Tag: Resurrection

Easter Day 2024: God Ships His Blessings On The Third Day (Mark 16:1-8)

Mark 16:1-8

Here’s a true story I heard on Thursday. Somebody was looking up on Google the famous blessing prayer from the Book of Numbers. I’m sure you’ll know the one:

The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.

But the top result wasn’t from a Bible site like Bible Gateway, they only came in second to Amazon, who were selling a print of that text in a picture frame. As a result, the entry read:

 The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace. Usually ships within 2 to 3 days.

When the person shared this, somebody commented:

I do wish more of His promises came with delivery dates and tracking!

Welcome to Easter Sunday, where we celebrate the fact that God’s blessing has shipped within 2 to 3 days! For on the third day, the tomb was empty.

What blessings ship from God to us on Easter Day? There are many! I want to share four with you.

Firstly, a new body:

You may recall that during Holy Week, a woman at Bethany has anointed Jesus’ body with expensive perfume. Jesus says she has anointed his body for burial. You might say the woman did so prematurely, but perhaps prophetically.

Now, along comes this group of women to do what? Exactly the same.[1] The Greek implies they are bringing liquid spices. This is not the same as the solid spices that John tells us Nicodemus used. The women are coming to do what the woman at Bethany had prophetically foretold.

But if the woman at Bethany was early, the women at the tomb are too late! They knew Jesus was physically dead , otherwise they wouldn’t have come. But now, the body isn’t there, because he has risen.

They weren’t expecting that. Three times in Mark’s Gospel Jesus prophesies that he will suffer and die, but be raised from the dead, yet it hadn’t sunk in. It didn’t fit their prior beliefs. They were persuaded not by the divine words of Jesus but by God’s divine action.

Make no mistake, the Resurrection is bodily. This is not about an immortal soul, this is about God raising Jesus’ body from the dead and making it new – even with new powers, as we read in other Gospels such as John.

God is interested in redeeming the physical, the material, the bodily. Our faith is not simply an ethereal, spiritual matter. Resurrection tells us that the whole of creation is on God’s agenda for renewal.

And that’s why our mission is not only to call people to repentance and faith in Christ, it is also to things like healing, social justice, and the renewal of our planet. Everything that God created has been tainted, and everything that God created is up for redemption. The Resurrection assures us of that.

The second blessing to ship on Easter Day is a new family:

Who is ‘Mary the mother of James’ in verse 1?[2] In the previous chapter, among the women at the Cross, is ‘Mary the mother of Joses and James’ (15:40), which is then shortened to ‘Mary the mother of Joses’ (15:47). It’s likely that ‘Mary the mother of James’ at the empty tomb is ‘Mary the mother of Joses and James.’

But here’s the surprising thing. There is only one woman in Mark’s Gospel who is called ‘Mary the mother of Joses and James.’ She appears in chapter 6 verse 3 where she is the mother of Jesus’ brothers. In other words, this is Mary the mother of our Lord herself.

But just as Jesus had said that his true family were those who did his will, so here at the empty tomb Mary herself is discovering that the risen Jesus is indeed making a new family. His new family is the family of believers in him.

We sometimes talk about the church as a family, and that’s absolutely right. We are the family of God, the community of the King, the sign and foretaste of God’s coming kingdom. In our tradition, we may not go in for the hackneyed way that some Christians address one another as ‘brother’ or ‘sister’ and that’s fair enough, but that’s what we are. At both baptisms and funerals we refer to the subjects as ‘our sister’ or ‘our brother’, and that is because Jesus creates a new family in the Resurrection.

And his Resurrection will be ours one way. I guess that’s why he told the Sadducees during Holy Week that there would be no marrying and giving in marriage in the life of the age to come. There would be no more need for procreation, because no more would dead people need replacing in the population.

One of my colleagues recently told the circuit staff a story of how he was visiting a residential care home, and he met one resident who was dying for what would be the last time. Before my colleague left, the resident said to him, ‘I expect this will be the last time we see each other.’

He replied, ‘I’ve got news for you! I think you’ll find we’re going to be spending rather a long time together!’

So look around this morning in church. Here are members of your forever family. It’s worth us learning to get on with one another!

The third blessing to ship on Easter Day is a new commission:

Having seen the place where Jesus’ body had been laid, the ‘young man dressed in a white robe’ (verse 5) (which is just a long way of saying ‘angel’) tells the women to ‘Go’ (verse 7). They are to go with the message of the Resurrection.

Hang on – who is to go? The women. In our more egalitarian culture, that detail can pass us by. But this was a society in which women couldn’t even give evidence in a court of law. If you were going to choose witnesses to support your case, you wouldn’t select women. The fact that it’s women who are the first witnesses to the Resurrection is a sign that this is not a cobbled-together fiction.

And we might reflect on all those who still say only men can lead the church because Jesus chose twelve male apostles. He also only chose Jews. It’s apparent here that God doesn’t keep to our social conventions. Anyone and everyone who has encountered the Resurrection and wants to follow Jesus can be witnesses to Jesus.

How many of us feel disqualified from serving Jesus in any significant way? It may be through the disapproval of others. It may be through our own low self-esteem that we disqualify ourselves. We may feel unworthy or unfit. ‘I’ve let God down in the past.’ ‘I don’t have the necessary gifts.’ ‘I’m not strong enough.’

But could it be that in fact our risen Lord is giving us a poke on Easter Day and saying, the only thing that qualifies you is that you’ve encountered me and you want to follow me?

I want to invite you to consider whether there is some call you have been resisting, putting off, or filing away because you don’t think you fit the template. I certainly didn’t think I fitted the right mould to be a minister. I’ve had the odd congregation who have agreed! I still at times live with ‘imposter syndrome.’

But on Easter Day, we can put all that aside. Have we met with the risen Lord? Do we love him? If so, let’s take on a commission.

The fourth and final blessing is a new beginning:

But go, tell his disciples and Peter (verse 7)

says the angel to the women.

The disciples and Peter? Huh? Wasn’t Peter a disciple too, an apostle, even? Why mention him separately?

I’m sure we can guess. Peter is so mortified by his three denials of Jesus that he doesn’t even consider himself a true disciple anymore. He may even have returned to his old profession as a fisherman. It’s all over, especially with Jesus having been executed.

But in God’s economy, the end is not the end unless there is good news. And here we have that hint of what John’s Gospel will tell us in greater detail: that restoration is on the way for Peter. ‘No condemnation now I dread, Jesus and all in him is mine,’ as Charles Wesley wrote.

The new commission that I just spoke of is available to Peter as well. He has a new beginning.

This is after all the Gospel, isn’t it? That our sins and failures don’t have the final word, any more than the sins of those who conspired to have Jesus crucified had the last word. They didn’t. Jesus vacated his grave.

