Tag: repentance

Seven Churches: 5, Sardis (Revelation 3:1-6)

Revelation 3:1-6

I’m sure you have noticed that whenever a major organisation is in the news because of a scandal, one of the first things they often want to do is protect their image. They call in public relations consultants who specialise in so-called ‘reputation management.’ The public image must be protected at all costs.

I think it was to the credit of McDonald’s UK boss on Thursday that when the BBC reported nothing had changed there since they had exposed a culture of sexual abuse and harassment of young workers, he didn’t pretend that everything was actually fine. He spoke instead of his determination to make the company a better and safer place to work. Of course, only time will show whether there is substance to what he says.

And with that in mind, let’s take a trip to this week’s church in Revelation, the church at Sardis. This time, Jesus is so troubled by them that his rebuke comes before his praise – the opposite way around from usual.

So the first thing we will consider is Jesus’ rebuke of Sardis.

I know your deeds; you have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead.  (Verse 1b)

‘You have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead.’ If ever a church was trying to maintain a good public image while everything was in truth rotting, it was Sardis.

But to help hear just how forceful Jesus’ words are here, it’s useful to know something about the history of the town itself. Listen to what Dr Ian Paul says about them:

Sardis lost out to Smyrna in competing to host an imperial temple, because of emphasizing its past splendour rather than the present reality. And though the capturing of the acropolis became a byword for an impossible task, it was in fact taken by force – not once, but twice! When Cyrus attacked the city in the sixth century, his forces noticed the use of a trapdoor under the unguarded walls, and while the occupants slept he entered to open the city gates. Three hundred years later, the Seleucid king Antiochus III the Great besieged the city, and apparently took it after reading of Cyrus’ victory. The inhabitants were once again asleep instead of on guard.[1]

The church at Sardis was just like the city itself. In having a reputation of being alive when they were dead they too were trading on past glories. They might not lose an imperial temple but rather a community that was the temple of the Holy Spirit, worshipping the One True God. They too were asleep and needed to wake up if they were not to suffer invasion from their spiritual enemy.

How easy it is for a church to trade on its past reputation, or to live in the past when the present doesn’t seem so appetising. I tell the story of a vociferous elderly lady in one past church who repeatedly reminded everyone of the time when the church had a hundred children in the Sunday School. It didn’t do much for the morale of those who were trying to lead the children they did have at the time, and nor did it help in finding out what God wanted to do there and then in that part of the church family’s life. The only way to do that involved sidelining and ignoring the nostalgia, and then praying, ‘Lord, this is the honest situation. Things are not good. What do you want to do here with children and young people?’

There are many churches which would like us to believe the hype that they are alive when in fact they are dead. They may be trading on past glories. They may be deluding themselves that because the people who worship there at present are happy, it must be a good place. They may not want to ask why some people have left. Show me a church that doesn’t say it’s a friendly church. But then ask people if they have ever encountered an unfriendly church. Many dying congregations expend a lot of time and energy on deluding themselves. They need to hear the rebuke of Jesus to Sardis for themselves.

And they need to hear what Jesus says they should do instead.  

2 Wake up! Strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have found your deeds unfinished in the sight of my God. 3 Remember, therefore, what you have received and heard; hold it fast, and repent. But if you do not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what time I will come to you.

Get back to basics, says Jesus. What brought you to a living faith in the first place? Was it not repentance for your sins and trusting in the mercy and grace of God rather than your own good deeds? Why is it that we confess our sins in every Sunday service? Is it not because we always need to be in that habit of getting back to basics? None of us is beyond the need to confess our sins.

When I was in my church youth group, our favourite preacher in the circuit was an elderly Welsh Local Preacher. I worked out once that he had been born two years before the Welsh Revival at the beginning of the last century. He would have been a toddler during that revival, and he preached like he was still in the middle of the revival.

One Sunday he challenged us from the pulpit with these words: “Have you been converted? Because I’ve been converted many times.” And I think what he meant was that he regularly had to come back to Christ in repentance and be made new again.

If we spend our time telling the old stories, we should be thankful to God for what he did then. But if we live in the past without walking with Jesus today, it counts for nothing. We are asleep in the light and it won’t be us who closes the church, it will be Jesus.

The second of our two things to consider is Jesus’ praise of Sardis.

4 Yet you have a few people in Sardis who have not soiled their clothes. They will walk with me, dressed in white, for they are worthy. 5 The one who is victorious will, like them, be dressed in white. I will never blot out the name of that person from the book of life, but will acknowledge that name before my Father and his angels.

What is this about? Let’s hear from Ian Paul again:

It is striking that the contrast here is not between the (spiritually) dying and the living, but between the dying and the unpolluted; spiritual life involves purity of living, symbolized by the unsoiled garments. From Genesis onwards, walk[ing] with God signifies approval, friendship and obedience (Gen 5:22); the purity of the garments now is in anticipation of the life of the age to come (6:11, 7:9, 13). Although the high priests in the Old Testament wear linen, white is predominantly the colour of pagan worship, signifying purity, holiness and honour in Greek and Roman culture. Participation in the life of God and Jesus includes sharing in their qualities; just as God and the lamb are lauded as being worthy (4:11; 5:9), so those who remain faithful are the ones who have ‘lived a life worthy of [their] calling’ (Eph 4:1).[2]

So here is our number one priority in the church: to be people who walk with Jesus, who reject the pollution of the world for the purity of his ways. This is what pleases him. This is the true sign of life in the church.

Having a lively programme of events and meetings is not our priority: walking with Jesus is. Having high-quality music from a choir or a band is not our priority: walking with Jesus is. Being the hip and fashionable place to go where there are lots of young people is not our priority: walking with Jesus is. Being an institution that is a respected pillar of the local society is not our priority: walking with Jesus is.

If other blessings come, that’s great, but they are not what we seek. Our priority is walking with Jesus.

And the thing is, we already know what to do about this and we’ve heard it over and over for years. We know from the Gospels how Jesus wants us to live our lives. We also know he has given us the Holy Spirit so that we can put these things into practice. Let’s not deflect from this by saying, “But how do we do it?” because Jesus has already given us his instructions and given us the tools for the job.

I read a column on the Internet by an American New Testament scholar called Scot McKnight. Every Friday he hands over his column to a recently retired minister, a Baptist pastor by the name of Mike Glenn. This week, he was writing about the ways in which preachers look for sermon illustrations and how long it takes us. But he ended his column this way:

Since my retirement, I’ve had a little more time to think. As you would imagine, I’ve come up with a lot of theories with what’s wrong with the world. Here’s one of my theories. The world needs some good sermon illustrations. That is, we need more people whose lives prove the reality of the Risen Christ. Before people look at Jesus, they look at His followers. Do His followers show any difference in their lives? Do they show evidence of having been with Jesus? If the world sees something interesting, then they might want to learn more about Jesus. If they don’t find anything in the lives of His disciples, the world will conclude there’s nothing to Jesus either. 

As I have often said, the world isn’t mad at the church because we’re different. They’re mad at us because we aren’t different enough. 

Maybe the world needs a few more sermons. Maybe. What we really need, however, are more good sermon illustrations. People whose lives tell the gospel in unforgettable ways. People who love their neighbors. People who forgive after being horribly wronged. People who can live in hope when the world is filled with despair. Whenever we hear stories like these, they stick with us. We can’t forget them.

