Tag: W E Sangster

Two Ways of Speaking to Others About Jesus, John 1:29-42 (Epiphany 2, Year A)

John 1:29-42

Teetotalism illustration: Wikimedia Commons, CC Licence 4.0.

If you ask what Methodists are known for, it might be the hymns of Charles Wesley, an expectation that we are teetotal, and regulation green cups and saucers for the compulsory tea and coffee after services and meetings. The more daring Methodists bought blue cups and saucers.

Or there might be the social side of our faith, which leads to our commitment to social action and justice.

But one area where we are less strong today is in talking about our faith to others. It’s strange, isn’t it, that a movement which began with preaching in the open air should lose its ability to speak about Jesus.

And when we don’t share Jesus, the church dies. For how else will people know about their need to follow him and be part of his family? Our actions certainly witness to him, but we then need to explain them.

We need to address this, though, not through guilt trips but encouragement. I’m aware that since I am a ‘professional Christian’, people expect me to speak about Jesus, and that may make it easier for me. However, I think this reading from John’s Gospel gives us a couple of encouragements. Both John the Baptist and Andrew, in different ways, show us a way forward. Let’s look at how they can help us.

Firstly, John talks about who Jesus is:

St John the Baptist. Photographer: Randy Greve on Flickr, CC Licence 2.0.

Everything John says is about who Jesus is. He is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world (verse 29). This is the One who solves all our needs for forgiveness and a new beginning. Even though Jesus comes after John (which implies the listeners think Jesus is one of John’s disciples) he outranks him because he was before him (that is, John speaks of Jesus’ pre-existence) (verse 30). I came to baptise, says John, but not to draw attention to me: I wanted you to see Jesus, who is the One Israel needs (verse 31). You were used in past times to the Spirit of God alighting on certain people temporarily, but now Jesus is the One on whom the Spirit rests permanently (verses 32-33). The divine mark of approval is on him, and he will bestow the same on his disciples. He is God’s Chosen One (verse 34) – not merely a teacher or even a prophet: there is no human equal to him.

John has gathered the crowds, and his popularity has grown among the ordinary people, to the point where the religious authorities had felt the need to set up a committee to investigate and report on him. But he is not interested in his own legacy. This is not about the setting up of John The Baptist Ministries, Inc. His sole aim is to point not to himself but to Jesus. And now that Jesus is on the scene, he can back out. He really doesn’t mind when two of his own disciples respond to his testimony by leaving him to follow Jesus (verses 35-37). In fact, that’s what he wants. Job done. It’s time to wind down the operation.

As I have been fond of saying over the years, the job of John the Baptist is to be the compère who introduces Jesus. Last weekend, Hollywood held the annual Golden Globes movie awards ceremony. A lot of the anticipatory talk in the media was about how good the jokes would be by the comedian hosting the ceremony, Nikki Glaser. But the job of the compère is not to point to themselves and enhance their reputation. It is to introduce the star of the show. That’s what John does.

Nikki Glaser at the Stress Factory in New Brunswick, NJ, Wikimedia Commons, CC Licence 2.0.

And that’s our task, too. Perhaps we are grateful that it’s not about us. John reminds us to put Jesus front and centre. Maybe that’s particularly important for those of us who witness in a public and formal way, such as preachers. The late American pastor Tim Keller, who developed a remarkable ministry in what was thought to be highly secular New York City among young adults, said in his book on preaching that every time you preach you should include the Gospel. You should hold us to that. Have we focussed on Jesus? Have you heard the good news this morning? Because that’s our priority.

Most of us are not preachers, though. For us, it means that when we get an opportunity to commend Jesus to someone, we say something about who he is and how he can help them. There are so many things we can say about Jesus to people, depending on the circumstances of those with whom we are conversing. It’s not necessarily about memorising the Gospel in four easy points, although some find that helpful. It’s more what the late W E Sangster, Superintendent minister at Westminster Central Hall through World War Two, said. He spoke of the Gospel as a many-faceted diamond. We need to find the facet of the diamond that reflects Jesus the Light of the World to the people or the situation where we find ourselves.

Therefore, when we are in a conversation with someone, and we sense it would be good to say something about our hope in Jesus to help them, it pays to pause and think, what aspect of Jesus would it be most helpful for them to consider? Do they need to know about Jesus, the forgiver of sins? Would it help them to know about Jesus the healer? Or do they need to encounter Jesus who is Lord of all? Or Jesus, through Whom God made all things good? Or is it some other element of who Jesus is that would be constructive?

We could make this part of our praying for these people, too. Something like this: ‘Lord, I sense my friend needs to know about Jesus. Please show me what would be most attractive or challenging or relevant to them. And please help me to share that in an appropriate way.’

Secondly, Andrew talks about what Jesus means to him:

Saint Andrew MET DP168806.jpg, Wikimedia Commons, CC Licence 1.0.

Andrew is possibly the most significant example of being a witness to Jesus outside of Paul and Peter in the New Testament. In fact, I once helped on an evangelistic mission where the preparatory training of local Christians was called Operation Andrew. Because Andrew is the character in the Gospels who speaks to friends and relatives and brings them to Jesus. He doesn’t preach, but he introduces people to Jesus by his personal and private conversations.