As the late Christian singer Larry Norman put it,

They nailed him to the cross,
They laid him in the ground,
But they should have known
You can’t keep a good man down.[3]

If anyone here thinks they have messed up so badly they can never be valuable to God, then the Resurrection says, think again. There is a new beginning for you.

If anyone here thinks they have committed the unforgivable sin, then the Resurrection says, think again. There is a new beginning for you, too.

The grace of God is bigger than our sins and failures. Even the worst of our betrayals of Christ do not have the final word in life: that place belongs to the love and mercy of God.

As a minister, I have heard respected church members privately tell me about the most awful sins they have committed. It has been my privilege to assure them of God’s forgiveness and the certainty that they, like Peter, have a new beginning with Christ. Easter Day is the reason I can do so. We all have a new beginning today.

I can’t conclude today without drawing attention to the theme of the women’s fear that is present in the reading.

‘Don’t be alarmed,’ says the angel, but despite his reassurances, the final verse says this:

Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid. (Verse 8)

I’m aware that I can give you all the arguments in the world for the joy, hope, and freedom of the Easter faith, but an encounter with almighty resurrection power can still leave us shaking.

And it seems such a strange way to end the Gospel – so much so that others have speculated that the original ending is lost, or have written alternative endings.

But maybe it all indicates that the necessary response is for us to write our own endings in each of our lives. For as Tom Wright has put it,

‘Jesus is risen, and we have a job of work to do.’

[1] This paragraph and the next are influenced by Ian Paul, The women at the empty tomb in Mark 16.

[2] Again, for what follows I am dependent on Ian Paul’s article.

[3] Larry Norman, ‘Why should the devil have all the good music?’, Only Visiting This Planet, MGM Records, 1972.

0

Seven Churches 2: Smyrna (Revelation 2:8-11)

Revelation 2:8-11

I was on sabbatical earlier this year, and when people asked what I was going to do with my time, some were surprised by one of the things I had chosen.

I had decided to revisit one of my favourite places, the Lee Abbey community in north Devon, to take a course on ‘Dealing with disappointment.’

“Why would you want to do that?” people asked me. “Don’t you want to do something more uplifting on a sabbatical?”

So I explained that I was coming to the end of thirteen years in a circuit appointment where not all my dreams had been fulfilled. I was in the latter stages of my ministry generally and as I look back I don’t see all the hopes I had for my calling at the outset fulfilled, either. I needed to process these things healthily.

Moreover, I said, disappointment is a regular pastoral theme when people talk with me. So few are living Plan A for their lives. More often it’s Plan B, Plan C, or Plan D. It’s important to have a grip of this theme.

Which brings us to that early church at Smyrna. Already facing afflictions, poverty, and slander (verse 9), Jesus tells them that suffering, imprisonment, persecution, and even death are just around the corner (verse 10). It’s not exactly the good life. So much for the old lie that said, ‘When I became a Christian, all my problems disappeared.’

Yet in these four short verses Jesus gives them a way to understand what they are going through that will fortify them for the difficult times and give them hope for the long term.

But what has all this got to do with us? We know about our Christian brothers and sisters in other parts of the world who suffer greatly for their faith. We often give thanks in our prayers that we have the freedom to worship.

I would not agree with those who say that Christians are now persecuted in this country, but I would say that it is becoming more difficult and there is increasing hostility in the public square to us. We should be prepared for days when Christianity will be costly even here.

And even if that doesn’t come our way, we shall all for sure face disappointments and injustices in life, so it’s best we prepare for facing them with faith rather than an attitude that expects everything to go right.

There are two things in what Jesus says to the church at Smyrna that help us. They are encapsulated in the way Jesus introduces himself, and they are implicit in his pastoral words to them.

How does he introduce himself?

These are the words of him who is the First and the Last, who died and came to life again. (Verse 8b)

Death and resurrection are the two themes that help us. How so?

Firstly, let’s consider death – and specifically here, I mean the death of Christ. He is the First and the Last, the agent of creation and also the One who will reign for ever and ever. And yet he died.

Whenever Christians think about injustice and suffering, the best place to start is at the Cross. Our faith is centred on the Cross. And what is the Cross if not the most unjust act in history? The eternal sinless Son of God is stitched up by both Jew and Gentile and condemned to an agonising death.

We might say that the death of Jesus was an unique event in history, and in the sense that if made possible the reconciliation of the world to God, that is true. But we might still draw a couple of lessons for ourselves.

One is that in a battle soldiers put themselves in harm’s way in order to conquer the enemy. That is what Jesus did with sin and the power of evil. We may not suffer for the sins of the world, but we do find ourselves in a spiritual battle. It is therefore not surprising if the enemy seeks to inflict damage and pain on us. It is the risk we take as soldiers of Christ.

Another is that our calling as disciples is to be imitators of Christ. I know we do that very imperfectly – well, I do, for sure – but it does mean that we are liable to be treated in a similar way to the way the world treated Jesus. Remember that he said,

If the world hates you, remember that it hated me first. (John 15:18)

So while we are not to go out and look for suffering, nor are we meant to be stupidly provocative (as I fear some Christians are), we should not be surprised when we are treated badly. In a time when more and more groups are trying to exclude Christians from the public square because they say we are hateful and dangerous, it’s par for the course. No wonder Jesus tells the Christians at Smyrna to expect suffering.

The trouble is, we have been led to think differently by living in a country where for many centuries Christianity was a major player in shaping the culture, where it has even been in partnership with the State – so-called Christendom.

But throughout history and throughout the world, this is not normal. It is more common to be reviled for following Jesus than praised. Remember: our faith is centred on the Cross.

Secondly, let’s consider resurrection – and again, we starting with the Resurrection of Jesus.

Not only does Jesus remind the church at Smyrna that he died, he also reminds them that he ‘came to life again.’

Now you might say that the Resurrection is an unique event in history, too. You would be right at present, but by the end of history as we know it you will be wrong. Jesus promises here,

The one who is victorious will not be hurt at all by the second death. (Verse 11b)

We look forward to the resurrection of the dead. The Resurrection of Christ is the first-fruits of the harvest of resurrection to come. If we follow Christ, then ‘The second death’, that is, eternal judgment, is nothing to fear, for by the grace of God we are put right with him by faith and he remembers our sins no more.

And we do see some mini-resurrections in this life. We see answers to prayer. Injustices are put right. People are healed. Those in need are provided for. Folk who have fallen out are reconciled. Wrongdoers make restitution to those they harmed. Forgiveness is given and received.

When we pray about a situation that is wrong, we do not always know whether our prayers are going to be answered in the affirmative in this life. But that should not stop us praying. If we don’t pray, then very little will happen. If we do pray, though, then there is more of a chance of seeing some divine resurrection.

