Tag: preaching

Worship In The Midst Of The World (Isaiah 6)

Isaiah 6:1-13

I expect you’re aware of the custom whereby just before the Sunday service starts, the duty steward prays for the preacher in the vestry. Over the years, I have heard a variety of such prayers, the worst being one Good Friday where in his prayer the steward called the death of Jesus a mistake.

But another common one starts something like this: “Dear Lord, we gather here today to leave the world outside behind and concentrate on you.” Now I guess that could be interpreted more than one way. But is our worship really an escape from the world?

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord (verse 1a).

Is that just a date in Isaiah’s diary? I don’t think so. If all he wanted to tell us was the day on which he had a powerful experience of worship and commissioning, he would surely just have named the month and the day of the month. ‘On the twenty-third day of Nisan,’ or something like that.

No. Locating his divine encounter as happening ‘In the year that King Uzziah died,’ Isaiah affirms that worship takes place in the middle of what is happening in the world. The events of history do not drive our worship, for sure, but worship is located in the midst of politics, economics, and every power that competes to shape our lives.

What does this worship look like?

Firstly, glory:

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and exalted, seated on a throne; and the train of his robe filled the temple. 2 Above him were seraphim, each with six wings: with two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. 3 And they were calling to one another:

‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty;
    the whole earth is full of his glory.’

4 At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.

I once arrived at a church as a visiting preacher and was greeted by a member of the congregation who said, “I hope you’re going to entertain us today.” This brought out my Mister Grump side, and I replied, “Well, I hope we’re going to worship.”

We must get rid of this idea that worship is entertainment. It is a prominent heresy across all sorts of Christian traditions and worship styles. Worship is to give glory to the triune God, who is holy, holy, holy. We are here to honour his name and to give thanks for all he has done. Worship is God-centred or it is not worship at all.

Archbishop William Temple gave a famous definition of worship:

Worship is the submission of all of our nature to God. It is the quickening of the conscience by his holiness; the nourishment of mind with his truth; the purifying of imagination by his beauty; the opening of the heart to his love; the surrender of will to his purpose–all this gathered up in adoration, the most selfless emotion of which our nature is capable.[i]

None of this is an escape from the world, for God is the greatest reality there is. Moreover, as the Creator of this world and its Redeemer, God is where our focus needs to be, without having an escapist mentality.

So while it’s not true to say that ‘the world sets the agenda’ – that was one of the heresies from liberals at the World Council of Churches – it is true that we come to focus our energies on God, who created the world we live in through Christ and by the Spirit, and who also redeems the world through Christ and in the power of the Spirit.

Secondly, confession:

5 ‘Woe to me!’ I cried. ‘I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.’

6 Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. 7 With it he touched my mouth and said, ‘See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.’

If we truly encounter the living God in his glory in worship, then we shall realise quickly that we do not match up. That’s what Isaiah realises, and not only for himself. He admits not only his personal sin, but the sin of the nation. A true encounter with God will blow away once and for all the idea that we’re all good, decent people who merely make the occasional error in life. It will relieve us of the comfortable illusion that we are good enough for eternal life.

Furthermore, here our lives are calibrated not by the popular standards of the world but by God and his holiness alone.

Initially, this leaves Isaiah with a sense of hopelessness. He cannot get beyond ‘Woe is me! I am ruined!’ That’s desperate.

But God can get beyond it. A seraph brings a live coal from the altar, the place of sacrifice. It is God who provides for Isaiah and God’s people to know forgiveness and the removal of their sin.

If you remember the painful story in Genesis where God asks Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, you may recall how Isaac asks his father who will provide the lamb for the sacrifice. Abraham replies that God will provide the lamb. And he does – mercifully not in the way he was expecting.

Ultimately, we believe that is what God supremely did with Jesus at the Cross. The Lamb of God was provided. Now our sins are removed as we confess them. They have already been atoned for at Calvary.

The regularity of our failure is why we confess and receive assurance of forgiveness in every Sunday service. It is God’s free gift. We have not earned it. God has reached out in love to the world at the Cross. Will we look at the worldly horror of the Cross and allow it to cleanse and transform us?

Thirdly, God’s word:

8 Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?’

Following confession and forgiveness, the way is clear for us to hear God’s word. That’s why the reading of Scripture and the preaching come next in a typical Sunday service, by the way.

