Tag: sovereignty of God

Keep Quiet – Jesus Is At Work (Mark 5:21-43)

Mark 5:21-43

Last week, when our reading was about Jesus stilling the storm on Galilee, the story came to quite a climax. Jesus’ disciples said, ‘Who then is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!’

It’s quite a punchline. Mark leaves us in no doubt that he wants his readers to consider who this amazing Jesus is.

This week is different. While we have two amazing stories woven into one narrative, the climax after the healing of the woman with the flow of blood and the raising of Jairus’ daughter feels like an anti-climax:

43 He gave strict orders not to let anyone know about this, and told them to give her something to eat.

Keep quiet and have a snack. That’s it.

It’s not the only time Jesus tells people to hush their mouths about one of his miracles in Mark’s Gospel, and many people have assumed that the reason Jesus took this apparently rather strange approach was that if word got out that he was the Messiah the expectations people would have of him would be nothing like the way he saw messiahship.

And with that in mind, we have to look more carefully for the themes of Jesus’ mission that Mark wants to highlight here. I’ve found three.

The first is unity.

Look at the contrasts in the story. Jairus’ daughter is young: she’s only twelve. The woman, on the other hand, has had her distressing medical problem for as long as the girl has been alive. She is much older.

The woman is also now in poverty. She had spent all she had on doctors (verse 26). The young girl, on the other hand, is the daughter of a man who is probably quite well-to-do.

The woman creeps up on Jesus from behind (verse 27). Jairus is direct and open, falling at Jesus’ feet to beg him for mercy for his beloved daughter (verse 22).

Young and old, rich and poor, bold and shy – the range is wide but the need is the same. However different they are, Jesus knows they need the mercy and grace of God.

And that’s what he does. He brings people of all circumstances and life experiences into the family of God, because all need God’s grace and love.

That’s a picture of God’s kingdom. Jesus crosses all our human barriers because everybody needs the grace of God. In our social lives and our friendships we might look for people with similar interests or experiences to us. But in God’s family he brings together rich and poor, black and white, northerner and southerner, male and female.

I can look around congregations I’ve served and see people who owned two homes sitting next to others who were on a fixed pension. I can see my West Indian friends from the Windrush Generation and succeeding generations mixing with white Europeans. I’ve even found Arsenal supporters in the church, and that’s hard for me as a Tottenham fan!

Seriously, this work of Jesus to bring all sorts of people into the love of God is the first sign of his work of reconciliation. He reconciles people to God and he brings them into a family where those same people, often or different or even opposing backgrounds end up being reconciled to one another.

I like to put it like this. Jesus accomplished that reconciliation at the Cross. And the Cross has both a vertical beam, indicating our relationship with God and a horizontal beam, indicating that we are also reconciled with one another.

Do you need that reconciliation with God or with other people? Receive all you need for that from Jesus.

The second theme I’ve found is sovereignty.

Sometimes I wonder how I would be feeling in this story if I were Jairus. After all, I have a daughter, too. But to come in desperation and plead with Jesus, who agrees to come to my house (verse 24), only to find that he then stops and spends time trying to find out who touched him (verse 30) when time is of the essence – I think that would shred any remaining nerves that I had in my body.

Not only that, we get to Jairus’ house and we’re told that the daughter is dead (verse 35). Why did Jesus delay?

It’s a little like the story in John 11 where Jesus’ friend Lazarus dies but he doesn’t rush to Bethany where Lazarus lived with his sisters Mary and Martha. Jesus bides his time.

And so too here. Jesus isn’t ruffled. He encourages Jairus to continue believing (verse 36) and he isn’t rattled by the commotion caused by the professional mourners or the crowd laughing at him for saying the child is only asleep (verses 38-40).

It may not look like it to us, but Jesus has the situation under control. Taking only the girl’s parents and his three closest lieutenants, he goes to the girl and heals her (verses 40-42).