The world is always looking for a good story. We just can’t find enough of them. Maybe if we made it easier to find a few good stories – a few good sermon illustrations – the world would find it easier to find Jesus. 

Do you see now how important it is that we all walk with Jesus. We shall fail. I do. We shall need to return to confession every week and be converted many times.

But there is nothing more vital in our lives and the life of the church. It comes above everything else we do.

So let’s make it our priority.

[1] Ian Paul, Revelation (TNTC). p99.

[2] Op. cit., p102.

0

Demi Lovato and the Community of Light, Matthew 4:12-23 (Ordinary 3 Epiphany 3 Year A 2023)

Matthew 4:12-23

Light.

Here is a quote that a friend of mine posted on Facebook the other day:

I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness for it shows me the stars.’

(Og Mandino)

It resonated with me as I read today’s passage in Matthew 4, where the evangelist quotes the famous words of Isaiah,

the people living in darkness
    have seen a great light;
on those living in the land of the shadow of death
    a light has dawned

(Matthew 4:16/Isaiah 9:2)

We associate those words from Isaiah with Christmas. I have picked them for most carol services. For Christians, they are a prophecy of the Messiah, Jesus.

But the New Testament doesn’t connect them with the birth of Jesus. Their association with Christmas comes not from Scripture but from their use in Handel’s ‘Messiah’[1]. In the Bible, Jesus is only revealed as the light coming to the people in darkness when he begins his public ministry here.

Yet here’s the thing about Jesus coming as the great light in the darkness: he has come to form a community of light, because in the next chapter he will tell his disciples they are the light of the world (Matthew 5:14-16).

So what Jesus is doing in today’s reading is setting down the foundations for his community of light. Here are three of those foundations:

Firstly, repentance.

17 From that time on Jesus began to preach, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’

The kingdom of God has come near, so repent. At its core, the word repent means ‘a change of mind’, both in the English and the Greek of the New Testament.

But repentance is not just an intellectual change. It is such a change of mind about life and truth that our lives and conduct change, too.

Why? Because ‘the kingdom of heaven has come near.’ That is, the king himself has arrived, and his name is Jesus. Just as Roman heralds would go through the towns and villages to proclaim the accession of a new Emperor, so Jesus announces his own coming as king. And if there is a new king on the throne of the universe, then it is his will that is to be obeyed, rather than whoever or whatever we were following before – our own self-gratification, the disordered self-centredness of society, or the lies of the enemy.

For the community of light that Jesus is beginning is the kingdom of God community. It is what the great American Free Methodist scholar Howard Snyder called, ‘The Community of the King.’

When we gather on Sunday for worship or in a small group in the week, we are gathering as the community of King Jesus. We are light to the world by living out our allegiance to him, not by making the faith easier to believe as we compromise with the standards of the world. All that does by definition is expand the darkness. Being the light requires being different, and that means repentance. And not one-off repentance, but something we keep coming back to throughout our lives.

Most of us probably have a good idea about things we need to change in our lives to bring them under the rule of King Jesus. The difficulty may be in where to start! So let us ask the Holy Spirit for guidance about our next steps in repentance.

Secondly, fishing.

19 ‘Come, follow me,’ Jesus said, ‘and I will send you out to fish for people.’

I have only been fishing once in my life. I was on a mission trip to Norway and our church hosts took us fishing in a fjord. If we didn’t catch any fish that afternoon, we wouldn’t eat that evening. Fortunately, we caught enough – although I only contributed one.

It’s the same for the church. We need to fish in order to live. We can’t wait for people to come to us. For too long we did that, and it was an act of complacency in times when people had some similarities to us and sympathies with us. Those days are gone.

It’s pretty likely that Simon Peter and Andrew heard Jesus’ vision of fishing for people as a sign that they would be sent to the Gentiles. For in the Old Testament, to be delivered from the waters was to be delivered from foreigners. There is some similar New Testament language in the Book of Revelation. And Gentiles were sometimes compared to terrifying mythical sea creatures.[2]

We need to get beyond our existing boundaries, says Jesus. It’s no good just spending time with our own kind. The Good News is for all. Matthew has already referred in this passage to ‘Galilee of the Gentiles’. In his birth stories, it is the Gentile Magi who worship, not the Jewish teachers. And at the end of his Gospel we shall have the Great Commission to go into all the world. It all begins here.

But, you say, I’m not the sort of person for that. May I remind you that neither were Simon Peter and Andrew? It was unusual for a rabbi to come and recruit disciples. Normally young men chose a rabbi to follow. The fact that these young men are not following a rabbi but out in the working world tells you they weren’t the brightest talent. But Jesus called them.

And Jesus calls us, too. He reminds us that we know people beyond the boundaries of the church who need the love of Jesus.

Remember, if we don’t do it, we starve, we die.

But how? That leads to the third foundation of the community of light, word and deed.

23 Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and illness among the people.

Now perhaps you hear that and say, ‘But I can’t preach and teach. And I’ve prayed for friends and family who are sick but none of them has got better. So how can I follow Jesus?’

Well – we don’t all have the same gifts, but the common thread is this: we take the light of the kingdom community beyond its boundaries by sharing the good news in word and deed. We may each have different ways of doing that, but a commitment to sharing God’s love in word and deed is the key principle. Although you should never write off the power of the Holy Spirit, of course!

Even though our wider society and culture turns increasingly away from Christian values, and even as it adopts a less and less friendly attitude to the church, we cannot go out into the world with our heads down. Nor as Christians can we go into the world with the thought that these people are so negative against us that we are going to curse them. We show love, even to our enemies.

A Bible passage I’m sure I’ve mentioned before to you but which is one of my favourites for understanding our calling today is Jeremiah 29. The prophet Jeremiah writes a letter to those of his people who have been forcibly taken into exile from the Promised Land to Babylon. Rather than cursing their captors, Jeremiah tells the exiles to bless them and to seek their welfare.

I think that’s one place where we start today. Here’s an example to make us ponder.[3] Last week, the Advertising Standards Authority banned poster adverts for the latest album by the pop star Demi Lovato. The album is called ‘Holy F*ck’ and portrays her in sexual bondage gear on a bed shaped like a crucifix as if she is on the Cross, like Christ. So pretty repulsive, and you can see why the ASA banned the posters for their offence to Christians.

But this is a young woman who, after becoming a child TV star, developed eating disorders and was subjected to sexual abuse. As she tried to cope with the pain, she became addicted to drugs and suffered mental health issues. A heroin overdose nearly killed her. She sustained brain damage and temporary blindness.

Her manager encouraged her to attend a church Bible study, and for a short while she felt close to God. But on the new album she sings that ultimately she felt like she didn’t fit in at church.

In our world, there are plenty of broken people who think they don’t fit in with church. Most of their stories are nothing like as dramatic as Demi Lovato’s. But they need God’s healing love showing to them and explained to them. They need the light of Christ, and his community, the light of the world, are the people to do this.

That means us. We are the community of King Jesus, not a religious club.

[1] I owe this insight to Ian Paul at https://www.psephizo.com/biblical-studies/the-calling-of-the-first-disciples-in-matthew-4/

[2] Ian Paul, op. cit., citing Chad Bird via Peter Leithart.