There’s no reading of Scripture in the Temple for Isaiah. It’s questionable what, if anything, they had in written form at this point – not much, for sure. But in any case, God speaks directly on this occasion.

If we are to be worshippers in the midst of the world, we need to hear God’s marching instructions to us. ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?’

Therefore, the reading and proclaiming of the word is to have an honoured and central place in our worship. It is not that with a variety of preachers we get to hear a whole host of different opinions, because the job of the preacher is not to foist their sentiments or even prejudices on the congregation; it is rather to proclaim what the Word of God says.

Therefore, there is another steward’s vestry prayer that both encourages me for its meaning but also humbles me by reminding me of the expectation on my task. It is when the steward prays that the congregation may hear your word through me. That is profoundly sobering!

This is not to say that a congregation should be uncritical of what the preacher says, although I do note the old joke which asks what the favourite Sunday lunch in a Christian household is. The answer is, ‘Roast preacher.’

But it is to say that we should be like the Berean Jews, whom Paul encountered on his missionary travels. In Acts 17:11 we read of them,

Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.

In some old pulpits, the preacher was confronted by a small plaque. On it were the words of the Greeks who came to meet Jesus before the crucifixion, where they told the disciples, ‘Sir, we would see Jesus.’ Our prayer and aspiration for worship needs to be that we see and hear Jesus, so that we know what he is expecting of us in the world.

Fourthly and finally, response:

And I said, ‘Here am I. Send me!’ (verse 8b)

Isaiah responds to God’s word. He is willing to go into the world on behalf of his God. We learn in the subsequent verses that he can’t necessarily expect people to respond positively to what he has to say, but nevertheless someone must go, and then if there is no redemption there will be no excuse. People will not be able to say they were not warned.

How does this play out in our worship? Within the service, it comes in the intercessions, which are meant to be a response to the word. (I’m not sure they always are, but that is the theory.) If you were used to services where the sermon was the climax of the service before the final hymn and blessing, but then noticed a change, where the intercessions followed the sermon, well, this is why.

And so it’s right that in our intercessions we pray not only for ourselves and the church, but for those in power, authority, or influence. If you read the Bible carefully, you will realise that the divine commands are not limited to God’s people. You will hear prophets speaking to kings and nations and all in authority.

This is a holy task. In the early church, those who had not yet been baptised and professed faith and who were undergoing catechism classes would leave the worship before the intercessions. Why? Because intercession is a priestly task, and they were not yet part of what we later called ‘the priesthood of all believers.’ But for those of us who believe, we are acting as God’s priests when we intercede in response to the word.

But the response doesn’t stop with the end of the prayers or with the blessing at the conclusion of the service. The genuineness of our response to the word is tested by what we do when we leave. At the end of the Latin Mass, Catholics were effectively told in the liturgy, ‘The Mass is over: now go out!’

Isaiah did that. It’s our calling, too. Like him, we may or may not see success in response to our bearing God’s word to the world in word and deed. But Isaiah kept faithfully doing it in response, because to do so in the world was intrinsic to true worship. May we do the same.

[i] William Temple, Readings In St John’s Gospel, on John 4:24.

0

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

Matthew 28:16-20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Firstly, make disciples by going:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Secondly, make disciples by baptising:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thirdly, make disciples by teaching:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

0

Mission in the Bible 6: The Apostolic Call (Mark 3:13-19)

Mark 3:13-19

Hearing a reading about the apostles might provoke a reaction in us that says, ‘What’s this got to do with us? We’re not in the same league as the apostles. We’re just a motley crew of ordinary Christians.’

Except we need to remember just how motley the apostolic crew was, too. How did James and John earn that nickname ‘Sons of thunder’ from Jesus? I envisage them turning up for apostolic meetings, gunning the engines of their Harley Davidsons.

We have the whole spectrum of political views from that day, ranging from Matthew the tax collector who helped fund the occupying Roman empire, to Simon the Zealot who wanted to send the Romans packing by the use of force.

We have a range of professions, from the physical labour exercised by the fishermen to the office accountant. That latter one would be Judas Iscariot, by the way: the Gospels tell us he was in charge of the finances.

Maybe the Twelve aren’t so far removed from us after all: the quiet and the loud, the right wing and the left wing, the manual labourers and the white collar workers. That’s not so very different from our diversity as a congregation, is it?