So let us continue to pray and act for the sick, the bereaved, the suffering, and those facing injustice. We never know what God might do.

To speak personally, I can only think of two times when I can say for certain that God answered my prayer for someone to be healed. However, that neither stops nor discourages me from continuing to pray for the sick. Who knows when number three will come along?

Or maybe you are upset that certain close friends and relatives have never committed their lives to Christ. If so, then I remind you about D L Moody, the famous evangelist, who prayed daily for a hundred of his friends to come to know Christ. Amazingly, by the time of his death, ninety-six of them had done so.

But what about the other four? They were converted at Moody’s funeral.

Conclusion

How do we hold all this together? We do so in a framework that Christian thinkers call ‘The now and the not yet of God’s kingdom.’ Since the coming of Jesus, we are living in two overlapping eras. The first is the era of sin, and thus we continue to see injustice and suffering. This is our first category of death.

The second is the era of the kingdom of God, which Jesus inaugurated when he came. Thus we also continue to see people and things being made new in response to prayer. This is our second category of resurrection.

We haven’t simply passed from the era of death to the era of resurrection. The two are co-existing, overlapping until Christ appears again to judge the living and the dead. Thus we must expect that sometimes we shall face suffering, and on other times we shall experience restoration, and we won’t always know in advance which will be our lot.

But whichever happens, God is still in charge of our lives. Jesus is reigning at the Father’s right hand, even though not everybody acknowledges his rule.

Here is a story I like to tell that I think illustrates what I am trying to say. Some decades ago, there was a massacre of British Christian missionaries in a far-off land, although some survived the attack.

A memorial service was held back in the UK. At it, the preacher said, “I believe that all of the missionaries were delivered by God. Those who survived were delivered from suffering, and those who were murdered were delivered through suffering.”

For we worship

him who is the First and the Last, who died and came to life again.

0

Farewell 3: The End Is Not The End

Jeremiah 8:18-22 and 1 Corinthians 15:50-58

Last month, a poet friend of mine published a new anthology of his poetry. It is a series of poems for the end of life and beyond. He entitled it ‘The End Is Not The End’.

And if you want a title for the sermon today, that’s it: The End Is Not The End. That doesn’t mean I’m staying in this circuit after all, and that the farewells have all been part of a hoax.

No, I want to face head on the difficulties and discouragements we face in our churches here, and which of course so many churches in the western world do.

A few years ago, I was praying about my time here and I wondered in my praying what would summarise my time here. What popped into my head was a Bible verse I didn’t want to hear. We heard it in the Jeremiah reading:

‘The harvest is past,
    the summer has ended,
    and we are not saved.’

(Jeremiah 8:20)

I knew that many of the hopes and dreams I had had when coming here were not going to be fulfilled. Situations that looked like they had great potential proved to have more style than substance. People who gave an initial impression of being deeply spiritual turned out to be like the seeds that the sower in Jesus’ parable threw on rocky ground or among thorns.

And alongside all this we are fighting an uphill battle in a culture that is increasingly hostile to our faith.

So what does the Methodist Church nationally do? Well, apart from its periodic attempts to impersonate your embarrassing trendy uncle, it chooses not to learn from history but to delete a historic document, the so-called Liverpool Minutes, that show how the first Methodists to face decline dug deep into their spirituality and turned things around.

Meanwhile, it buries its head in the sand when all the evidence is there that the structures we have are creaking towards breaking point and it adds more bureaucracy – the classic behaviour of a decaying organisation. Let’s have even bigger Districts. Let’s amalgamate circuits to such a size that if you are like the one I am moving to, they cannot meaningfully consult the entire circuit about the appointment of a new minister. We defend these structures despite all the evidence from other churches that we need greater continuity between churches and their ordained leaders. And we spread our leaders even thinner.

And we pile even more responsibilities on the leaders without taking anything away from them. Renewing my Safeguarding training has gone from a two-hour session four years ago to eight hours now. There are good ideas added, such as getting all the ministers into a pastoral supervision programme, but no-one tells us what we should drop. Conference clearly thinks we can make bricks without straw.

‘The harvest is past,
    the summer has ended,
    and we are not saved.’

And it’s not just the ministers facing this. I look at what we ask our congregations to do, especially those in leadership positions. Some of them are being worn down to the bone with the amount of practical work and administration we need them to do. Not only that, some of them are holding these responsibilities at ages well beyond that where we always used to let people retire gracefully from positions in the church and let them have a well-deserved rest.

‘The harvest is past,
    the summer has ended,
    and we are not saved.’

Now to some of you this might sound like I am just settling some scores at the end of thirteen years here. Please believe me when I say that’s not what this is about. I believe we need some honesty and reality about the situation.

Of course, that’s what got Jeremiah into trouble in his day. Relentlessly he told God’s people the stark truth of their situation. With no change in direction, they were going to be conquered by Babylon and taken into exile there. He didn’t deal in the frothy shallow positivity of the popular culture.

Or maybe you think I’m just here as a spiritual doom and gloom merchant. We call such people Jeremiahs. But I am not here to be a religious Eeyore. Nor am I here to be Private Frazer from Dad’s Army, crying, ‘Doomed, doomed, we’re all doomed!’

I am here today to be a small-scale Jeremiah, but not in the way you might think. Let me explain.

Forty years ago, when I trained to be a Methodist Local Preacher, we had to sit four written exams. In my Old Testament paper, there was a question where we were asked to assess a statement that Jeremiah was a prophet of doom.

And like all good exam answers, the best response was to say, ‘Yes but’. You see, Jeremiah was about doom – in the short term – but in the long term he was about hope. Short term doom, yes – but long term hope.

He called on the exiled Israelites to find ways of living positively in Babylon and blessing their captors. And he looked beyond the exile to when they would return to the Promised Land.

So I want to proclaim to you today short term doom but long term hope. The End Is Not The End. Just as Jeremiah held out hope that it was still possible to live a fruitful life of faith in an alien and hostile culture, and just as he saw beyond that to restoration, so I want to say something similar to you today, but with a New Testament spin.

And so this is where I want to bring in our reading from 1 Corinthians 15. This is Paul’s great chapter on the Resurrection, and the verses we heard were the climax of that chapter.

This passage has the verse that has been dubbed the verse for the church crèche. It’s verse 51:

Listen, I tell you a mystery: we will not all sleep, but we will all be changed.

But to be more serious, here is God’s great promise that The End Is Not The End. For just as Jesus was raised from the dead, so shall we at the end of time. Death will be swallowed up in victory. Its sting will be neutralised. We gain the final victory through our Risen Lord.

It’s like the famous American preacher Tony Campolo used to put it. He would recount how people would come up to him and ask him how on earth he could be positive and hopeful in such a dreadful world as ours.

His reply? ‘I’ve read the last chapter of the book, and Jesus wins!’