[3] What follows is based on James Emery White at https://www.churchandculture.org/blog/2023/1/19/a-prayer-for-demi-lovato

0

The Prophetic Question: Who Are You? Matthew 3:1-12 (Advent 2 Year A 2022)

Matthew 3:1-12

I had always thought that the parent I most resembled was my father. Temperament, build, hair colour, interests – not identical, but pretty similar.

It was therefore a surprise when I went into a room in the office where I began my working life to find there a woman called Olive say, “You must be Joan Faulkner’s son! You look so like her.” It turned out Olive had worked with my mum many years previously.

Who are you like? Sometimes I approach a Bible passage like that. Which of the characters are we like, and what does that tell us about our faith?

And I want to take that line with today’s passage. Who am I like in the reading? Who are you like?

Are we like John the Baptist?

I don’t know how many times I’ve read this story during my life, but what I do know is that when I came to it this week my first reaction was, ‘Yes, I identify with John the Baptist!’

Why?  Because I like locusts and honey? No. Because I want to wear something made from camel’s hair? No: I just ordered a new winter coat from Mountain Warehouse in a Black Friday deal.

It was the line about being ‘one calling in the wilderness’ (verse 3). And the word ‘wilderness’ grabbed me. I thought, that’s what my ministry is like. Much of the time I haven’t seen the things I’d have hoped for, and much of the Methodist Church feels as parched as the wilderness. Woe is me!

But then I dug deeper instead of feeling sorry for myself. I thought of what the wilderness symbolises in the Scriptures. One thing it symbolises is ‘testing’, just as God tested the faithfulness of Israel in the wilderness between Egypt and the Promised Land.

And so I wondered whether a prolonged period of spiritual drought was one where my faithfulness to God was being tested. Furthermore, I wondered about the drought the Christian church finds itself in, as evidenced by the substantial fall in the numbers of people calling themselves Christians, as we have learned this week the 2021 Census data shows.

But then perhaps we are being tested by God to see whether we will be faithful to him in disappointing circumstances. The temptation at a time of decline is to start adjusting our message to fit what people popularly believe, but that is a serious mistake. For one thing, it means we won’t be faithful to Christ even when it means we are unpopular. For another it’s a tactical mistake, because if we make ourselves just like the rest of the society then there is no longer any point in conversion.

The Anglican evangelist J John put it like this in response to the census figures:

In my view, and I claim the Bible on my side, what is needed is not a stripped-down creed tuned to the prevailing mood of the culture.

That won’t work: no one goes to church to hear exactly what they get from the media and from their friends and colleagues. What will bring them in and see them committed to the church is the full- blooded, confident preaching of Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Paradoxically the way to change the census figures is to ignore them and instead focus on producing changed lives through Jesus Christ.

But the wilderness is also the place of renewal. God promises to bring his people back from exile in Babylon through the wilderness to their land. So it’s fitting that John locates his campaign for the renewal of Israel in the wilderness. So as we witness more and more decline and death in the British church, we also pray, Lord, turn this wilderness into a place of renewal and growth.

Meanwhile, what do we do? We trust in God. This is what the locusts and honey are about. They are not a description of a bush tucker trial from I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here, they were the basic foods available to him if living simply in the desert. Honey was a regular sweetener for the poor and for others in his culture; other wilderness-dwellers often fed on locusts[1]. Just don’t go looking for them among the more unusual foodstuffs at Waitrose. John was saying, I am willing to live simply and live on what God provides here.

How willing are we like him to trust God like that?

Or are we like the crowds?

It isn’t difficult for the people to go and hear John. His location is just twenty miles from Jerusalem. The Jewish historian Josephus tells us that the crowds were so large that Herod Antipas, the local ruler on behalf of the Romans, feared an uprising[2].

But if it was easy for them to get there, it wasn’t so easy for them to fulfil what John was calling them to do. He preached that they needed to repent (verse 2), and here ‘repentance’ doesn’t merely mean ‘change your mind’, it means ‘turn your whole life around’. We see them doing this because Matthew tells us that they were baptised by John when they confessed their sins (verse 6).

Let us pause and consider what a humbling thing this was for the average Jew to do. John was not asking them to follow through simply with a liturgical, ritual act. He was expecting a complete change of lifestyle.

But he is expecting this from devout Jews! These are people who are already committed to faith in God! John is saying to them, you might just as well be a pagan Gentile, such is the level of turnaround you need in your lives. They were being treated as if they had never demonstrated any serious commitment to God at all before, despite having followed the Jewish way of life and taken part in its rituals for years!

I gained a small insight into what that must feel like many years ago. As a good number of you know, when I was exploring God’s call to the ministry, I ended up studying Theology as an independent student at an Anglican theological college. When the calling became clear, I had a quandary. Did I stay with my native Methodism or did I go over to the Church of England, because I was seeing a great advert for it there?

It was that thought that I would have to be confirmed just like I had never been a Christian before that ultimately put me off the C of E. To me, it denied the previous work oof the Holy Spirit.

Now what if I or some other preacher told you that all your Methodist heritage was in vain in terms of getting into God’s Kingdom? Just because you were a church steward for many years didn’t count. Just because you knew Wesley’s hymns inside out meant nothing. Just because you had taught Sunday School or been a Local Preacher – well, so what?

Rip it all up and start again. That’s what John expected of the crowds. What if we need to do that? What if all that we do, much as we cherish it, has declined into empty ritual and dead religion? Do any of us need to hear John’s call for a radical turning back to Christ and a complete reset of our spiritual lives? Does anyone hearing this today need to do that?

Or finally, are we like the Pharisees and Sadducees?

Well, if you thought John was hard on the ordinary crowds, just wait until you hear him tear into the religious leaders. A ‘brood of vipers’ (verse 7): That is an ancient insult! There was a belief that had been around for a few centuries going back to the Greek historian Herodotus five centuries earlier that vipers were mother killers – that the children, the brood, killed their mothers in revenge for the fact that the females killed the males during procreation. ‘Mother-killer’ becomes, then, a way of saying that these leaders were utterly depraved morally[3].

Therefore being ‘children of Abraham’ (verse 9) counted for nothing. Some of you have heard me say that my sister once worked out when doing some work on the family genealogy that she and I had grown up as the fifth generation of Methodist in the same congregation. But that would have meant nothing spiritually if we both had not taken the decision to respond to the grace of God and follow Jesus Christ ourselves.

And that’s why I get disappointed when I go to a church and am greeted by someone who tells me with pride that they are a life-long Methodist. It counts for nothing unless the person has embraced Wesley’s call to repentance and faith in Jesus Christ, leading to a life of discipleship.

But John the Baptist exposes these religious leaders as people who rested on their spiritual heritage while using that as a cover for shamelessly immoral lives. I’d like to tell you that doesn’t exist in the church today, but I’d be lying. From time to time I encounter it. I don’t mean those who are genuinely struggling to conquer sin but not always succeeding, I mean those who are happy to use religious respectability as a cover for a totally different lifestyle. You know – the sort of stories that make salacious headlines occasionally, and bring the church into disrepute.

Now I sincerely hope this third and final point is the one that makes least connection with anybody here today. Perhaps it is more made to be preached at Synod or Conference!