Sure, we may not be called by Jesus to be apostles, and we shall not exercise our calling in exactly the same way. But there are enough similarities for us to draw on here as we live out our calling to spread the apostolic faith. I’m taking verses 14 and 15 as the focus for our thoughts:

14 He appointed twelve that they might be with him and that he might send them out to preach 15 and to have authority to drive out demons.

There are three elements I’m going to pick out from these verses.

Firstly, ‘that they might be with him’ (verse 14).

In the Christian church, and especially in the Protestant traditions, we are very much into the idea that Christian life and witness involves us being highly active. We fill our churches with programmes, and we expect our ministers to be busy. We have a culture that faith is about doing rather than being.

I believe this is one of the reasons our churches are so often tired, dry, and dying. We can no more make Christian witness an endless cycle of action than we can drive our cars without filling up their tanks (or recharging their batteries). Our version of mission has been to run on empty. Is it any wonder it fails?

Before Jesus sent the apostles out, ‘He appointed twelve that they might be with him’ (my emphasis). We have nothing to share with the world if we are not in a vital relationship with Jesus Christ. How can we commend him if we spend no time with him? How can we expect people to see Jesus in us if we keep our distance from him?

For sure that involves our Sunday practices of worship and Holy Communion. But it also includes mutual sharing in small groups. It includes a personal prayer life each day. We can’t just rely on Sundays. Those of you who are married, would your marriage last if you and your spouse only spoke with each other once a week?

There are plenty of aids to help us in Bible reading and prayer. Traditional daily Bible reading notes still exist. You can get various ones from Scripture Union, or the excellent American daily devotional The Upper Room. Every Day With Jesus, which has been so popular for many years in the UK, is now available as an app for your smartphone or tablet.

Or the 24/7 Prayer movement has produced an app called Lectio 365. It gives you two brief prayer exercises a day. There is a morning one with a Bible reflection tuned to matters of prayer and mission. And there is an evening one where we can reflect with God on how the day has gone.

In the Western church, there is really no excuse when we have so many riches to help us with our devotional lives. It doesn’t reflect well on us that our brothers and sisters in far poorer parts of the world just get on with things and often have more vibrant prayer lives than us. Is that one reason why they tend to have more of an impact with their faith than we do?

If we want our church to have life, we need to begin by going back to spending time with Jesus. There is no substitute.

Secondly, ‘that he might send them out to preach’ (verse 14).

OK, so here’s where we might not all do things like the Twelve did. Jesus doesn’t call every disciple to be a preacher. But he does call every Christian to take his message into the world. We know people don’t like being ‘preached at’ today, but we do have good news to share.

In the ancient world, a herald would come to a town or a village, much like a town crier. There were two messages that he would call ‘Good news.’ One would be that Rome had a new emperor on the throne. The other would be that Rome’s armies had won a great battle.

The New Testament writers took inspiration from this. For them, there was not a new emperor on the throne of Rome but a new king on the throne of the universe, for Jesus had ascended to the Father’s right hand. He was not a coercive king like the Roman emperor, but still one who called people to follow the ways of his kingdom.

Similarly, the New Testament heralds proclaimed that Jesus too had won a great victory in battle – not by bludgeoning the enemy to death but by going to death himself at the Cross.

So our message of good news for today is that Jesus has done all that is necessary against the powers of evil in his death on the Cross, and that he now reigns in heaven, calling everyone to submit to his rule.

Our message is that Jesus has overcome all those things in life that frighten us the most, even death itself, and that he how calls for our allegiance.

If we live according to this message then it will provoke questions. If we are not frightened by what life can do to us, and if we are committed to the ways of Jesus, you bet people will notice and want to know more.

Here are the words of one such person[1]:

If you want, I’ll talk to you about God and salvation. I’ll turn up the volume of heartbreak to the maximum, so to speak. The fact is that I am a Christian, which usually rather sets me up for constant ridicule in the Anti-Corruption Foundation, because mostly our people are atheists, and I was once quite a militant atheist myself. But now I am a believer, and that helps me a lot in my activities, because everything becomes much, much easier. There are fewer dilemmas in my life, because there is a book in which, in general, it is more or less clearly written what action to take in every situation. It’s not always easy to follow this book, of course, but I am actually trying. And so, as I said, it’s easier for me, probably, than for many others, to engage in politics. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied.” I’ve always thought that this particular commandment is more or less an instruction to activity. And so, while certainly not really enjoying the place where I am, I have no regrets about coming back, or about what I’m doing. It’s fine, because I did the right thing. On the contrary, I feel a real kind of satisfaction. Because at some difficult moment I did as required by the instructions, and did not betray the commandment.