Friends, The End Is Not The End. If it ends in death, then it’s not the end. Not in the light of Jesus our Risen Lord, it isn’t.

Well, you may say, that’s all very well, but isn’t that pie in the sky when we die? What can you say to us as we have to continue living in difficult times as Christians?

I want to give you two words of encouragement.

The first is this. Although we await the great resurrection at the end of time, we do experience in the meantime some little resurrections. Here’s what I mean by that.

Many of you know I was recently on sabbatical, and before I went, some of you asked what I was doing during my three months. One of the things I did was I spent five days at the Lee Abbey community in North Devon. I went there for a Christian conference on the theme of how to handle disappointment in the life of faith. I went knowing that I was wrestling with disappointment towards the end of my time here. I went knowing also that most if not all of us live with disappointments in our lives, and it’s therefore an important pastoral issue.

Now I guess one of the things we’re dealing with in this sermon is the theme of coping with disappointment. Our speaker at Lee Abbey that week focussed on what is commonly called ‘The now and the not yet’ of the kingdom of God. We see some signs of God’s kingdom now in our life of faith, perhaps when we see remarkable answers to prayer, but we also experience the fact that God’s kingdom has not yet come fully. Yes, Jesus reigns, but not everyone nor all creation bows the knee to him yet.

So it is part of the Christian life to live in this tension. And what I simply want to say to you about this today is that even as you find yourself immersed in disappointments, doom, and struggles, never lose sight of the fact that God in his mercy will grant you some little resurrections. He may be silent at times, but he is not absent. As I said to the Knaphill people last Sunday morning, sometimes he is like Jesus walking alongside the two disciples on their way to Emmaus, who do not realise who their companion is. You may not recognise his presence at times in the midst of the sorrows, but he is there, and he will grant you tokens of his grace.

The second word of encouragement I want to give you is this. The passage from 1 Corinthians 15 is very special to me personally, and I’d like to tell you why.

Many of you know that in my last appointment I had a rough time. I was a misfit in the appointment, and for me that meant five miserable years. We actually considered whether I might need to come out of ministry for a few years to recover and see whether I ever wanted to come back into ministry at all. Before we left, I went into counselling for some help.

In all those difficulties, this was the passage which was my lifesaver. At times I confess it only just kept my head above the water. But it did.

You see, you might expect that Paul’s great chapter on the Resurrection would end with inspirational words about the life to come, but he doesn’t. His last words are words that earth how we are going to live now in the light of that resurrection hope. Verse 58:

 Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labour in the Lord is not in vain.

Your labour in the Lord is not in vain – so keep going.

I have never really understood why God called us to that last appointment. I have the odd theory, but nothing completely makes sense. But, says Paul, your labour in the Lord is not in vain. Whatever I did for him and his kingdom there, Jesus will take and make into something beautiful because in the resurrection it will endure. It felt like five wasted years to me, but the resurrection means that in the economy of God it will not be wasted.

For those of you here who are particularly living at the coal face of our difficulties in the church today, I want you to hear those words: your labour in the Lord is not in vain.

For my lovely ministerial colleagues who work hard and don’t always feel they see the fruits they long for: your labour in the Lord is not in vain.

For my dear church members, not least some of you in my church leadership teams, who have put in sterling efforts that must at times feel like King Canute trying to banish the incoming tide, I say the same: your labour in the Lord is not in vain.

For those of you like me and some members of my family, who live with the dark clouds of depression, I say to you: your labour in the Lord is not in vain.

Just remember, dear friends, that if you think everything is ending in death and darkness, The End Is Not The End.

Jesus wins.

1

Farewell 2: Jesus Makes Sense (Luke 24:13-35)

Luke 24:13-35

So we come to my final sermon here. When I think back to our beginning here, I remember the sense of hope and positivity I felt about this church. I thought there was huge potential here. I really thought something could happen.

So to come to the end of my ministry here at a time when the church is seriously having to consider closure before too long is something I never would have anticipated thirteen years ago.

I have reflected on why we have got to this point, and I have my theories. Could we have anticipated before it happened that we would be financially vulnerable? Possibly. Have we been a divided congregation? Yes, at times. Have we on occasion chosen fear over faith? I think we might have done. And did COVID-19 accelerate our problems? Without question.

You may have your theories, too. But it’s all academic now. This is the situation we are in. So what to say?

I may have told you along the way the story of the late Ugandan evangelist, Bishop Festo Kivengere, whose ministry came to prominence during the evil and violent dictatorship of Idi Amin in that country. One day, he was told he could address a group of men before they were shot to death by firing squad in a football stadium before a huge crowd.

Kivengere said he didn’t know what on earth to say to men facing that fate. But then he heard the quiet voice of Jesus speaking to him:

“Tell them about me. I’ll make sense.”

So that’s what I’m attempting this morning. To tell you about Jesus, so that he will make sense to you at this time, and bring you hope in whatever you face when I have gone.

This story of the Emmaus Road is one that is special to Debbie and me, because the preacher at our wedding chose this lesson and preached on it. But I’m not aiming to reproduce that sermon. Instead, I want to take two simple truths about Jesus in the passage, because I believe they will hold you strong in faith, whatever you face.

Firstly, Jesus is present with us in our grief.

To some extent, the account of Cleopas and his companion walking along talking to the stranger about Jesus and not realising it’s Jesus is almost comical. It feels like a pantomime. Not so much, ‘He’s behind you!’ as ‘He’s beside you!’

But listen to them as they pour out their litany of dashed hopes about Jesus. All their dreams are gone. Jesus was going to change everything. They had pinned all their hopes on him. But now he had been executed. It had all gone.

Compare that to how many of us are feeling about this church now. W can remember so many happy times here. We have made great friends. There have been memorable special occasions. And most of all, the encounters we have had with the living God. The likely loss of these hits hard.

For me, I remember us visiting the church where we had got married and where the children were dedicated, a few weeks before it closed. I had been devastated when I heard it was going to shut.

But as Cleopas and his companion pour out their grief and sense of hopelessness, what is going on? Jesus is with them in their grief. I know they don’t realise it, and we read that ‘they were kept from recognising him’ (verse 16), which is a puzzle. Does their failure to believe in the resurrection stop them? Do dark forces prevent them? Or is the Holy Spirit closing their eyes until the moment of revelation to come in the house? We don’t know.

Many of us know the temptation to believe that Jesus has deserted us when we face troubles. But Jesus was with Cleopas and his friends, even though they didn’t realise at first, and he is with us, too. We may not recognise it. We may not understand why he has allowed a disaster to happen. But our lack of understanding is no reason to conclude that he has absented himself.

The fact is, disasters do happen to God’s people. Think of Israel being sent away from the Promised Land into exile in Babylon. They struggled at first with how they would sing the Lord’s song in a strange land (Psalm 137). But eventually, with the encouragement of people like Ezekiel and Jeremiah, they found a way to live faithfully in their new situation.