But were any of us to be living a double life, outwardly proclaiming our faithfulness to the truth while using that to hide a shameful life, then Advent is  the time to hear Jesus’ warning that he won’t play games with us. He can make new faithful people out of stones, he says (verse 9). We shouldn’t rely on some sense of being indispensable to him.

Conclusion

All these three sets of people we’ve considered point us to the fact that Advent is a season of preparation, but it is preparation that happens by repentance. Not for nothing have some Christian traditions called Advent ‘The Lesser Lent.’

We prepare for Christ’s coming by inviting the Holy Spirit to examine our hearts. He prepares the way of the Lord in us and makes straight paths for him in our lives (verse 3).

[1] Craig S Keener, The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary, p118f.

[2] Ian Paul, https://www.psephizo.com/biblical-studies/john-the-baptist-jesus-and-judgement-in-matthew-3/

[3] Keener, p122f.

0

Raising Doubts (Easter 6 Resurrection People 5) John 20:19-31

John 20:19-31

‘Doubting Thomas.’

In all the years I’ve preached on this story, I’ve encountered people with a variety of reactions to Thomas. There are those whose faith is so serene that they find it hard to comprehend someone with doubts. To them, faith is as natural as breathing.

There are others who quite understand him having questions, because although they believe, they too have plenty of questions for God.

Finally, there are those who think Thomas isn’t militant enough, and who would say it’s all a sham. They defer to outright unbelief.

To explore this today, I am not so much going to expound the passage as use it as an example of this theme about faith, doubt, and unbelief.

And that is going to require me to explore the subject in four phases.

Firstly, there is a difference between doubt and unbelief.

To help us see the difference between doubt and unbelief, consider the story in Mark chapter 9 when Jesus and his three closest disciples come down from the Mount of Transfiguration and encounter a father with a demonised son, whom the other disciples have not been able to heal.

Do you remember the exchange between Jesus and the distraught father?

21 Jesus asked the boy’s father, “How long has he been like this?”

“From childhood,” he answered. 22 “It has often thrown him into fire or water to kill him. But if you can do anything, take pity on us and help us.”

23 “‘If you can’?” said Jesus. “Everything is possible for one who believes.”

24 Immediately the boy’s father exclaimed, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!”

I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief. He has both belief and unbelief. This is doubt. A famous Christian thinker called Os Guinness wrote a book on doubt, and he defined doubt as ‘Faith in two minds.’

If we are doubting, we are struggling. We are being pulled both ways. We may want to believe but are finding it hard. It’s not that we refuse to believe.

Now while being in two minds is not a great place to be – the apostle James says that the one who doubts ‘is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind’ (James 1:6) and ‘unstable’ (James 1:7). But Jesus wants to bring stability and faith, so if we find it easier to believe, let us offer kindness and gentleness to those who doubt and give space for Jesus to bring them through to faith.

Secondly, some doubt or disbelieve because they positively believe something else.

This is a simple point to remember. If somebody says they don’t believe something, it’s because they actually believe something else that contradicts it or rules it out.

Thomas was a bit like that. He didn’t immediately accept that Jesus had risen from the dead, because like most Jews apart from the Sadducees he didn’t believe there would be a resurrection of the dead until the end of time. The Sadducees didn’t think there would be any resurrection at all!

If someone today says they don’t believe in the Resurrection, it may well be because they believe something else. That belief may be grounded in the idea that scientific laws are unchanging and unchangeable, and that resurrection is scientifically impossible.

If you tell some such people that their position is a ‘belief’, they may react negatively! For they tend to believe it’s a fact. ‘Beliefs’ are only for those deluded religious people. But it is actually an act of faith to say that you think the whole of life can be lived on the basis of scientific discoveries.

They tend to say that we can’t prove our faith beliefs, but I would say they can’t prove theirs, either. There is more to this world than science, much as we welcome its discoveries. Not everything can be tested by science. We need other disciplines, like history, which works differently from science.

There is a lot of life where we need trust and faith as well as proof. None of us goes into a marriage with the complete proof that the one we love is going to be kind, loving, and faithful to us for the rest of our lives. Instead, we enter into marriage on the basis that we have learned enough about that person to believe we can trust them.

Finally, on the specific issue of believing in unchanging scientific laws, of course it’s helpful to know that laws make for predictable behaviour. Imagine if gravity varied massively all the time.

But perhaps there is another way to see this consistency and reliability of scientific laws if you allow for the existence of God. And that is to see them, as I heard one preacher put it, as ‘descriptions of God’s habits.’ They tell us how God usually does things. The Letter to the Hebrews tells us that Jesus ‘sustains all things by his powerful word’ (Hebrews 1:3). But perhaps on rare occasions and for reasons known to his sovereign will the Lord occasionally changes his habits. That would permit the possibility of miracles. And if so, then we  have to be careful about making scientific laws the ultimate standard by which we judge the truth and falsehood of other claims.

Thirdly, some disbelieve for other motives that are not logical.

I can understand someone who has been brought up on the idea of unchanging and unchangeable scientific laws using that as a test for truth, although as I’ve just said I don’t think it’s as watertight as some think it is.

But we need to recognise that some people choose unbelief for other reasons. For some it is because they believe their faith in God let them down. They wanted God to do something in their lives or in the life of someone they love but it didn’t happen. Sometimes it’s because they had a rather Sunday School image of God, even in adulthood. Sometimes it’s the fault of the church that has told them that God will always heal.

It’s tragic, really. If people reject Christianity because they think it can’t explain suffering, they miss the fact that atheism can’t explain love and purpose in life. If all we have is evolution, then life is just continued incidents of purposeless survival.

We could help people grow into a mature faith if instead we encouraged a church where we believe in ‘the now and the not yet’, that Jesus may heal in this life but he may not. And if we combine that with learning from the Psalmists about the possibility of believing in God but still bringing our darkest problems and emotions to him, instead of having to prettify everything, and make faith always neat, tidy, and clean. It isn’t.

Another reason for disbelief, though, can be what amounts to outright rebellion against God. Certain atheists are on record as saying that not only do they not believe in God, moreover they do not want to believe in God.

Why? Because they want to be in charge of their own lives. They do not want to be answerable to someone else.

The thing is, belief in God can strike against personal pride. Whose life is it anyway? It’s my life. Except it isn’t.

In the same way, I’ve been told that surveys show that the more intellectual someone is, the less likely they are to believe in God. But this assumes that belief or unbelief is only a matter of reason and knowledge. When pride comes into play, everything gets distorted – just as Christians would expect, because it’s sin. And so the cleverer someone is, the more at risk they are from taking pride in their intellectual abilities.

And the Gospel strikes against that. They don’t like the call to repentance. We need to model what Paul said in Romans that it is God’s kindness that leads to repentance (Romans 2:4).

Fourthly, the ultimate solution is an encounter with Jesus.

What changed Thomas? It was an encounter with the risen Jesus. He appears again behind locked doors, this time with Thomas present.

And he shows himself sympathetic to Thomas’ concerns, inviting him to examine his wounds as he had requested.

But the encounter is enough. Thomas doesn’t even get as far as exercising his demands. He says, ‘My Lord and my God!’ (Verse 28)

Sometimes we come to realise that all the logical arguments, important as they are for buttressing our faith, are insufficient on their own. We need an encounter with Jesus. OK, it won’t be exactly the same as Thomas had, for we are among those ‘who have not seen and yet have believed’ (verse 29).