I wonder if you know who said those words? They have been widely reported in the last week. Because they came in 2021 from Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who was recently murdered in prison.

So – firstly, be with Jesus. Secondly, preach the good news. Thirdly, ‘to have authority to drive out demons’ (verse 15).

Ooh. That’s a bit scary. And maybe we divide here between those who would run a mile from something like this and a few Christians on the other hand who would get unhealthily excited by it. We have also had the subject sensationalised and distorted by Hollywood and by the media generally.

Every now and again we hear of terrible misuses of this, where some church leader believes somebody to be possessed by demons, and physical force is used, leading to serious injury or even to death.

That’s why most churches restrict who can practise this. In Methodism, you now have to apply and be interviewed before you can be recognised as someone who practises in this area. You are not permitted just to go off and do exorcisms independently.

We may not have the particular authority to drive out demons. But all Christians have a mandate from Jesus to oppose evil. For evil is not just about what the devil does, according to the New Testament, it is also about the world and the flesh.

When the Bible talks about ‘The world’ in negative terms, it means the systems of this world in their opposition to God. So it’s when rulers, politics, or culture line up against God’s kingdom as inaugurated by Jesus. So it includes things such as when politicians don’t care about the poor. It’s about when our culture raises up created things as false idols – so think of the ways people are denigrated today for not being in sexual relationships and you will see one thing that our society treats as an idol. These things need to be opposed.

When the Bible talks about ‘The flesh’ as a bad thing it doesn’t simply mean the human body. It means our sinful human nature. It means that natural bias we seem to have towards doing what is wrong. And this too needs to be opposed.

And just talking about these things may make us realise that opposing evil is not just an external thing: it is also something we fight within ourselves. We have our idols. We have our own inner tendencies towards sin. And as I read this week, even when we take up an offering in an act of worship we engaging in an idol-busting exercise. For as someone said,

“It’s not a time when you’re trying to get money out of people’s pockets. It’s a time when you’re trying to get the idols out of their hearts.”

So in conclusion, the apostolic call to mission can be stated quite simply. It is fueled by spending time with Jesus. It is seen in living and proclaiming the Good News of Jesus’ reign. And it is characterised by opposing evil in all its forms, externally and internally.

It’s simple to state, but challenging to practise. So let us rely on the Holy Spirit to live out this call.

[1] Found on a friend’s Facebook feed. Source unknown.

0

The Superior Authority Of Jesus (Mark 1:21-28)

A shorter act of worship and a shorter talk too, this week. It’s just the way it worked out. This was the material I could find. (Usable material with copyright permission that didn’t cost a bomb was in short supply for this passage.) And as for the talk, well, I’d said what I wanted to say and didn’t feel any need to prolong it.

So here’s the video, and the script for the talk is below as usual.

Mark 1:21-28

You may know the famous story of the preacher who asked some children, ‘What’s furry, either red or grey in colour, and collects nuts?’

A little girl nervously answered, ‘I know the answer should be Jesus but it sounds like a squirrel to me.’

Unlike that occasion, the answer to the biblical story we’ve just read very definitely is Jesus. For Jesus and his authority are the focus of Mark’s account here.

And Jesus demonstrates his unique authority in two ways in this narrative.

The first is the authority of his teaching:

22 The people were amazed at his teaching, because he taught them as one who had authority, not as the teachers of the law.

What was the difference between Jesus and the teachers of the law? Well, the teachers of the law were learned men, but when they taught all their exposition of the Scriptures would be based on quoting ‘previous authorities and commentators’.

To a large extent, the modern preacher does the same. Without you knowing it, I just quoted a scholar named Ian Paul. I could also look at my shelves of Bible commentaries and turning to Mark’s Gospel, I could cite William Lane, Robert Guelich, Craig Evans, or James Edwards. Whether I quote them or not, I will have engaged with their writing while working out what to preach.

Jesus doesn’t need to do any of that. He has come from the Father. He is the Son of God. He doesn’t need to derive anything. He speaks with personal, divine authority. If he came to preach, he wouldn’t need to say, ‘Ian Paul thinks this.’ If he wrote an article, there would be no footnotes.