So too with us. Even if this church disappears, Jesus won’t. Ask him to show you where he is and what he is doing. Ask him for the privilege of knowing that he is listening to you in your grief.

After all, he endured the worst injustice of all, when he died on the Cross despite being sinless. Do you think he doesn’t understand the human condition at its most desolate? Of course he does.

And this is why we sang Matt Redman’s song ‘You Never Let Go’:

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death
Your perfect love is casting out fear
And even when I’m caught in the middle of the storms of this life
I won’t turn back
I know You are near

And I will fear no evil
For my God is with me
And if my God is with me
Whom then shall I fear?
Whom then shall I fear?

[Chorus:]
Oh no, You never let go
Through the calm and through the storm
Oh no, You never let go
In every high and every low
Oh no, You never let go
Lord, You never let go of me

Secondly, Jesus is still in the resurrection business.

Think how Cleopas and his companion are trapped inside their own beliefs. They are good Jews who believe that resurrection will come – but only at the end of time. So it doesn’t matter that Jesus has prophesied three times that he will suffer, die, and rise, and it doesn’t matter that some women in their group that morning had reported that he had been raised (verses 22-24).

What changes them is an encounter with he risen Jesus. They are not forgotten or forsaken. Hope is not lost, it is renewed. Jesus is alive!

In exile, Israel was depicted as like a valley of dry, dead bones by Ezekiel. But the Spirit of God brought them new life and eventually they returned to Jerusalem and the Promised Land. The dead bones were alive. Jesus is in the resurrection business.

And I believe that whatever happens here in the coming months and years, Jesus has not got out of the resurrection business.

I don’t have any specific word from the Lord about what that will look like, but I do know this: the resurrection body is different, and when Jesus raises up his work from the dead again here it will look different. The resurrection body of Jesus was on the one hand identifiable as him, but on the other hand had new and different powers. Think of how Jesus appeared inside locked rooms.

I believe there is a hint in the Emmaus Road story that resurrection life is different. When the three travellers get to Emmaus and Jesus is invited into the home of Cleopas, he shuns his rôle as their guest and behaves as the host when he takes the bread, blesses God for it, breaks it, and shares it.

Some people think this is a precursor of Holy Communion, where we also see the fourfold action taking the bread, blessing God for it, breaking it, and sharing it. But I think that’s reading too much into the text, because devout Jews offered these four practices with the bread whenever they are.

But if Jesus is the host and Cleopas and his companion encounter him (verse 31), and they realise that their hearts have been burning inside them Verse 32, surely a reference to the Holy Spirit), then what we have here is church in the home. Jesus raises up a new form of worship, and of course by the time he writes his Gospel forty or fifty hears later, the early Christian church is worshipping not in the Temple or in synagogues, but where? In the home.

This is another case of the resurrection body being different. And because of that, what I want to say to you is this: if this church dies, God is capable of raising up a new work. Just don’t be limited by your prior expectations. Don’t assume that we’ll still have church buildings, and we’ll have them where we’ve always had them, or even as to whether we should take such precautions.

Be ready, then, for the Holy Spirit to do something new and different here. Perhaps what we were offering had had its time, and God wants to do something new here in order to reach people in the name of Jesus. Think of Mr Spock in Star Trek, but not so much saying, “It’s life, Jim, but not as know it,” but “It’s church, Jim, but not as we know it.” Let old and dying ways go. Give them a decent burial.

And be prepared to walk with Jesus into something new and unfamiliar, but much simpler than Methodist rules make them, except for the fact that he is the host.

Let it be in the spirit of the way the prophets prepared Israel to come back from exile in Babylon to the Promised Land. In Isaiah 43, they are told to forget the former things, including even the Exodus from Egypt, because God was doing something new.

So too, because Jesus is still in the resurrection business, be prepared to put aside the old ways as he does something new in raising up a new work to replace the old.

Let’s go back to that Matt Redman song we sang. Here are some other words from it:

And I can see a light that is coming for the heart that holds on
A glorious light beyond all compare
And there will be an end to these troubles
But until that day comes
We’ll live to know You here on the earth

We may weep at the grave of this church. But make no mistake. Jesus will raise up a new work. Let’s make sure we walk with him.

0

Putting One Over Jesus, Luke 20:27-40 (Ordinary 32 Year C)

I first preached this sermon six years ago at Weybridge Methodist Church. I’ve dusted it down again for this Sunday following a heavy and fraught week.

Luke 20:27-38

Did you ever like putting one over on your teachers? I wondered at the chutzpah of a fellow student at theological college, who wrote at the top of one of his exam essays the verse from the Psalms which reads, ‘I have more wisdom than all my teachers.’ I hope he wrote some good answers!

Or perhaps you liked to prove the clever kid in the class wrong, or you rejoiced when they had a bad day? I have to say that I saw that one from the other side. I’m afraid I was the clever kid in the class, especially when it came to Maths. One year in an exam at secondary school I so rushed my answers because I thought it was all too easy that I found myself plummeting from first out of two hundred students in my year to fourteenth, Oh, the shame! And I am sure that many other teenagers enjoyed my temporary downfall.

That’s a little like what the Sadducees were attempting in our reading today. How they would love to smear egg on Jesus’ face! How they would love to bring him down a peg or two and reduce his credibility and authority with the crowds.

But why would they want to do that?

The Sadducees were historically connected to the Jerusalem priesthood, and they were generally a wealthy lot, who ensured they kept themselves comfortable by keeping in with the powerful. So they were very pally with the Roman forces that were occupying the Promised Land. People like that didn’t want to acknowledge the authority of Jesus, because following his teaching would undermine their addiction to power and wealth. If they could only discredit this pesky popular working-class preacher, then maybe his words wouldn’t keep them awake at night anymore.

Now what on earth does that have to do with us? We don’t want to undermine Jesus, surely? We love him. Jesus is our friend and our Saviour. We owe everything to him.

But sometimes we don’t want to hear what he says, either. His teaching is too uncomfortable for us at times. We don’t want to make him look foolish, still less look to carry out a character assassination, but we have our ways of making his awkward teaching irrelevant. So when he says challenging things about money and possessions, we argue that those sayings were only for those particular people at that specific time, and they don’t have universal application – at least, not in that form. Or when we find that Jesus believed in the existence of demons and this apparently offends our scientific minds, we say that Jesus was just a man of his time and he wouldn’t have known about the existence of mental illness. You can add your own examples to this list.

The trouble, though, is this. As the late John Stott used to say, you can’t accept Jesus as Saviour without also confessing him as Lord. It’s not possible just to have the benefits of salvation without all that follows in the commitment of discipleship to the Lord Jesus Christ.