We see that for the first time in this reading:

41 The first thing Andrew did was to find his brother Simon and tell him, ‘We have found the Messiah’ (that is, the Christ).

In John 6:8-9, Andrew introduces the boy with the five loaves and two fish to Jesus, even though he doesn’t expect that small quantity to go far. But he still does it.

In John 12:20-22, some Greeks want to meet Jesus. It is Philip and Andrew who tell Jesus about them.

Andrew is that quiet, personal witness. We don’t see him preaching to the crowds, instead we see him in these private interactions that facilitate the possibility of people meeting Jesus.

And within that mode of operation, Andrew speaks about what Jesus means to him. ‘We have found the Messiah.’ Not just, ‘Jesus is the Messiah,’ but ‘We have found him.’ It’s the truth about who Jesus is, as per John the Baptist, but it’s personal. This is who Jesus is, and I’ve found it to be true in my life.

Is that not the essence of Christian witness for most of us? We have discovered that the claims of Jesus are true, but not merely in theory: we have found them to be true in our own lives. That gives us something we can share with others, not by preaching, but in the to-and-fro of respectful conversation.

Again, it is not about bigging up ourselves, it is about promoting Jesus. He is the focus. Many of us will not have dramatic stories to tell, but we shall have that knowledge that Jesus has been at work in our lives, and we can share that. Others of us may have known times when Jesus did indeed work in a remarkable way in our lives, but when we tell it, we don’t emphasise all the gory stuff about ourselves: rather, we put the emphasis on what Jesus did.

Therefore, whether or not we have had the sort of life that can get written up as a dramatic religious paperback, every Christian can reflect on their lives and think of the times when they have known for sure that Jesus was at work by his Spirit, and we can bring that into conversation when the time is right. It won’t be by making a formal, prepared speech, it will be in the way that friends and family tell each other stories about their lives. We do that, and then we let the Holy Spirit do the work of making this real to the people with whom we share. We pray, of course, for the Spirit to do that.

At this point, if this were a seminar rather than a sermon in a church service, I would want you to take a pen and paper, and spend some time thinking over the story of your own life, then writing down those occasions when you have known that Jesus did something particular for you.

A pen on paper, Wikimedia Commons, CC Licence 4.0.

But since we are not in a seminar environment, I want to suggest that you find half an hour for yourself at home to try that very exercise. Recall and write down the times when Jesus has done something special in your life. And when you have done that, I want you to work on memorising it. Not necessarily in a word-for-word way, because if you just regurgitate that to others, you will sound stilted and unnatural. In fact, they will feel like they are being preached at, and not in a good way.

One approach that some find helpful is to turn that story of Jesus’ work in you into a series of short bullet points that you can remember. What are the essential parts of the story?

What I have in mind here is, I think, in harmony with something the Apostle Peter said in his First Epistle. Writing to a group of Christians who were fearful of a negative response to their faith that would have been far worse than anything we might face, he said this:

But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect (1 Peter 3:15).

This is a way in which we can have a reason for our hope: by recounting the ways in which Jesus has shown his faithful love to us over the years. I am sure that if I asked you, Christian-to-Christian, whether Jesus has been good to you over the years, you would probably say ‘Yes.’ What comes to your mind is helpful in witness, too. We can avoid flowery, churchy language, and share with people in a simple way what Jesus has done for us.

Conclusion

Let’s go from here and conduct an experiment. Let us meditate on the many things that are true about Jesus, so that we can offer an aspect of him in conversation with others.

And let’s reflect on our own experiences with Jesus, so that we are ready to share them when the Spirit prompts us that to do so would be helpful.

May it be that the Holy Spirit encourages us through this to speak about our faith as well as demonstrate it.

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Mission in the Bible 12: Listening with Two Ears (Acts 8:26-40)

Luke 8:26-40

If Debbie tries to speak to me about something while I am watching the television, there is more than a fair chance that I won’t take in what she’s saying. She will have to tell me to stop listening to the TV in order to listen to her. After all, as a man, I can only ever do one thing at a time. And I certainly can’t listen to more than one source simultaneously.

It makes me think of something I was told in a training session for people who were going to engage in prayer ministry. The instructor said that we had two ears, and that we had to listen to the person in need with one ear and the Holy Spirit with our other ear. That sounded tricky! It was better when they advised a team of two people to pray with whoever came forward, with one team member listening to the person and the other listening to the Spirit.

But part of our task as the church is to engage in multiple listening. The late John Stott called it ‘double listening’, where we listen to the Bible and to the world. Not that we squeeze the Bible into today’s standards and values, which happens far too often, but that we find where the Gospel speaks to today’s world.

And in our strange and wonderful Bible reading today, Philip engages in multiple listening. And it’s this multiple listening that enables him to lead the Ethiopian eunuch to faith in Christ.

Firstly, Philip listens to the Holy Spirit:

An angel (speaking on God’s behalf) directs Philip to go to the desert road (verse 26) and when he is there, the Spirit tells him to go near the eunuch’s chariot and stay near it (verses 27-29).