You get a flavour of this in Matthew’s Gospel, where Jesus often says, ‘You have heard it said … but I say to you …’

If you encounter the voice of God through a preacher today, it will be because the preacher has worked on faithfully and accurately relaying to you the teaching of Jesus (which may involve consulting learned sources). And there will also be the explicitly spiritual dimension. The preparation will be soaked in prayer. The Holy Spirit will sovereignly choose to light up the words of the preacher in your hearts and minds, such that you hear the voice of God, rather than the preacher.

Please pray for your preachers. We only have this secondary authority. Pray for our faithful study of the Scriptures. Pray that we will be in tune with the Holy Spirit.

And for all of us, preachers or otherwise, what we need is an authentic encounter with the voice and teaching of Jesus through the work of the Holy Spirit. The Scriptures have been preserved for us as the primary and supreme way to hear his authentic voice today.

Therefore it’s not just a case of praying for Sunday’s preacher. It’s about exercising the privilege we all have to read the Scriptures under the illumination of the Spirit and encounter Jesus, to whom they point.

The second way Jesus demonstrates his unique authority in today’s passage is in the authority of his power over evil:

23 Just then a man in their synagogue who was possessed by an impure spirit cried out, 24 ‘What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are – the Holy One of God!’

25 ‘Be quiet!’ said Jesus sternly. ‘Come out of him!’ 26 The impure spirit shook the man violently and came out of him with a shriek.

This is a battle for power. The unclean spirit uses words that were commonly used as a rebuke: ‘What do you want with us?’ The spirit also names Jesus as ‘Jesus of Nazareth … the Holy One of God’, a reflection of the ancient belief that knowing someone’s name gave you power over them.

But it doesn’t work with Jesus. He doesn’t use spells or incantations. He doesn’t even need to pray. He acts on his own superior authority! ‘Be quiet! Come out of him!’ And that’s that. All done and dusted.

Jesus doesn’t just have words, he has deeds. And those deeds validate the content of his teaching that we thought about last week, where he proclaims that the kingdom of God is near and it’s time to repent.

It’s something that confronts us all. Very few people are demonised, but all of us face the conflict with evil and the temptation to go the wrong way.

And so this combination of authoritative teaching and authoritative deeds face us with a choice. What will we do with Jesus?

At the end of the passage we don’t hear what choice the members of the synagogue make about Jesus. We only hear about their amazement (verse 27). Who will follow Jesus and who will oppose him? We know that very soon there will be a split. Teachers of the law whose authority as we have seen is displaced by Jesus will largely oppose him. Many ordinary people will follow him.

But what about us? It’s not enough just to admire his teaching and call him a good man or even a prophet. Choosing to do nothing about him is effectively to choose against him, because we are saying we don’t want him to change us.

Why, some people even try to neutralise the influence of Jesus by saying that they worship him on Sundays in church. But that same worship is also meant to convey the word and works of God in Christ to us. We still need to choose.

Perhaps some of us listening today are also amazed by Jesus and his authority. But let’s be more than amazed. Let’s respond to him by following him.

0

A Book Recommendation For Preachers


Derek Tidball, ‘Preacher, Keep Yourself From Idols‘

I was first introduced to Derek Tidball’s work for pastors (as opposed to his other writing) when I read his book ‘Skilful Shepherds‘ at the beginning of my time in theological study. It takes the pastoral task way beyond the hints and tips of old-fashioined ‘pastoralia’ into a proper setting of pastoral theology, and Tidball anchors this in the distinctive contributions of each New Testament writer. More recently, I was to benefit from the way he convincingly (to me) showed the variety of approaches to ministry that every NT writer teaches and assumes in ‘Ministry By The Book‘. Not for him the nonsense that there is only one form or pattern of church leadership handed down by God.Elsewhere, he has written on sociology and the NT, but I have not read any of those titles.