I wonder whether there is something that feels like it’s running out of control in your life? Is there something that seems to be descending into chaos and you’re afraid of where that will leave you?

If you are, I encourage you to invite Jesus into the situation. You can sound as desperate as Jairus if you like, it doesn’t matter. Jesus won’t be fazed. Let him walk calmly with you through what you fear will be an impending disaster.

That’s why I say this is about sovereignty. He’s still in charge. So turn to him.

The third and final theme I’ve noticed in the narrative is purity.

The condition of the woman made her ritually unclean in Judaism. For Jesus to come into contact with her would make him unclean.

And similarly, if you touched a dead body, as Jesus did when he took Jairus’ daughter by the hand (verse 41), that also made you ritually unclean.

It’s as if the uncleanness always pollutes the clean.  It’s like dropping one blob of ink into a glass of water and seeing the ink affect all of the water.

Except that doesn’t happen here. You could say that the purity of Jesus is so strong that it overpowers the ritual impurity of the woman and of Jairus’ daughter.

In this story, darkness doesn’t finally overcome good. It isn’t even a fight between two equals as some make it out to be. It isn’t even a fair fight at all. Jesus has all the power of divine holiness. That which would ruin lives cannot compete in his presence.

It makes me think about a couple of verses from the First Letter of John:

The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the work of the devil. (1 John 3:8)

Greater is he who is in you than he who is in the world. (1 John 4:4)

Sometimes when we’re involved with all our fallibilities the fight against suffering and sin is long and grim. But with Jesus in charge the final outcome is certain. None of this can stand in his presence. Instead of the virus of sin contaminating him, his holiness infects the darkness, exposes it, and cleanses it.

Isn’t it good news that ultimately the pure holiness of Jesus overcomes all the darkness and despair of this world? If you’re disheartened because the bad stuff so often ends up on top, look at this story and see signs that what Jesus does here puts all the powers of darkness on notice for what will ultimately happen when he appears again on Earth in glory.

Take heart from the superior purity of Jesus!

In fact, take heart from all three of the themes we’ve been thinking about today. Be glad that Jesus opens the kingdom of God to all people, that God longs to see all people reconciled to him and to one another. Rejoice in the sovereignty of God in Christ, where even when we get frantic and time seems to be slipping away he is still in charge. And take heart that suffering and death do not have the final word in all of creation, because the purity of Jesus is superior.

None of this might sound as spectacular as the calming of the storm on Galilee, but believe me, it’s every bit as important.

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Fifth Sunday in Lent: Worship In The WIlderness – A Truth-Speaking Journey

This week’s passage – Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones vision – isn’t a traditional Lent reading, but you could say it is a vision of wilderness conditions. And so I use this week to explore how God brings hope and life in the midst of crisis and death.

Ezekiel 37:1-14

The concept of the wilderness is used in more than one way in the Bible. Sometimes it’s literal, sometimes it’s an image. Sometimes it’s negative, sometimes positive. Sometimes it’s about sin, sometimes it’s about drawing near to God with no distractions.

Perhaps in a temperate climate like the one we’re used to in Britain, it’s natural to gravitate to the negative connotations of the wilderness. And that’s what Ezekiel 37 gives us in this vision of a valley filled with dry bones. It’s a place of death – although it’s also a place which God visits with hope.

The kind of death it symbolises is set out for us in verse 11:

11 Then he said to me: ‘Son of man, these bones are the people of Israel. They say, “Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone; we are cut off.”

It’s the death of hope. Israel is in exile in Babylon, far from her homeland. Back in Jerusalem, the city has been sacked and the Temple, their most cherished sign of God’s presence with them, has been destroyed.

Our hope is gone; we are cut off.

