

And if the Resurrection (and the Ascension) make Jesus present everywhere then we can meet him at the breakfast table, at the shops, and at our place of work, as the disciples did here.

How do we feel about that? Are there times when we would rather he wasn’t there? I remember a Christian businessman saying, ‘On Sundays, my priorities are first, God, second, my family, and third, my work. On Mondays, those priorities are reversed.’

Does this truth make us feel uncomfortable, or is it good news? If, like that businessman, we’re clearly uncomfortable with the prospect, reflect with me now, because actually, it’s good news that the risen Lord is present everywhere, including work.

Firstly, the risen Lord is present to guide our work.

Peter and the lads are experienced fishermen. By going fishing at night they have opted for the time commonly accepted to be the most productive for fishermen on the Sea of Galilee. Yet they catch nothing. Not even some plankton.

Why on earth – apart from desperation – would they take instructions from Jesus, who had been a carpenter, not a fisherman? What does he know?

Well, he must know something, because one of those little unexplained details of the story is that he has already got some fish and is cooking them on the beach!

Of course, as readers of the Gospel, we know he’s more than a carpenter, he’s the Risen Lord. Those pesky fish that Peter and his friends are trying to catch are part of the creation he oversaw.

And furthermore, in that creation the human race was assigned work as a good thing, for it was part of the stewardship of creation under God which is the human calling.

So it makes complete sense that the risen Lord is interested in the disciples’ fishing work. It isn’t inferior because it’s not overtly religious. It isn’t inferior because this is what several of them left to follow Jesus. It’s still valuable as part of what makes for a flourishing world as God designed it.

The same is true for us, whether we do paid work or whether we volunteer, whether we need the income, or whether in retirement we are free to dedicate our time to other causes.

Therefore our risen Lord has a genuine interest in our work, and that involves him guiding us in that as much as in any church decision. Our work is to be a matter for prayer as much as any other aspect of our lives.

Are there areas of our paid work or our volunteering where we are struggling? Have we thought that this was secular and not religious, and therefore not brought it to God? That would be a sad mistake.

You may be an employee or self-employed. You may be a business owner. Or you may be a student. Or you are using free time to make a difference as a volunteer. Jesus is risen and alive and cares about what you are doing. Don’t be afraid to involve him. He wants to be involved.

So bring him that staffing decision. Bring him that knotty problem your lecturer set. Bring him the moral issue you’re wrestling with. He is interested, and he is present to help.

Secondly, the risen Lord is present to give purpose to our work.

I once had a manager who was the sort of person who lived to work. This was a problem for most of her staff, who generally worked to live. The office was everything to Mrs Freeman, and she couldn’t understand those who didn’t see it that way.

Why were the rest of us different? Well, for a few, they had spouses who earned a lot more and so their earnings weren’t a life and death issue. But for many, it was because work was not a place of fulfilment but of frustration or tedium. It certainly wasn’t a fulfilling experience.

I think many people would identify with the latter group. We’ve replaced the Seven Dwarfs’ song ‘Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work we go’ with ‘I owe, I owe, it’s off to work I go.’

And as I’ve said to you before, I’ve had that same experience of frustration and tedium in the ministry just as I did in the office. Those who romantically look on at my work and think it must be some kind of uninterrupted heavenly bliss have never got close to a manse family.

I have also testified before that the Bible verse which just about kept me going during the worst of times was 1 Corinthians 15:58, the climax to Paul’s great chapter on the Resurrection, where he says that a great consequence of Christ being risen from the dead is that our labour is not in vain.

If you remember the sin of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3, you will recall that when God finds them he pronounces various curses on them and the snake. One of those curses is that Adam will find work to be frustrating. The Good News of salvation in the Resurrection reverses this curse, just as it reverses our separation from God by sin.

We heard that promise when we also read Isaiah 65:17-25 in the service:

21 They will build houses and dwell in them;
    they will plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
22 No longer will they build houses and others live in them,
    or plant and others eat.
For as the days of a tree,
    so will be the days of my people;
my chosen ones will long enjoy
    the work of their hands.
23 They will not labour in vain,
    nor will they bear children doomed to misfortune;
for they will be a people blessed by the Lord,
    they and their descendants with them.

Surely Peter and his colleagues in the boat had a sense of this when they dragged their huge catch to shore. After the fruitlessness of the night, now their purpose was fulfilled. They had fish. They could sell fish. They could make a living.

Not everything will be put right now. The vision of complete fulfilment awaits the ‘new heavens and new earth’ of which Isaiah 65 and Revelation 21 speak. (Which implies, by the way, that there will be work to do in the life to come – but it will be fulfilling work.)

However, we can ask the risen Lord whose resurrection promises that coming new heavens and new earth to help us find purpose and meaning in what we are doing now. It may be the chance to serve. It may be creative management of the earth and its resources.

Sure, while sin lasts there will still be frustration. But as the new creation begins to poke through, the risen Lord will bring purpose and meaning to what we do. Let us ask him to make that clear for us.

Thirdly and finally, the risen Lord is present to bless our work.

One hundred and fifty-three fish! Bulging, over-filled, and heavy nets! This is clearly way more than a normal catch!

Over the centuries, various scholars have tried to find symbolic meaning or significance in the number 153, and maybe that’s not surprising, given the many layers of meaning we often find in John’s Gospel. However, those attempts have largely failed, and perhaps we just need to default to a simple explanation.

Somebody counted the fish. The risen Lord had blessed the work of his disciples’ hands.

In Ephesians 3:20 the Apostle Paul tells that prayer can lead to God doing

Immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us.

There is no reason to confine that promise to church work. Paul places no such limit. And this story shows that we can seek God’s blessing through the risen Christ in every part of life, including work such as paid employment, studies, and volunteering.

How significant might that be in the economic situation we are now facing? As prices increase at a rate we haven’t seen for thirty years, as manufacturers’ costs go up, and as household budgets get squeezed to the point where more families are having to make impossible choices, would this not be a great time to ask the risen Lord to bless our work?

So what are the needs of your employer, your educational institution, or your charity? Pray that the risen Lord will be present to bless.

Yes, let’s increase the range of people and causes that we pray God will bless. Not churches and the sick, but all sorts of elements in society. As you walk along the high street in the village, why not pray a blessing on the businesses? OK, there will be one or two whose business you will consider inappropriate for blessing, such as the betting shops, but why not pray that blessing?

The prophet Jeremiah told those Jews who were forcibly taken into Babylonian exile that they should ‘seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which [God] has carried [them] into exile’ (Jeremiah 29:7).

This makes for an interesting challenge: instead of complaining about our society, why don’t we instead pray blessing upon it through the risen Christ?

In conclusion, because the risen Christ is present everywhere to bless we need to get rid of our old sacred/secular divide. Jesus doesn’t see things like that. As one preacher once put it, ‘The only thing that is secular is sin.’

No, see the whole creation as the arena for our risen Lord to be at work, because his Resurrection is the first sign of him making that entire creation new.

And let that vision of the Risen One who transformed the fishing expedition of his friends be one that inspires us to pray and to believe that he also wants to transform our work, our studies, our volunteering, our work in our homes and families.

Because all of those are part of the creation he is renewing. Let’s join him in his work – in prayer and in action.

0

Create a website or blog at WordPress.com

Up ↑