Therefore it was with some expectation that  I came across ‘Preacher, Keep Yourself From Idols’, which came out last year. It is the printed form of his Ockenga Lectures on Preaching that he gave at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in March 2010. Unlike the other books above, these two hundred pages are a quick read. He takes the many good things that preachers can unduly elevate and distort their ministry. So he is particularly good on ‘the idol of entertainment’, where he points out our need to be interesting, but reminds us that not all churches need to be Premier League, any more than the local football club has to be. He is excellent on ‘the idol of professionalism’, in which he draws a careful line between the need for excellence on the one hand and the danger of divorcing our work from our relationship with God. When he writes about ‘the idol of immediacy’, he strikes a particular chord in today’s instant culture and in the cult of crisis spirituality by calling for the patient on-going teaching of the word.
If I had one frustration, it was his chapter on ‘the idol of busyness’. Quite rightly he notes the importance of preaching as part of the church leader’s task. (This one of three chapters out of twelve that are clearly directed towards ministers. However, he does not generally take the line controversially espoused by Martyn Lloyd-Jones in his book ‘Preaching and Preachers’ that preaching should only be a ‘full-time’ occupation.) He observes how matters such as complex legislation intrude on our time these days, and pleads that we continue to give sermon preparation the priority in our diaries that it needs. Quite right, too. But I longed for him to tell me how, rather than just give me a couple of footnotes.

Beyond that, though, I thought this was an excellent addition to my preaching bookshelf. It isn’t a manual of preaching. It’s a character-building book. And it’s no good learning how to if you’re not growing in Christ as a preacher. So far as I can tell, it hasn’t been published in any ebook format, so you’ll have to go the old route as I did and pick up a paper copy. I believe you’ll be glad you did.

2

Preaching In Dialogue With The Congregation

My current reading is ‘The Preaching Of Jesus‘ by William Brosend. I wouldn’t have come across it but for my membership of the Ministry Today board, because a copy was sent to us for review, and I volunteered.

I like reading books about preaching, but this one wasn’t a natural as the foreword is by Marcus Borg, a scholar whom I find altogether too sceptical. However, it was also commended on the back by a scholar I admire, Ben Witherington III.

In this short post, I want to highlight one early and important point in the book. Brosend uses an elaborate first chapter to argue that there were four major characteristics to the preaching of Jesus. The first of these is dialogical preaching. This is not the same as those hackneyed ‘dialogue sermons’ from thirty or forty years ago, where two people presented an artificial conversation to cover the loss of confidence in proclaiming the Word. (And in any case, ‘proclamation’ is Brosend’s second characteristic.)

No: Brosend means that when Jesus preached, he was in dialogue with Scripture, tradition, the culture and his listeners. Here I just want to highlight one important point he makes about the preacher’s dialogue with Scripture. It is this: are we in dialogue with the passage in a way that is sensitive to the way our congregations will be in dialogue with it? Will they have been wrestling with the passage all week? Most unlikely. Will they have been consulting learned exegetes? Even less likely.

It isn’t that protracted meditation and responsible exegesis are bad things. But if we only bring our own questions and/or the scholars’ questions, we are not going to connect the Word to the listeners.

I think that’s a salutary reminder when preachers are often taught (especially, in my experience, in the Methodist ‘Faith and Worship’ course) to put academic exegesis first. I’m glad for the reminder.

3

Are Worship Leading And Preaching Different Gifts?

Mike Bossingham thinks so. (PDF of article here; equivalent Facebook discussion here.) For my money, I think they are different, too, and I agree with Mike that the culture established in the Methodist Church where the worship leader is just Santa’s little helper to the preacher is all wrong. So too is the notion that if you can preach you can lead worship, but if you can lead worship you can’t necessarily preach. I have always thought my primary gifting was in preaching, but in Methodism that means I normally have to lead worship as well. At that point I break down for ongoing creative ideas.

The Facebook thread goes on to debate Mike’s idea of balancing contemporary and traditional elements in worship, but to me that’s a separate argument.

What are your thoughts?

18

The Enduring Power Of Martin Luther King

Today, I took two assemblies in a school- one for the infants (ages 4-7) and one for the juniors (7-11). I was beginning a new theme for this term: heroes. Those of us on the assembly team from local churches had decided to eschew the word ‘saints’ in favour of something more understandable.

Not remembering that next Monday is the American public holiday in his honour I chose to speak about Martin Luther King. In preparation, I found this clip of the entire ‘I have a dream’ speech on YouTube:

I downloaded this, using the free utility YouTube Downloader. As you’ll see, it’s seventeen minutes long, so then I edited it in Windows Live Movie Maker to begin at the ‘I have a dream’ passage (at 12:29, if you’re interested).