I am beginning to sense that the longer the COVID-19 pandemic continues, the more there are Christians and churches feeling something similar to this. The continuing financial losses are heightening the crisis some churches face. The Canadian pastor Carey Nieuwhof, whom I often quote, has said, ‘Crisis is an accelerator,’ and the crisis of coronavirus has certainly accelerated critical questions about some of our churches. Issues we might have expected to face in ten years’ time we are suddenly facing today.

That’s why it doesn’t surprise me if some Christians today say similar words to those of Israel in Ezekiel 37:11: our hope is gone; we are cut off.

So in what ways does God bring hope to this wilderness valley of death? And how do we respond if we are to receive his life?

I thought I was going to share two things with you, but it’s turned into three:

Firstly, notice how Ezekiel addresses God:

‘Sovereign Lord, you alone know.’ (verse 3b)

This is the first thing to remember: that God is sovereign. It may feel like social forces are sweeping away things that we cherish and that everything is out of control, but for all this, Ezekiel still addresses God as ‘Sovereign Lord’.

What does it mean, though? The popular Christian cliché is to say, ‘God is in control,’ but I wouldn’t put it like that. It implies God as a micro-manager who direct every minute action. It may be that that is somewhat along the lines of what some of my Calvinist Christian friends believe, but I don’t believe that is true to the Scriptures or true to life.

No: we have to account for a God who is sovereign and for certain exercise of free will by human beings, subject to our limits. It would be fair to say that God has more free will than us, but we still need an understanding of God’s sovereignty that does not obliterate free will and human responsibility, a conception of divine sovereignty that allows both for the sense of purpose and the sense of randomness in the universe.

I think we are moving in the right direction when, rather than saying ‘God is in control,’ we say, ‘God is in charge.’ In the United Kingdom, the Queen is in charge, but not everybody obeys the laws passed by her Government. Nevertheless, she is still sovereign over this kingdom. You could make similar appropriate analogies for different forms of government in other countries.

What Ezekiel is confessing is that God is still in charge, even though Israel is sinful and Babylon is cruel. He can and will exercise more free will than the apparently powerful Babylonians, and that is grounds for hope. In the long term, that will lead to Israel being set free and returning to her land.

Similarly for us, we recognise that God is still in charge, even though COVID-19 has caused carnage and churches and other institutions are in crisis. Yes, some churches will close. Perhaps we see them as casualties of war in the conflict between good and evil. But Jesus promised that he would build his church, and the gates of Hades would not prevail against it[i]. That may constitute our long term hope.

Secondly, notice the emphasis on the word of God. Three times, Ezekiel is told to prophesy (verse 4, 9, 12). On the first and third occasions the call is to bring God’s word to his desolate people. When they hear from God, hope begins to take shape. The bones start to come together (verse 7) and they hear the promise of new life with a return to their homeland (verses 12-14).

The word of God brings hope. It is not simply a message that disappears into thin air. Instead, it has an effect on the hearers. It leads to hope and life.

This is what we need, too: a word from God that stirs hope and new life in us. The very worst thing is when we do not hear God and when God is not speaking to us, as the prophet Amos said:

‘The days are coming,’ declares the Sovereign Lord,
    ‘when I will send a famine through the land –
not a famine of food or a thirst for water,
    but a famine of hearing the words of the Lord.[ii]

But that is rare. If we are to discover hope in our crisis then we need to hear God for ourselves. How might we do so?

The most important way in which we get used to what the voice of God sounds like is to soak ourselves in the Scriptures. A daily, disciplined engagement with the Bible where we both read the words and listen for God speaking to us through them. There is no more a substitute for this in the Christian life than there is for eating regular meals in ordinary, physical life.

When we get a good sense for what God’s message is like, we can then listen for and test today’s claims to prophecy. Where are the people in the Christian community who manifestly live closely to God, and who when have an atmosphere of heaven around them when they speak? Who are the people who bring a fresh word, full of energy, that is consistent with and grows out of what we know about God’s voice from the Bible?

Of course, their words must be tested. Uncritical acceptance is not on the agenda.