But he met us. That’s what matters.

It’s something to pray for when we know friends and loved ones who don’t believe. Pray that Jesus will meet them in a grace-filled holy ambush.

I was talking with an experienced evangelist about a teenage boy we both knew who felt he had intellectual reasons for unbelief. She said, ‘What he needs is an encounter with Jesus.’ I think she had a point.

I remember a story told by Bishop Festo Kivengere, one of the courageous Christian leaders who stood up to President Idi Amin of Uganda in the 1970s. Kivengere told how he was called to a football stadium where some prisoners were going to be publicly executed by firing squad. He was allowed to meet with the prisoners and pray with them.

‘But,’ Kivengere cried out to God, ‘what do I say to them? What will make sense to these men who are going to be executed at the whim of an evil dictator?’

‘Tell them about me. I’ll make sense,’ were the words he heard back from Jesus.

So that’s what he did and many of those men went to their unjust deaths knowing their eternal destiny was secure.

‘Tell them about me. I’ll make sense.’ That’s our calling.

0

Self-Examination, Luke 13:1-9 (Third Sunday in Lent, Year C)

I’ve no idea what the compilers of the Lectionary were smoking when they put together the current set of readings. Last week we were in Luke 13:31-35, but this week we jump back to the beginning of the chapter!

Luke 13:1-9

Whatever their reasons, though, I hope to show you by the end of this reflection that the themes of today’s reading are eminently suitable for Lent.

“Jesus, what about those Galileans whose blood Pilate mixed with the sacrifices at the Temple?” (cf. verse 1)

It has a horrible contemporary ring, doesn’t it? Jesus, what about those mothers and babies in the maternity hospital at Mariupol that the Russians bombed?

And for many people who bring sincere questions about suffering to God, it may sound relevant too. The child who died of cancer. The husband and father who went off with another woman. The natural disaster that killed hundreds.

These are not easy questions for Christians who believe in a loving and powerful God. We begin to answer them by talking about God who in Jesus Christ entered unjust human suffering himself. But we may not come to a complete answer, and not everybody wants an intellectual answer, many simply want to be heard and held.

And those who think the problem of suffering trumps the existence of God are deluding themselves. If the existence of unjust suffering is a problem for believing in a loving, just, and powerful God, then the existence of love and purpose are problems for an atheist. How many atheists would push their beliefs to the limit by saying to a spouse, “I have electrical and hormonal responses to you,” rather than “I love you”?

Which brings us to the way Jesus responds to his questioners here. Had they genuinely been seeking God, then surely he would have responded differently. How do we account for his apparently harsh response unless it is that this is one of those trick questions from people who are not serious about following him?

His answer makes sense if that’s the case. Not everyone who asks questions about spiritual matters is serious about getting to a point of following Jesus. I once shared digs with an atheist colleague during a work training course. He told me his objections to belief in God. I did my best to respond, but at the end he said he wasn’t interested in changing his mind, he just wanted a good argument.

And so Jesus brings the conversation round to the real issue for those who ask deep questions for frivolous reasons. Repent. Jesus didn’t call Pilate to repent of his wickedness. He called his hearers to repent. And if the collapse of the tower at Siloam (verse 4) sounds horribly like a first century Grenfell, it’s not the architect or the builder he calls to repent but his listeners.

Let’s remember that Jesus came proclaiming the kingdom of God, and that when he did so, he characteristically said, “Repent and believe the good news.” The good news is that there is a new king on the throne and it’s not Caesar. We need to repent in order to conform to the ways of his kingdom.

Jesus was telling his hearers that Caesar didn’t have final control over Israel, and nor did the self-interested religious establishment. God was on the throne of the universe in his Person. There would be further good news at the Cross as this God conquered his enemies, the principalities and powers of evil. So, says Jesus, here’s the good news – but it’s only yours when you repent.

And that repentance is not a one-off act. It’s a lifetime of turning back to God, turning our lives bit by bit back to the ways of the kingdom Jesus proclaimed.

Today, we rightly want Vladimir Putin to change his ways. We abhor what he is doing – and so we should. But we must not let that distract us from the challenge Jesus issues to us, too: repent.

We are all far from the finished article. I hope and pray we can look back at our lives and see where Jesus has changed us already. But his words in today’s reading are such that our prayer needs to be something like this: “Jesus, I’m grateful for all the ways you have transformed my life. What’s next?”

Well, that could be challenging enough. But if Jesus has already given us what we might construe as a ‘negative’ challenge in the call to repent – give up certain things, strip things out of your life, and so on – he also has a ‘positive’ challenge for us. Be Fruitful.

We hear this in the brief parable Jesus tells about the unfruitful fig tree in the vineyard (verses 6-8). The fig tree hasn’t borne any fruit for three years, and the owner is persuaded to give it one more year by the gardener.

Some people observe that it’s strange to talk about a fig tree in a vineyard, but it did happen sometimes in the ancient world. The important thing here to remember is that Jews hearing about a vineyard will remember that in Isaiah chapter 5 that is the precise metaphor the prophet uses for Israel. The fig tree is someone dwelling among Israel, the people of God, who is not being fruitful.

We know Jesus had a lot to say elsewhere about being fruitful, not least in his ‘I am the vine’ passage in John 15.

But what kind of fruitfulness does Jesus expect of us? Not literal figs, I hope – I can’t stand them! It is of course a metaphor for the work of the Spirit in our lives individually and as God’s people. So Jesus expects churches to make more new disciples of him. He expects us to exhibit more Christlikeness as individuals and as a community. He expects us to make a difference in society as, in the words of Jeremiah, we ‘seek the welfare of the city to which [we] have been called.’

What if we used this as a report card on our church? Are we making new Christians? Is our love for God and one another increasing? Would our local community miss all the good we do if we suddenly vanished overnight?

I don’t know what you’d say, but for many churches today I suspect it might be quite a mixed report. New Christians? Few, if any. More love? Yes and no. Making a difference locally? Maybe, maybe not.

In the parable, the owner and the gardener agree to give the fig tree just one more year. If nothing changes, then they agree to cut it down. Could it be that a spiritual principle like this is behind some of the church closures we see in our time? I know there are other factors as well, but does Jesus actively close some churches because they are no longer fruitful for the kingdom of God?

I have to say, it wouldn’t surprise me.

What do we need to do in order to change and improve? Do we need to stop behaving as if the church is all about satisfying our own personal needs and tastes? I believe we do. Do we need to stop speaking to people in the church in ways we never would countenance in our families or at work? Sure. Do we need actively to structure our church life around an outward-looking focus rather than an inward navel-gazing? Yes, I think so.

So in conclusion, to come back to where I began by saying this reading had highly suitable themes for Lent, why did I say that?

Well, repentance is probably quite obvious. Lent is a time when we examine ourselves. Often that means we have to put right things in our lives where we have gone awry from the purposes of God. So yes, repentance is a Lent theme.

But so is fruitfulness. Because that too requires self-examination. And I hope I’ve shown that when it comes to fruitfulness, we not only need to examine ourselves as individual Christians, we need to do the same as churches.