So the first challenge in our reading this morning is a challenge to our wills: will we bow the knee and truly acknowledge Jesus Christ not only as Saviour, but also as Lord?

Let’s move on. The second challenge is a challenge to our minds. What on earth is all this strange stuff about seven brothers each in turn marrying the same woman as one after another, they die?

It’s a Jewish custom, taken from the Old Testament, known as ‘Levirate Marriage’. A man had to have children to inherit from him. It’s rather like the concern many men have in our society to pass on the family surname to a son. Hence if in ancient Israel a man died without fathering children, it became the task of the next brother to marry the widow and father children that would count as the first man’s heirs.

Hence the Sadducees can build up their ludicrous story in an attempt to ridicule Jesus and his belief in the resurrection. For the Sadducees didn’t believe in resurrection. They predominantly only read the first five books of the Bible rather than the later ones, which the Pharisees read. And as they saw it, there was nothing about resurrection in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, or Deuteronomy. To be fair, there’s very little in other Old Testament Scriptures, either: the resurrection of the righteous is taught in Daniel, and it may be hinted at in Job, but there’s precious little.

So they tell their imaginary story. You can almost hear the smug self-satisfaction as they think they have proved to Jesus that his belief in the resurrection is laughable. If you want a similar example in our society, then think about the way some militant atheists laugh when they think they have dismissed what you and I believe as ignorant superstition.

But Jesus takes the Sadducees to task for a failure of logic. They just haven’t thought this through. Passing on the family name assumes that generations are going to die and need replacing; how is that going to happen with the resurrection, in which there will be no more death?

Friends, not all of those who oppose Christianity have thought through their objections carefully. Richard Dawkins in particular is one who recycles and rehashes old, tired arguments that have long been refuted by Christians. If we can get a hearing for our convictions (and I grant you that isn’t always easy) then it can be quite simple to refute what people like him say.

But if the opponents of Jesus are shown up for not using their minds well, then it behoves Christians to use their thinking to the glory of God. Remember that Jesus said we are to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength.

And I say that knowing how reluctant some Christians are to think hard about their faith and about life. Many years ago, someone suggested that the church carries on as if the old Sunday School chorus wasn’t ‘Jesus wants me for a sunbeam’ so much as ‘Jesus wants me for a zombie’. Ministers see congregations glaze over corporately when they ask them to think hard.

But this is what we must do, prayerfully, as an act of worship. I don’t mean that everyone has to be an intellectual – that isn’t everybody’s gift – but we do all need to think to the glory of God about our faith. I hear church members complain about the public success of the new atheists in recent years, but when it comes to it they don’t want to make an effort with their minds themselves. They would rather bury their brains in the sand. Yet if we want to counter them and show that the Christian vision has more power to explain life than theirs, then we have to dedicate our thinking to God, pray that the Holy Spirit will help us in the life of the mind, and seek to express what Paul calls in 2 Corinthians ‘the mind of Christ’.

Thirdly and finally, the reading contains a challenge to our vision. Who or what controls our vision and imagination? I suggest to you that in a lot of areas – and certainly when we consider life after death – Christians have surrendered their vision and imagination to non-Christian sources. Our account of faith becomes seriously sub-biblical, if not downright unbiblical.

What do I mean? Listen to the average Christian talking about death and the hereafter and you hear a range of convictions that have nothing to do with historic Christianity. When someone dies, we hear people say that it doesn’t matter, because the body is just a shell for the real person, for the soul. Friends, that isn’t biblical thinking, that’s pagan Greek philosophy.

The life of the world to come doesn’t consist in us being disembodied souls floating on clouds. The vision of Jesus and the apostles is of resurrection. That’s bodily. In fact, you might say it’s bodily plus, given the additional powers that the resurrection body of Jesus seemed to have. You can’t even use Jesus’ reference to being ‘like the angels’ (verse 36) as anything other than bodily: in the Bible, angels manifestly have bodies.

The vision Jesus gives us here is of the bodily and the physical in a new existence – souped-up, if you like. You might say that something physical is missing here: if there is to be no marrying and no childbirth in the new creation, then presumably there is no more sex after death. Here is the reason why our marriage vows are ‘till death do us part’: marriage doesn’t figure in the new world.

But then we have already said that there is no more need for procreation, because generations will not need to be replaced. And surely the intimacy and ecstasy possible between a husband and a wife will be superseded by even closer, deeper, and more intense relationship with our God. Not only will we now see face to face rather than through a glass darkly (according to 1 Corinthians 13), we can also expect – according to Augustine of Hippo – for everything in the new creation to mediate the presence of God to us.

Our Christian vision of relationships, then, in the new heavens and the new earth, is not one that can be reduced to being reunited with our loved ones, however comforting that may be. It is about being together in the undiluted presence of God.

And because this is not about disembodied souls, let alone harp players on clouds, it sets before us a vision of a healed creation and restored relationships with God and one another.

Once you state it in those terms, you can see that we have something we can anticipate in this life, albeit not perfectly. We can work for the healing of people and of our planet. We can work for reconciliation with God through the Cross of Christ, and for peace-making between people. By the power of the Holy Spirit, we can pray for healing, work for justice, evangelise, and reconcile in the name of Jesus. When we do so, we are pointing the world towards God’s great future and witnessing to Jesus Christ by sharing that vision.

Indeed, we witness to him as well when we are willing – like Jesus – to use our minds for his glory, to think through difficult issues of faith in the light of Scripture and in listening to hard questions.

We also witness to our Lord and Saviour when we acknowledge that our will comes to an end of itself and must bow to his superior will. We are not just believers, we are disciples.

All of this is possible in the marriage and family life context of our reading, but also in all of our relationships, our networks, neighbourhoods, places of work, and our leisure environments.

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

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

John 21:1-14

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

0

Resurrection People: Restructuring Imagination Luke 24:13-35 (Easter 3 Year C)

Luke 24:13-35

How do you see the world? For me, it’s through a pair of glasses.

In my case, the menu for a new pair of glasses contains a number of elements. The lenses are varifocal, so I can have distance vision through the top, I can read through the lower part, and I can do middle distance vision such as computer work through the middle. Sometimes I need an astigmatism correction. Then there are the helpful additions such as anti-reflective coatings and anti-scratch, since I rely on them everywhere except bed and the shower.

But there’s one other element I always pay for. I am a blue-eyed boy – literally – and like all blue-eyed people I am more sensitive to bright light. In my case, I’m particularly sensitive to things like bright sunlight. And so I have photochromic lenses, the ones that darken in bright light.

Now one of the things about photochromic lenses is that whether you have them in their grey version or their brown, they make the colours you see more saturated. If I take off my glasses, the world looks rather washed out in comparison to the way I am used to seeing it.