But we need to tune in to God if we are to hear his word of hope and life. I have a particular favourite radio station I like to listen to in the car. However, it’s very easy round here to drive in and out of its signal range. If I want to hear it well, I may need to drive closer to the transmitter.

It’s just as easy to drive away from the presence and the voice of God. Each one of us needs to take those steps to tune into the sound of God’s voice in the Scriptures and draw close to him. Then we may hear the message of hope and life he has for us in our day.

Some are suggesting that what God is saying is that the pandemic is like a Great Pause in the world, and that it is like a racing car’s pit-stop where the tyres are changed so that it can accelerate out of the pit lane back into the race. And therefore we are being called to use this time of pause to get right with God, draw near to him, and be prepared not for a ‘return to normal’ but to an acceleration of God’s purposes.[iii]

Does that chime with you as you soak yourself in the word of God? Is that a word of hope and life? Test it and see.

Thirdly and finally, look at all the stress on the breath of God. The bones come together, but there is no life. They need breath.

9 Then he said to me, ‘Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to it, “This is what the Sovereign Lord says: come, breath, from the four winds and breathe into these slain, that they may live.”’ 10 So I prophesied as he commanded me, and breath entered them; they came to life and stood up on their feet – a vast army.

Breath – also wind, or spirit. In New Testament terms, this is a prophecy that calls on the Holy Spirit to come and fill the people of God.

Ultimately, to have hope we need the very life of God in us. Just as God breathed life into human beings in the creation story of Genesis 1, so also for the people of God to come alive and be filled with hope we need God to breathe his Holy Spirit into us.

And so Ezekiel prophesies for the breath of God to come from the four winds, just as the ancient prayer commonly used at ordination services says, ‘Veni Sancte Spiritus’ – ‘Come, Holy Spirit’.

Some don’t like that language, because they believe the Spirit of God is everywhere, and there is some truth in that. But at the same time what brings death to us is our living without the Spirit, and we remember how there are biblical stories about the glory of the Lord moving on from the disobedient. So there is justification for us to pray, ‘Come, Holy Spirit.’

Hope comes from the life and presence of God. Lasting, eternal hope is not something human beings can engineer. That’s why we need to pray with fervour, ‘Come, Holy Spirit.’

Everything I’m saying today is about being God-centred. Our hope rests on his sovereignty, his word, and his Spirit. If we want to come out of the dry, hot death of the wilderness into fresh new life and hope then the only way to do is by actively depending on our God in these ways.

[i] Matthew 16:18

[ii] Amos 8:11

[iii] Jarrod Cooper, The Divine Reset. See also this video interview: https://premierchristianmedia.co.uk/16DQ-79OQD-68XW34-4DUIQ7-1/c.aspx

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How can god be in charge when … ?

This week, I explore Genesis 25:19-34 which tells the story of Isaac and Rebekah’s long wait for children. Then, when Esau and Jacob arrive, they prove in their characters to be great disappointments. How can we believe that God is in charge of our lives when things like this happen?

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Sermon: Missional God

Matthew 20:1-16

Introduction
What kind of book is the Bible? Some see it is a book as rules. Others say it is God’s love letter to us. 

Me, I see it increasingly as the story of God’s mission. (Which means that any rules tell us what pleases the God who loves us and has saved us. And which means that if it is a love letter, it is addressed to the world, not just God’s favoured ones.)

No, right from the beginning, God is on mission. And he is on mission in a particular way. God does not shout from a distance, expecting us to come where he is. From the start, he comes onto our territory. He is the first missionary, coming walking in the Garden of Eden, calling out, ‘Where are you, Adam?’ In the Incarnation, Jesus is ‘the Word … made flesh [who] dwelt among us’. In this parable, the landowner keeps going to where the workers are, rather than expecting them to turn up at his vineyard.

So God is a missional God, and this sermon attempts to explore some characteristics of our missional God.