Shocking, then, as this reading may be – it’s hardly Sunday School ‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild’ material – may the Holy Spirit use it that we all, both individually and together, may change for the better, for the sake of God’s kingdom as revealed by Jesus.

0

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

Luke 3:7-18

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

0

First Sunday In Lent: Worship In The Wilderness – A Spirit-Led Journey

Having begun the ‘Worship in the Wilderness’ series on Ash Wednesday, we move now to the First Sunday in Lent and a theme where we look at the good God can bring out of our wilderness experiences.

Deuteronomy 8:1-5, 15-18

Mark 1:9-13

When we speak of having a ‘wilderness experience’, we don’t tend to mean something good. A wilderness experience is a time when life is hard and discouraging, when we feel far from good and unable to gain spiritual nourishment. Nothing grows. We hunger and thirst but are not satisfied.

It’s not good.

Would you consider it strange, then, to hear this week’s title: ‘A Spirit-Led Journey’?

‘At once the Spirit sent him out into the wilderness’ (Mark 1:12) says Mark of Jesus. It’s just after his baptism, and at that wonderful experience the Holy Spirit has descended on him. ‘like a dove’ (Mark 1:10). According to Mark, being sent into the wilderness is every bit as much an experience of the Holy Spirit as that of the dove and the voice from heaven.

In fact, as I’m fond of pointing out when preaching on the temptations of Jesus, to say the Spirit ‘sent’ Jesus out into the wilderness or ‘led’ him there does not reflect the full force of the Greek. Perhaps it’s our British fondness for understatement, but a more literal translation would be, ‘At once the Spirit threw him out into the wilderness.’

The Greek word is ekballo. The ‘ballo’ part is where we get our word ‘ball’. So think of a sports competitor hurling a ball a long distance, and you have some idea of what Mark is saying here. Imagine a fielder in cricket running round to stop a ball going for four, and then hurling it back to the wicket-keeper.

So the Holy Spirit has very forcefully taken Jesus into the wilderness to face temptation. And as Jesus resists that temptation, he wins key battles that that refine and strengthen the calling he has had affirmed at his baptism.

And that may be the first reason why some of our wilderness experiences are Spirit-led journeys: they are training exercises.

You may have seen television documentaries that follow prospective recruits to elite military outfits like the SAS, where the candidates are put through a series of tough, uncompromising, and even distressing experiences. Those who overcome are further on the journey to selection.

And for us, when the Holy Spirit leads us into a bleak place for a training exercise, we are being refined for when we face future battles. If we win victories over difficulty in a wilderness experience, we may be more ready for the trials of life later so that we can overcome them by faith in Christ for his glory.

You will not become an elite soldier by watching Netflix episodes from the comfort of your sofa. Nor will you grow in spiritual strength as a Christian if all you have is an easy life. So sometimes the Holy Spirit removes our comforts and prepares us for what is to come.

That’s one way to see the disciplines of Lent, such as giving up certain things. Our lack of those creature comforts for a season can be a way that the Holy Spirit trains us in the way of Christ.

A second reason why a wilderness experience can be a Spirit-led one can be found in our reading from Deuteronomy 8. It’s about learning humble dependence on God.

2 Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, to humble and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands. 3 He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. 4 Your clothes did not wear out and your feet did not swell during these forty years. 5 Know then in your heart that as a man disciplines his son, so the Lord your God disciplines you.

Who or what do you really want, God asks us. Do you want me, or do you want an easy life? Learn to depend on me, he says, and to listen to my word, because that is where you will find life.

It’s not about us. It’s about God. Things may seem fine and dandy when we have plenty of good things to eat (‘bread alone’) but we need to learn the lesson that our priorities are not the same as those of the rest of the world.

Remember what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 6, when he told his disciples not to worry about food, drink, and clothes:

32 For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. 33 But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.

For me it was the experience of living without a guaranteed income for my first three years as a student when I didn’t qualify for Government grants. I learned as time after time people gave money that enabled me to study and to live.

Again, a Lenten discipline of giving up something may help us cultivate this humble trust in God. It may also be that the experience of being deprived of many good and valuable things through the coronavirus pandemic has done something similar.

God wants our trust, and sometimes he takes us to the wilderness to find it.

A third reason why a wilderness experience can be a Spirit-led journey can be found in the prophecy of Hosea. In the book, and I’m particularly concentrating on chapter 2 here, Israel is compared to an adulterous wife who is always running after other lovers than her husband. In particular, one of her ‘lovers’ is the false god Baal.

But God wants Israel to know that he is the source of all good things, such as grain, wine, and oil. So what will he do?

At first it is severe. Israel will lose her crops of grain, wine, wool, and linen, making her metaphorically exposed before the world. Her festivals will stop, and her vines and fig trees will be ruined.

It all sounds like devastating punishment.

But the thing is, it doesn’t stop there, with Israel in a new but figurative wilderness. For what is the next thing God says?

14 ‘Therefore I am now going to allure her;
    I will lead her into the wilderness
    and speak tenderly to her.
15 There I will give her back her vineyards,
    and will make the Valley of Achor a door of hope.
There she will respond as in the days of her youth,
    as in the day she came up out of Egypt.

This is the third way in which a wilderness experience can be a Spirit-led journey: God brings us back to himself when we have gone far from him.

In other words, when God takes away things from us in the wake of our walking away from him, it’s not the final punishment. Instead, he is removing items from the scene so that all we have is him. He wants us to see him and him only, so that our love for him may be rekindled.

It is a severe form of mercy, but mercy it is. God removes our idols and in doing so shows they have no power. ‘Who will you worship?’ he asks us. And better that he asks us that now than later when it will be too late.

So in conclusion, I haven’t specifically chosen to give up anything for Lent this year. But maybe sometimes the Holy Spirit makes the choice for us. He leads us into the wilderness and removes props from our lives as he trains us to be stronger spiritually for future battles. He takes away our creature comforts so that we may depend on Christ. And he gets rid of our idols so that we may devote ourselves wholeheartedly to our God and Father.

How is the Spirit leading you in the wilderness right now?

0

Video sermon And Text: Active Patience (Second Sunday Of Advent)

This week, having realised that the copyright fears that led me not to post my videos these last couple of weeks were groundless, I’m going to give you both the video and the text of my talk.

2 Peter 3:8-15

In my teens, one of my favourite pop songs was ‘I’m Not In Love’ by 10cc. It was cleverly arranged and produced, and it had wry and touching lyrics that even clicked with a fifteen-year-old.

However, I heard both the single version and the album version on the radio. The single was a four-minute butchered edit of the full six-minute album track, and so I saved my pocket money to buy the album.

The album – ‘The Original Soundtrack’ – also contained much darker material, not least a song called ‘The Second Sitting For The Last Supper’ in which the band mocked the Christian hope of Christ appearing again in glory.

Two thousand years and he ain’t come  yet
We kept his seat warm and the table set
The second sitting for the Last Supper

It’s a hope for which many people mock us. It’s a hope with which numerous Christians struggle.

Perhaps sometimes it touches on those never-quite-disappeared childhood traits, remembering the times as little ones that we sat in the car while our parents drove, and within five minutes were asking, ‘Are we there yet?’

The third chapter of 2 Peter can give us help in understanding God’s purposes and responding appropriately. What these verses tell us is that when we understand God better, we shall also understand better how to live.