I even process my photos according to this way of seeing the world. Their colours are brighter and punchier than other photographers would make them.

What about Cleopas and his companion (who may well have been his wife and may have been called Mary)? How did they see the world? Well, they had been seeing it through the lens of believing that Jesus, whom they took to be a prophet (verse 19), ‘was the one who was going to redeem Israel’ (verse 21), but he has been crucified by the authorities (verse 20) so that’s all gone by the board. And now they are confused by reports from women friends that his body is no longer in the tomb (verses 22-24).

They don’t know how to see the world anymore. And that’s a bleak place to be.

All their hopes for this miracle worker from Nazareth had come to a climax when he had ridden into Jerusalem a week earlier signalling himself to be the Messiah, and acclaimed like a new King David, yes, surely he would set Israel free from the Romans and she would no longer be an exile in her own land.

And that hope, that imagined future, that vision of how things were to be, came crashing down in a matter of days. No wonder they’re despondent.

Sometimes we allow ourselves to see life through a vision that appears good and honourable, but which lets us down. It might be about our aspirations for our career, our family, or our children, only for work or a family member to take a wrong turn. I wouldn’t be the first minister to enter this calling with a vision for renewed and growing churches, only to be disappointed.

But the encounter that Cleopas and Mary have on the Emmaus Road with Jesus gives them a new way of seeing life. It’s a vision that won’t let them down. It’s a vision that will sustain them through joy and sorrow. It’s a vision that will inspire them as disciples of Jesus.

Firstly, we see life beating death. The ultimate enemy of the human race and indeed of all beings is conquered. We believe the gospel promise that Christ’s conquest of death in the middle of history guarantees ours at the end of history.

For Christianity, the essence of death is separation. The separation of the deceased from the living; the separation of the soul from the body. The essence of resurrection is reunion: the reunion of the soul with a new body animated by the Spirit of God, and the reunion of those previously parted by death.

That’s why at the funeral of a Christian we have this mixture of grief and hope, not just grief. We grieve our separation from the deceased, but we anticipate resurrection where we will be reunited and our bodies healed as the Spirit of God gives life to them. When we commit that person’s body at the funeral to be cremated or buried ‘in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life’, this is what we are anticipating. Not just life after death, but a a new quality of life after death.

In this life, it means we face the darkest of challenges with hope. Not that we go rushing after death and martyrdom, but we know that sickness, injustice, and tyranny will not have the final word.

So we don’t become cavalier about Covid, because this life God has given us is precious, but we do know that at its worst it cannot wreak  ultimate destruction.

And right now our Ukrainian Christian brothers and sisters do not become reckless about their lives for the same reason, but they face the shameless violence of Vladimir Putin in the knowledge he cannot ultimately win. Either the events of this life or the resurrection of the dead will mean final defeat for  account to Almighty God for his deeds.

So that’s our first new way of seeing that the resurrection brings, and it’s utterly transformational: we see life and death in a new way.

Secondly, we see hope beating despair.

In 1984, a painter named Gottfried Helnwein created a piece of art called ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams.’ It depicts four famous people in a diner. Marilyn Monroe and Humphrey Bogart are a flirtatious couple, James Dean is another customer, and Elvis Presley is the bartender. The theme is ‘emptiness’, because all four could have been said to have died senseless deaths: Presley from alcohol and prescription drugs, Bogart from alcohol, Monroe from drugs, and Dean from a tragic motoring accident. If the sort of dreams I described earlier have let you down and you feel empty, then the victory of hope over despair in the resurrection is for you.

We’ve talked a lot about the need for hope in our society over the last couple of years in the wake of the Covid pandemic. To a large extent millions of people have put their hope in science, and we are grateful for the remarkable work on vaccines. I certainly am: I am sure my recent bout of Covid would have been far worse without my three vaccinations.

Yet the hope our society has clung to in the face of the virus, while good, has not been ultimate hope. For that we need the resurrection, which shows that even death, the strongest of all the forces arrayed against us, does not have the final word.

And whether it’s Covid assailing us or the visions and dreams we’ve lived by letting us down, the only ultimate antidote to the despair they bring is the hope of the resurrection.

As I said earlier, I have known broken dreams as a minister. Church life has not generally become what I hoped and prayed it would. I guess my dreams were about some form of religious ‘success’, but of course that is not guaranteed to us and it is therefore not the solid hope that the resurrection is. Indeed, we might say that putting our hope in any vision and dream that is less than the resurrection is some kind of idol.

So what has kept me going when the experience of my calling has been dark? One Bible verse. It’s a verse that Tom Wright keeps coming back to in his wonderful book ‘Surprised By Hope’, and it’s the final verse of the Apostle Paul’s great chapter on the resurrection, 1 Corinthians 15. The climax of his argument about the resurrection is to say this:

58 Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labour in the Lord is not in vain.

The resurrection means that our labour in the Lord is not in vain. In the eternal economy of God, all that we do in the Lord’s service counts. We may not be able to see how it does right now, but the resurrection means those acts of faithfulness are not wasted. They are invisible building blocks in the cause of God’s kingdom.

So the resurrection says to us, keep going! Keep doing the Christian thing. One day we will see what God has built with it.

Thirdly and finally, we see the kingdom of God beating the empires of this world.

When God made Jesus’ body new in the resurrection, it was the sign that one day he would make all things new. It was the promise of the new creation, the new creation we begin to experience in ourselves when God begins to make our lives new when we come to him. And it climaxes in the great promise of Revelation 21 that God is making a new heaven and a new earth, with a new Jerusalem at the centre.

So that is where all this is heading. A new creation where there will no longer be any suffering. There will be no sickness, there will be no sin, whether personal immorality or social injustice. Relationships will be whole. There will be harmony among people. Everyone will have enough. This is the new order promised by the resurrection.

But what are we supposed to do? Some Christians particularly of past generations would have simply seen us as rather passively waiting for it to come about at the end of time. No wonder Christians were accused of ‘pie in the sky when you die.’ That is not the way.

No, this great vision of the fulness of God’s coming kingdom that we see in the resurrection inspires us to act now. Of course the kingdom of God has not yet come in all its completeness, but it is coming. It is on the way. Jesus said it had arrived with his coming.

And this is why it’s important to keep doing the faithful stuff, as I said in the last point. Each prayer for healing, each act of care for the sick, each action in support of transforming the lot of the poor, each act of reconciliation, each deed of compassion, each drawing of someone into the love of Christ is all part of the coming kingdom and a pointer to it.

It’s the resurrection and all that it promises that is our inspiration to live this way.

So – like Cleopas and Mary – may we allow the resurrection to change the way we see life. May we then live by that vision – where life beats death, hope beats despair, and the kingdom of God conquers the empires of this world.  