1. Sovereign
The missional God is the sovereign God. ‘Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?’ he says to those who complain (verse 15a).

What do we mean when we talk about God being sovereign? Some of us get nervous, because we know how this has been used in history. In the Calvinist tradition, affirming the sovereign God has been used to advance the idea that God chooses some people to be saved and others to be damned. That’s not what I mean.

The sovereign God can do what he chooses, but what does he choose to do? It will be consistent with his character. The sovereign God wants his reign to be accepted everywhere, and so he reaches out to all. If he is truly sovereign, then he wants that reign to be embraced universally. Not all will accept the summons to his kingdom. Some will resist and face eternity without him. But it is his will that none should perish. And so, just as the landowner in the parable keeps going back to hire more labourers, so God keeps searching for more people who will turn from their former ways to follow his Son.

What does this mean for us? We are called to share in God’s mission. If God wants his reign to be embraced by all people in all places, then this is fundamental to the nature of the Church. Christianity is a missionary faith. Mission is not something we leave to those who are keen. It is something for all of us.

Yesterday, I was at Synod. The President and Vice-President of the Methodist Conference were with us. Our current President, Stephen Poxon, is Chair of the North Lancashire District. His District has twinned with three overseas Methodist Conferences. One of them is the Methodist Church in Uruguay. There are only six hundred Methodists in Uruguay, spread across twenty-five congregations. A Uruguayan Methodist visiting the UK said to Stephen Poxon, ‘There’s something I don’t understand about British Methodism. Back home, every single Methodist church has a community project. Why isn’t that so in British Methodist churches?’

I think that Uruguayan Methodist had a point. If the missional God wants to see his sovereignty acknowledged everywhere, then mission has to be our top priority, even our defining characteristic as the church. 

Some of the famous quotes from the last century really come into their own here – like when William Temple said the church was the only organisation that existed for the benefit of those who weren’t its members. Or when the theologian Emil Brunner said that the church exists by mission as fire exists by burning. We are a missionary church, or we are no church at all. That much is certain if the missional God is sovereign.

2. Generous
The missional God is generous. ‘Or are you envious because I am generous?’ he says to the moaners (verse 15b). 

What does it mean for the missional God to be generous? In the parable, it’s quite clear. He has promised a day’s wages to everyone who comes and works for him. The surprise comes at the end when he gives just as much to those who have worked for less than a day. He doesn’t give them what they’ve earned – which wouldn’t be enough to live on – but what they need – namely the rate for a whole day.

On the surface, this makes it sound like God is a socialist: ‘From each according to their means, to each according to their needs.’ But capitalists like this parable too, because the landowner is free to do what he likes with his wealth. Jesus didn’t tell this parable in order for people to fit it into the political philosophies that would come two thousand years after his hearers.

No, the Gospel is a message of divine generosity. All we need for salvation has been provided for us in Christ. In his Incarnation, he lived our life. In his death, he took away the sins of the world. In his Resurrection, he began God’s New Creation. We have everything we need in Christ. It has been generously provided in Christ, at immense personal cost.

God is on a mission to share his generous love. We are called to share the message of divine generosity to all people. But here’s the issue: the spirit of the message needs to fit the content of the message. So a message of God’s generosity needs to be couched in a generous spirit.

However, is that how we are perceived by non-Christians? One thing the Vice-President of Conference said at yesterday’s Synod was this. He talked about having visited the Greenbelt Festival for the first time. While he was there, he encountered a seminar led by a cross-party group of Christian MPs. Together, they explained to their sorrow that in Parliament the Christian Church is generally assumed to be a critical organisation. We are known far more for what we are against than for what we favour.

Might it be that if we want to encourage people to embrace the generous love of God, we need to adopt a generous attitude towards them? Debbie and I try to get involved in the community that centres around our children’s primary school. We have tried to befriend two or three single mums, who have each had two children by different fathers, and they have not married the fathers. Then there are two families where the husband and wife have recently split up. In one case, we can understand why the wife kicked the husband out. In the other case, we can’t. But we have tried to be available and demonstrate Christian love to them.