So firstly, understanding God better:

8 But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: with the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.

This verse, which takes some words from a psalm, tells us two things about God which get taken up in the next two verses. If a thousand years are like a day to the Lord, then he acts over a long period of time. But if the reverse is also true, that a day is like a thousand years, then God also acts suddenly and quickly.[1]

We see the long-term patience in verse 9:

9 The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.

The slow – to our eyes – acting of God is a mercy to the human race. He doesn’t want to wrap things up without people having a full opportunity to repent and put their faith in his Son, Jesus.

So if someone mocks us as Christians for the fact that Jesus has not returned, we can remind them that he is hanging back to give them the chance to hand over their lives to him. ‘Why hasn’t he come?’ we might reply. ‘Because he’s waiting for you.’

They may or may not appreciate that answer! But it is consistent with the merciful and gracious character of God. The offer of salvation is not a quick, instant, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it event. It is there on the table and stays on the table even for the most recalcitrant of sinners.

God is patient. Jesus hasn’t forgotten to come again, because he hasn’t forgotten the sinners he loves.

But as well as the long-term patience of God there is also his ability to act suddenly and quickly. Verse 10:

10 But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare.

God may be patient, but he will not suffer mocking. He will ‘come like a thief’. Christ appearing again ‘like a thief [In the night]’ is a common New Testament image for his return in glory. No-one expects that a thief is coming: you need to be prepared in order to avoid suffering loss.

It’s no good, then, having a casual attitude to God which says, ‘I’ll live just how I like, and then I’ll repent at my leisure on my deathbed.’ That is to treat a patient and merciful God with contempt, and to forget that he is also holy.

And – although in some cases it can be emotional manipulation – the old line of the evangelists that asked, ‘If you were to be hit by a bus tonight, do you know what would happen to you eternally?’ makes a good point to those who would be casual with God and disregard the fact that he can act suddenly and quickly.

So I think we can put these two apparently contradictory elements of God’s character together and see where that leaves us with our Advent hope. God is patient, because he longs for everyone to repent. Yet he will not be mocked by those who treat him casually, and one day he will come both suddenly and quickly. He will even do that before the end in individual people’s lives.

Therefore secondly, we look at understanding better how to live:

Just as there were two elements to understanding God better, so there are two corresponding ways to live in the light of that as we await our Advent hope of Christ’s appearing again in glory.

In response to God’s sudden and quick action, not least in his glorious return, we read verses 11 to 13:

11 Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives 12 as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming. That day will bring about the destruction of the heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat. 13 But in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells.

Forty years ago, I went to Spring Harvest for the first time. On the first evening, a preacher named Stuart Briscoe said that he believed in 2 Peter 3 when he saw the atomic bomb fall on Hiroshima. Then he knew it was possible for the heavens to be destroyed by fire and the elements to melt in the heat (verse 12).

But we do this a dis-service if we think that Christ’s sudden and speedy return is only about destruction. For we go on to read of the hope expressed elsewhere in the New Testament, not least by Paul in his letters and John in Revelation, that Christ’s goal is to bring ‘a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells’ (verse 13).

This is why Christ will come again in glory: to bring a new creation, where righteousness dwells.

And so the way to live in the light of that is to live in righteousness now. Christ calls us to live now as a sign of his new world that is coming. Live according to the new creation, not the surrounding culture.

What would it mean to live in righteousness now? Well, the English word ‘righteousness’ might be a little misleading here. Often we take it just to refer to matters of personal morality. But the Greek word means not only personal righteousness but social righteousness – justice, if you will – as well.

So our personal moral conduct needs to come more closely in line with what Jesus calls it to be. But so do our actions in society.

Abraham Kuyper was a Dutch Christian theologian and politician – in fact, he became Prime Minister. He put it this way:

‘There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!’

Is there any part of our lives where we don’t want Christ to cry, ‘Mine!’?

And then there is the way we live in response to the patience of Christ. This comes at the end of the reading:

14 So then, dear friends, since you are looking forward to this, make every effort to be found spotless, blameless and at peace with him. 15 Bear in mind that our Lord’s patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote to you with the wisdom that God gave him.

‘Our Lord’s patience means salvation.’ As we saw earlier, that patience means salvation in the opportunity for repentance, and so another way we live in the light of Christ’s coming is to offer the Gospel.

But it’s also the climax of our own salvation. For our salvation is not just the forgiveness of our sins through the Cross, it is also the transformation of sinful lives by the Holy Spirit into those that live righteously as we’ve just been saying.

And it is also that our salvation will be completed when Christ appears in glory. For when righteousness dwells, sin will be abolished. Peace will reign. All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well, as Mother Julian of Norwich said. This is part of our great hope.

To conclude – Christ’s appearing in glory seems to be a long time coming, but it is because God is patient. The chance is there for repentance, and the Church must announce that.

But Christ will still come suddenly and quickly. Let us be prepared by living according to the pattern of his great future.

[1] My understanding of these two contrasting elements is owed to Ben Witherington III, Letters and Homilies for Hellenized Christians Volume II, pp376-8.

0

Sermon For The Second Sunday In Advent: Telling The Prophetic Time

Wristwatch
Wristwatch by Dan Iggers on Flickr. Some rights reserved.

Mark 1:1-8 with Isaiah 40:1-11

You may have noticed that I do not wear a watch. Contrary to popular opinion, this is not so that I can preach for an interminable length of time, it is because I developed an allergy to nickel a few years ago. I could not wear a watch without getting a rash, and I found the plastic digital watches awful as an alternative.

Somebody told me there was a way to prevent the nickel back of a watch from irritating me in this way. I should coat it in clear nail varnish. This would save my skin from contact with the offending metal.

Debbie came with me to a branch of Boot’s. She took great delight in announcing loudly as she gave the nail varnish to the cashier, “IT’S FOR MY HUSBAND!”

Oh, and after that, it didn’t work anyway. Three coats of nail varnish on the watch. No success. If you ask me the time nowadays, I consult my phone, because it is connected to an Internet clock. Or maybe I’ll look at my iPad for the same reason. (Although the iPad is a little large to go on my wrist!)

Our readings this week in the Second Sunday of Advent are about telling the time. Not ordinary calendar and clock time, for which we use conventional timepieces, but God’s time. In this second week of Advent, we traditionally celebrate the rôle of the prophets, and their job is to proclaim God’s time.

The particular prophet in focus here is John the Baptist and his use of Isaiah, and if you know your Four Sundays of Advent, you’ll be aware that John is usually under the spotlight in Week Three, not Week Two. So we’ll leave the more specific features of his ministry for next week – you can think then, if you like, about his dress code and his diet – but this week simply see him as a model of prophecy.

Exiled
Exilado / Exiled by Edlago Quinco on Flickr. Some rights reserved.

There is a specific chiming of the clock in God’s time that John the Baptist comes to announce, according to Mark’s Gospel. According to John, the time in God’s schedule has come for the end of the Exile.

What do I mean by ‘the end of the Exile’? You will remember how God’s people were taken from the Promised Land into Exile as a result of their persistent defiance of their God. Ten of the tribes were taken captive by Assyria in 722 BC, and never heard of again. The remaining two were defeated by Babylon in a series of waves, culminating in 586 BC, when Jerusalem was captured, the Temple destroyed, and most of the survivors were taken to the land of their conquerors. This was the Exile.