0

Fourth Sunday of Easter: The Good Shepherd

This week we consider the famous ‘Good Shepherd’ passage. Why think about this in the Easter season? Because Jesus references his death and resurrection, and what flows from them.

John 10:11-18

As many of you know, my plans for university at the normal age of eighteen were interrupted by the sudden onset of serious neck pain. One evening, sitting in a prayer meeting, I gravitated towards the armchair most likely to give me some support and relief – one that elderly people usually sat in.

A lovely member of that group called Peggy saw my pain and quoted the words with which today’s reading began: ‘I am the Good Shepherd,’ and led a prayer for me. So I know first-hand the comfort this passage brings to people.

Yet what I’ve discovered over the years is that these comforting words are also challenging words. So today we’re going to meditate on both the comforting and challenging messages of these verses.

The first thing to observe is how Jesus teaches here about his divinity. Right from the opening words, ‘I am’, we have a claim to divinity. Those two words may be unremarkable in English, but you may recall that God revealed himself to Moses as ‘I am’. There are then seven ‘I am’ sayings in John’s Gospel, and what we don’t see in English is one particular feature of the Greek. If you wanted to say ‘I am’ in the ordinary sense in Greek, you just needed to say ‘Am.’ But adding in ‘I’, the personal pronoun, gives it added emphasis that echo the Old Testament notion of God as ‘I am.’ In the ‘I am’ sayings, the Greek uses that emphatic ‘I am’ rather than simply ‘Am.’

This claim to divinity is bolstered by the title ‘Shepherd’. Of itself it isn’t necessarily a divine title, because the rulers of Israel were commanded by God to shepherd the people[i]. However, the rulers were given the title ‘Shepherd’ as derivative from the Lord, under whom they served. The ultimate ‘Shepherd of Israel’ was God himself[ii]. This was also deeply personal, most famously in Psalm 23, ‘The Lord’s my Shepherd.’

Therefore when Jesus calls himself the Good Shepherd, he is taking on for himself a title that ultimately belongs to God himself. Combined with emphatically saying ‘I am,’ Jesus is making it abundantly clear that he claims divine status for himself.

All very interesting, you may think, but what does it mean for us and what did it mean for the first hearers? Quite simply, if Jesus is divine, then we owe him our allegiance. It’s hinted at later in the passage when Jesus is talking about ‘other sheep that are not of this sheepfold’ (verse 16). He says, ‘They too shall listen to my voice and there shall be one flock and one shepherd.’

So the other sheep are listening, but not them only: Jesus said, ‘They too will listen to my voice.’ His assumption is that not only will the other sheep listen, they will listen, because the original sheep are listening intently in the first place.

And for all who act as under-shepherds in the church among God’s people today, we are therefore not only to listen to the voice of the Good Shepherd for ourselves but also obey that voice and furthermore encourage or urge those in our care to obey his will.

The second observation in Jesus’ teaching here is his love:

The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. (Verse 11b)

17 The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life – only to take it up again. 18 No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father.’

Note all those references to Jesus laying down his life. Risking one’s life is honourable and to be applauded, but to lay down one’s life demands more. When we risk our lives, we put ourselves in harm’s way and we may be killed or maimed, or we may survive unscathed. But in laying down one’s life, death is certain. He will die, and he will do so voluntarily. He is not a political protestor who happens to get caught and executed, but one who willingly presents himself. He could have prevented it, but he doesn’t.

The word ‘love’ is not explicitly used for these actions, but when the good shepherd is contrasted with the hired hand who will run off with his wages rather than protect the flock from danger it’s clear that Jesus is in this for love, not money.

For reasons that Jesus doesn’t explain here (we must go elsewhere in the New Testament for answers) the protection of the flock from harm can only be achieved by the sacrificial love of the Shepherd.

So the Lord himself is willing to put himself in harm’s way for the sake of those who will be saved.

What sort of response does that call for from us? For one, surely it leads us to a sense of wonder and worship that God in Christ has done this for us. How can we not ‘sing the wondrous story’?

For another, remembering that the life of Jesus is a model for us, we know from this that he calls us to love in sacrificial ways, too. Many of our Christian sisters and brothers around the world still lay down their lives for their faith. While that seems far less likely for us and I pray such trials never come our way, should not each one of us ask what we have sacrificed out of love for Jesus and love for his people?

None of us can give up our lives for the salvation of the world, but we are called to love because Jesus has shown love. Christian disciples respond to God’s love in Christ by showing that we are in this for what we can give, not what we can get. That’s what distinguishes shepherds from hired hands.

What am I giving up out of love for Jesus and his people? Can I answer that question?

My third observation is that Jesus teaches us here about his mission:

16 I have other sheep that are not of this sheepfold. I must bring them also. They too will listen to my voice, and there shall be one flock and one shepherd.

Here Jesus looks beyond the sheep in the immediate courtyard. These are not secret believers in other religions, as if all religions are valid ways of coming to God, because the second part about ‘one flock and one shepherd’ rules that out. This is about the mission to the Gentiles that will take place after the Ascension and Pentecost.[iii]

The sacrificial love of the divine Shepherd is such that he wants to draw all into his flock. His death is the effective way to bring all who will respond to follow him. Not only does he know those who are already part of his flock, he knows all people, and so he calls them, inviting them to recognise his voice and follow what he says.

And the relevance for us is this. While sometimes Jesus reaches out to people in unusual, direct ways – for instance, I’ve heard accounts of him appearing in dreams to people and calling them to follow him – mostly he works through human intermediaries, who are empowered by his Spirit. And you know who that means. Us.

Therefore, when we accept the call to join the flock of Christ and tune into his voice as the way to know how to live, part of that includes the fact that he speaks to us about sharing the news of his self-giving love with the world.

That doesn’t mean we all go knocking on doors. It doesn’t mean that quiet people have to become loud. Nor does it mean that we all have to know all the answers to all the objections to our faith (although a bit more studying of our faith by many of us would surely do no harm).

But it does mean that we all have a privilege and an obligation to be bearers of Christ’s good news to the world in our words and our deeds. It is a wonderful story we have to tell of a God who was so concerned about the alienation between him and his creation that he took the pain of reconciliation entirely upon himself.

Some of us will find it easier to talk about Jesus than others. But if we are not so fluent with our words and start to get nervous at the thought of talking about our faith, we might want to reflect on Who it is we are talking about and what it is he did for us. Does the cost of our nerves stack up against the price Jesus paid on the Cross?

[i] See, for example, 2 Samuel 7:7, 1 Chronicles 17:6

[ii] See, for example, Genesis 49:24, Psalm 80:1, Jeremiah 31:10, Ezekiel 34:1.

[iii] https://www.psephizo.com/biblical-studies/jesus-the-good-shepherd-leads-his-sheep-in-john-10/

0

Create a website or blog at WordPress.com

Up ↑