There are some Christians who think the first thing we should have done was condemn sex outside marriage and divorce in these cases. I want to make clear that Debbie and I believe very strongly in the sanctity of marriage. There is a time and a place for talking about right and wrong. But how will people have a chance of believing in a generous God if we do not offer a generous spirit towards them? Believing that our missional God is generous calls all Christians to undertake acts of selfless, sacrificial and unconditional love in the name of Christ for those yet to discover his love.

3. Merciful
Our missional God is merciful: ‘So the last will be first, and the first will be last.’ (verse 16)

Mercy is at the heart of the Gospel message. It is a message of God’s loving mercy for sinners. In Christ and Christ alone we have the forgiveness of sins and new life. Such is the mercy of God that he sends his Church everywhere in his Name to proclaim and demonstrate the mercy he longs to extend to all. 

I expect we’re all used to speaking about the mercy of God like that. But when Jesus has the landowner say that the last will be first and the first will be last, the culture of mercy is extended further. That mercy is so fundamental to God’s kingdom that notions of order and rank are outlawed. One commentator on the parables puts it this way:

‘Earlier Jesus taught that there are degrees of punishment in hell (Lk 12:47-48); now he makes plain that there are no degrees of reward in heaven. The perfection of the life to come, by definition, does not allow for them.’

No superiority, no rank in the kingdom: we all need the mercy of God in Christ to enter the kingdom of heaven. The idea that because I am a minister I am more important is anathema to the Gospel. I should not expect to sit at the front of church like some worldly dignitary.

The early Church recognised this radical application of the Gospel: they even elevated slaves to the rank of bishop. They did not care for the world’s way of status. The Good News changed all that. Sometimes I see it in today’s Church, other times I don’t.

What does this have to do with mission? When we are obsessed with title or power, we start valuing some people less than others. While there may be certain ways in which the older approaches to rank and status are passing away today – such as the decline in respect for the Royal Family – other forms of the problem rise up to take its place. So we have an obsession with celebrity that seems to be about the kind of people our culture claims to be more important than others.

Now giving people differing value undermines the Gospel. God’s love in Christ is every bit as much for the least and the lowest as it is for the most and the highest. A true proclamation and living-out of the Gospel will have nothing to do with mimicking the world’s love of status. Nor will it fall into that contemporary trap, the making of Christian celebrities.

Rather, it will be counter-cultural. God loves all people, and that means he loves the poor and the obscure every bit as much as the rich and the famous. The Gospel is for our neighbours and the poor of the world.

One last example from yesterday’s Synod. Stephanie and I attended a workshop about mission opportunities in schools. It was led by a young woman from the Luton Churches’ Education Trust. Forty churches in Luton support this trust. It employs over twenty staff to work in secondary schools and with local teenagers. They don’t just do the normal schools work of RE lessons and assemblies. They also work with the sort of young people who are shunned or despised – those with ADHD, or who self-harm. As far as they were concerned, these children were as valuable as the gifted ones with the A* grades. That makes Gospel sense.

Conclusion
This parable leaves us in no doubt that God’s heart beats a missionary rhythm. If we are truly to be the Church of Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, then mission will define what we are about. We shall have a passion to take the Gospel everywhere. We shall proclaim God’s generous love in Christ with a generous spirit. And God’s mercy for all will mean we are as interested in sharing that love with the broken as with the headline-makers.

I nearly included today’s Old Testament lesson from Jonah in the service. It’s the part of Jonah’s story where he complains to God that the sinners of Nineveh have repented at the sound of his preaching, and received the grace of God. If we have the heart of Christ, then may we not be moaners like Jonah. May we be people who rejoice when the missing find their way back to God. And may we press on with the Gospel, that there may be many more occasions for such rejoicing.

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