But some decades later, when Babylon itself had been conquered, the Jews began returning to Jerusalem and Judah. This return is prophesied in Isaiah 40, which we heard. Nehemiah leads the rebuilding of Jerusalem, and prophets such as Haggai urge a commitment to rebuilding the Temple.

Yet it wasn’t a ‘happy ever after’ ending. In the centuries since, God’s people had been oppressed by the Greeks, and now they were under occupation in their own territory by Rome. Many of them said it was like still being in exile. They might be within their national borders, but they had no power to rule themselves and the land.

You have heard how rebel leaders arose from time to time, bidding to overthrow the Romans, and how they generally met grisly ends. But now comes a different kind of prophet – not a soldier, but a preacher. And Mark says that John arrives on the scene in fulfilment of Isaiah 40. Just as that chapter in Isaiah had begun the prophecies of hope that heralded the return from exile of God’s people in the sixth century BC, so now this prophet proclaims the return from another exile.

Of course, many people in that day would have hoped that this return from exile would deliver what the failed freedom fighters (or terrorists, as Rome probably regarded them) had aspired to: deliverance from military occupation. But as we know, John doesn’t come with that message, and nor does the Messiah he is introducing, namely Jesus. This return from exile is of a different kind. It is a return from exile where God gives his people not so much what they want as what they need. It is not freedom from occupation by Rome, but freedom from occupation by sin. It moves the question of blame and responsibility away from outside enemies, and makes God’s people look at themselves.

Yet even if that sounds challenging, it is still good news. We can be set free! Whatever the external circumstances, there is a freedom to be had here and now in God’s time. ‘Now is the time for God’s salvation,’ says the Apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians. This truly is God’s time, says the prophet. There may be things you want, and there will be times when God will give you those things, but major on the things you need, and especially this one. ‘Come home,’ says God, ‘It’s time.’

So what is solved by God saying through the prophets that the time for the end of the exile has come? I think we can take an image from the experience of the Jewish people in Babylon. Exile was the most terrible trauma for them. It was the end of their faith as they knew it, just as the destruction of the Second Jerusalem Temple in AD 70 that Jesus prophesied would be devastating to the Jews of his generation and the next. In exile, they struggled to have faith. They felt far from God, because they could no longer go to the Temple where God had said his Name would reside, and even if they could get there, the Temple wasn’t standing. No wonder in the red-raw language of Psalm 137, they sang of weeping by the rivers of Babylon and asking in the echo of their captors’ taunts, ‘How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’ To be in exile was to be far from God, perhaps even cut off from God.

Therefore to come home from exile was to come back to God, and draw near to him. We might criticise their locating of God’s presence in a particular special place, and indeed the Old Testament itself does, even and especially when King Solomon dedicates the original Temple. They know that God cannot be confined to places built by human hands. His Temple is the whole created order.

We too fall into a similar trap at times. We delude ourselves that God is more to be found in a religious building than in his world. As a result, we miss a lot of what God is doing in our generation.

But we can hear the ‘end of exile’ invitation to come back to God and draw close to him again. We can hear the ‘end of exile’ message that we need not stay away. However much we may know that our sins put us outside of fellowship with God, when the prophets declare the end of exile with the coming of Jesus the Messiah, they say to us, you can draw near to God because he has drawn near to you! This Messiah is not simply a human champion (although he is, if in a different way from common understanding): he is God in the flesh. He is Emmanuel, God with us. When we feared we would have to stay at a distance, or we didn’t know our way back to him, God made the move towards us.

And this is the nature of God’s love towards us in Christ. He says, “You don’t have to stay in exile anymore. You don’t have to keep your distance. I am coming close to you in my Son. Do not be afraid. I am bridging the gap. I am dealing with the sin that has driven us apart. Hear my invitation to walk with me in freedom.”

Now if God has come on a journey from heaven to earth in his Son to draw close to us, how do we walk towards him? The passage tells us, and it has a typical prophetic theme: repentance. Like the Old Testament prophets, there is powerful enacted symbolism – in this case baptism. John proclaims a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, and when people are baptised, they confess their sins (verses 4-5).

What’s more, this too is backed up by the reference to the end of exile in Isaiah 40. There, the prophet imagines the need for a royal highway on which God can lead his people back to their homeland. Hence ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight’ (Mark 1:3b). Smooth everything out, get rid of the potholes, put down new tarmac. It’s like the way a locality is decorated or improved before the Queen visits. God’s highway must be smooth and straight.

However, Mark applies that prophecy in a different way. If it’s end of the exile time now, then it is the people who need to straighten out their own paths. The way to walk towards God is by straightening out our lives in repentance, the repentance for which John gave, as I said, the powerful prophetic symbol of baptism.

Watling Street
Watling Street by David Jones on Flickr. Some rights reserved.

And this would have made sense, not only at the time of John’s coming, but also to Mark’s first readers, who were almost certainly Christians in Rome. I’m sure you remember the Roman reputation for building long, straight roads. We even lived in a turning off the famous Watling Street when I served in my circuit before last. The Romans made straight roads, and they made roads straight.

Repentance is not simply saying sorry. It is being sorry enough to desire change, to straighten out our lives. The word means ‘change of mind’, and repentance involves a whole change of mind about right and wrong, about who comes first in my life, and what gets priority.

We associate repentance with coming to faith in Christ at the beginning of the Christian life. Rightly, we recognise the need for a complete change of mind, a U-turn, if you like, in order to become a disciple of Jesus, because his ways are so different from those of the world.

Basilea Schlink, Repentance: The Joy-Filled Life
Basilea Schlink, Repentance: The Joy-Filled Life

However, it would be wrong to limit the call to repentance to the commencement of Christian faith. God regularly calls us to repentance as a means of drawing us closer to him. Perhaps that is why one saint, Mother Basilea Schlink, wrote a book entitled ‘Repentance: The Joy-Filled Life’. It’s not what we expect, is it, for repentance and joy to be linked? But they are, because repentance brings us nearer to God and therefore to all the joy that knowing him bestows upon our lives.

It is why we need to be converted over and over again. Like certain motorways and ‘A’ roads I could name, our lives have semi-permanent roadworks on them. God is calling us to that straightening out of our highways.

And perhaps it is those who least feel the regular call to repentance about whom we should be most concerned. For the disciples who make it their business to draw near to God find as they edge closer that the  nearer they get to him, the more they realise what sinners they are. If they are not careful, they feel hopeless, because they think, “Will this ever end?” but the more proximate we get to the holy love of God, the more we shall realise how far short we fall, and how we yet again need to turn from our selfish ways if we are to prepare the way of the Lord.

What we all need to hear is the prophetic call that the time for the end of exile and coming close to God is not only the time for an ending but the time for a beginning: the beginning of the Holy Spirit’s availability to all flesh. The coming Messiah ‘will baptise you with the Holy Spirit’ (verse 8) says the prophet John. And in that promised gift of God’s nearness comes the experience of divine holiness, which is both awesome and terrifying, but also the promised power to turn our lives into straight streets.

0

Create a website or blog at WordPress.com

Up ↑