After an introduction talking about issues of fairness based on real-life examples (Rosa Parks and tbe bus seat, water fountains, different schools, slavery in the case of the juniors and so on), I showed about one and a half minutes to the infants – up to the point where King says he wants hi four little children judged not on the colour of their skin but their character. With the juniors, I played a few seconds more – to the point where he envisions black and white children playing together and treating one another as sisters and brothers.

And that was when the Interesting Thing happened: when I paused the video for the juniors, several of them broke out in spontaneous applause. How wonderful it was to see the style and substance of King’s oratory make a connection with children in a different country, forty-seven years later.

So don’t tell me preaching is dead. We can legitimately talk about style, presentation and all the rest. But when we have a message to share and can do so with passion, surely the Holy Spirit still uses it to connect. Sure, King’s crusade was about a theme that would command common assent generally today, and when I went through the examples of ‘unfairness’ the juniors roared back their disapproval of what happened. But there is something here.

And it’s also about King’s story generally. Why did I choose King? Partly for this reason. Our chidren have been introduced to one or two famous figures at school via books recently. One was Florence Nightingale. Another was Mary Seacole. As a result, we have borrowed other books in the series from the library and read them with our two. One night I read a simple biography of King to Mark for his bedtime story. Granted, it omitted things like King’s alleged infidelities, but the impact on Mark was fascinating. The next day he told us he had changed his mind about what he wanted to do with his life. Previously he has wanted to be an English teacher or an author.

“Now I want to be a minister,” he said, “And tell people not to hate each other.”

He is only five. But I was only eight when King was murdered. There is real power here.

0

Steve Jobs A Model For Preachers?

That headline pains me. I’m not convinced by the Apple fanboys. But … no-one can deny the effectiveness of Steve Jobs as a communicator. There is now a book out entitled ‘The Presentation Secrets Of Steve Jobs: How To Be Insanely Great In Front Of Any Audience‘. Now while the subtitle itself gives away some reservations I might have as a Christian – the purpose of a preacher is not to be great but to show the greatness of Christ – I read this article and thought that some of the key points might be worthwhile thinking for preachers. The author of the book, Carmine Gallo, lists five elements that are present every time Steve Jobs speaks in public. They are:

1. A headline – a short slogan present throughout the talk and the publicity.

2. A villain – from IBM in 1984 to Microsoft today, Apple sets itself up as a good guy in opposition to ‘evil’.

3. A simple slide – not wordy bullet points but a slide mixing minimal text with strong images.

4. A demo – he shows the new product working, and he has fun with it.

5. A ‘holy smokes moment’ – something incredibly memorable.

Do read the article and come back here to tell me what you think about the strengths and weaknesses of these ideas from the perspective of Christian communication.

4

Sermons, Worship And Stuff

My eagle-eyed reader will have noticed there was no sermon posted on the site this weekend. (My wife says you should be rejoicing. If you wondered why I posted about the dressing gown yesterday, I just wanted to get some writing out of my system.)

That’s because I wasn’t preaching today. I led some prayers in a Christingle service this morning at St Augustine’s followed by leading a short said communion, and some more intercessions tonight in a circuit service to commission three worship leaders.

The Christingle service was fun. Jane, my Anglican colleague, made a boy in the congregation into a human Christingle. I just hope he got the orange make-up off before his football game this afternoon. 

Tonight it was good to celebrate the gifts of three worship leaders. Berniece, sadly, couldn’t be with us, as she had been taken to hospital this week. But Joe and Dianne, both from churches I serve, are the sort of people any minister would want to have in their congregations.

Next week I may or may not post a new sermon. In the evening I’ll have a café church service where we discuss some clips from a DVD. In the morning I’m on a pulpit exchange to mark the beginning of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, and so I shall be doing my minister stuff at a local United Reformed Church while a Catholic lay pastoral assistant fills my pulpit. It might be one of those weeks where it would be helpful to lift the pressure by repeating an old sermon, not least with assemblies at two different schools (including my children’s school for the first time), all sorts of other meetings and the minor detour of a tooth extraction tomorrow morning.

Come three weeks’ time and there will be a protracted period of there being no new sermons on the blog. It will last three months. On 1st February I start a sabbatical. Not that I’m deserting the family for long periods of times, so no burglars who know our address should contemplate an unfriendly visit. But naturally I am looking forward to it. My recent laptop purchase was ready for that experience, and hopefully when the sabbatical starts I’ll be able to blog my experiences regularly.

So that brings you up to date with things.

0

Create a website or blog at WordPress.com

Up ↑