Well, it’s easy to say ‘listen to the Holy Spirit’, isn’t it, but harder to get to grips with it for ourselves. At one end of the Christian spectrum we have people who say they have never known God speak to them along with others who say that God only speaks to us now through the Bible.

At the other end there are Christians who, in the words of one preacher, claim to have more words from the Lord before breakfast than Billy Graham had in a lifetime. Some of these people are harmless fruitcakes, but others are manipulative and abusive leaders.

I once heard a story about a man who went to his vicar and said, ‘Wonderful news, vicar! You know that gorgeous blonde woman in the choir? The Lord has told me to marry her.’

‘No he hasn’t,’ replied the vicar.

‘Yes, he has!’

‘No, he hasn’t.’

‘Yes he has!’

‘NO HE HASN’T,’ insisted the vicar. ‘You’re already married.’

I think there’s a healthy middle path to be found here. I do believe God still speaks to us, but I also believe we test that against what he has revealed to us in the Bible.

And I would also say that some of us who think God hasn’t spoken to us are mistaken. He has told us things, but perhaps we haven’t always recognised it was him. Take the common example of feeling prompted to phone a friend or a relative, only to do so and discover they are ill or in some other predicament. We can then pray for the person or help meet their needs. Isn’t that something the Holy Spirit would do?

An Anglican priest friend of mine used to lead an organisation in London called the Christian Healing Mission. In teaching Christians about prayer, John would invite people to sit quietly and ask God to speak to them, then keep silence. He would encourage them to write down whatever impressions came into their mind, believing that God did indeed want to speak to his children. He never denied the need to be discerning about what people thought they heard, but he believed we should be optimistic about God’s desire to speak to us.

So why don’t we open ourselves all the more to the possibility of the Holy Spirit speaking to us? What adventures might he take us on for the sake of God’s kingdom advancing?

Secondly, Philip listens to the eunuch:

Here I’m thinking of where Philip enters into a conversation with the eunuch about what he is reading and what it means (verses 30-35).

When I was a child, we had a family GP who seemed to start writing you a prescription before you had finished telling him what was wrong with you. He didn’t really listen to your problems.

And we have seen something similar in the current General Election campaign. How many of our leaders, when a member of the public asks them a question, be it in a TV debate or on a radio phone-in, just launch into their prepared answer on that subject without listening to the nuances of that person’s personal concerns?

It happens in the religious sphere, too, when well-meaning evangelists splurge out the Gospel without listening to the people they are trying to reach. And while they have a point that the Gospel is unchanging, we need to find the point of contact or even perhaps the point of conflict so that we can make the Gospel connect with folk.

So Philip takes the trouble to listen to the man’s concerns. On his way back from Jerusalem to Ethiopia, a journey that would have taken a couple of months by chariot, this man is serious in his enquiring after God. He seems to think there is something in the Jewish faith and is reading the Hebrew Scriptures, but as a eunuch he will not be allowed to convert fully to Judaism. I think there is a desire for God and for belonging here, and Philip picks up on it. Philip knows this man’s deepest longings can be satisfied in Jesus.

W E Sangster, the famous minister at Westminster Central Hall in the mid-twentieth century, said that the Gospel is like a diamond with many facets. We need to discover which facet shines on a particular person in order to make the Gospel connect with them.

And the moment we understand that, we see the need to listen to people, not just regurgitate a pre-packaged version of the Gospel that we have memorised. It’s a good thing sometimes to learn summaries of the Gospel and also to be able to recount our own testimony, but we must be careful first to listen to the people we are aiming to reach for Christ so that we may share the Good News in the most appropriate way.

Thirdly, Philip listens to the Scripture:

I think the fact that the eunuch is reading this powerful passage from Isaiah 53 that we often call ‘The Suffering Servant’ means that the Holy Spirit is already at work in his life, preparing him for the Gospel and pointing him in to where he needs to ask questions. Perhaps he realises that attempts to explain this passage in terms of it merely being about the prophet himself can only go so far and are ultimately doomed to fail. There are parts of it that just don’t fit.

And along comes Philip for a meeting orchestrated by the Spirit. He listens to the Bible passage the eunuch is reading, and he responds.

But notice how he responds:

35 Then Philip began with that very passage of Scripture and told him the good news about Jesus.

Philip does what the early church did. They listen to Scripture and interpret it in the light of Jesus. The Hebrew Scriptures had pointed to a coming Messiah. Now he had come in the Person of Jesus, it made sense not just to read the holy writings to quote proof-texts out of context, but to read and understand them in the light of Jesus.

So that’s what Philip does here. He listens to these verses from Isaiah and says that ultimately they only make sense in the light of the Good News of Jesus. And as a result, this man who could not fully belong in Judaism due to his castration can fully belong to Jesus. His baptism (verses 36-39) is surely a joyful expression of that truth.

What Philip is doing is rather like Jesus on the Emmaus Road. As Jesus came alongside the two travellers, he opened the Scriptures and related them to himself. Philip comes alongside the Ethiopian eunuch and relates the Scriptures to Jesus.

This approach grounds us in the centrality of the Bible as the authoritative account of the Christian faith, but we do not act as Bible-bashers. We are not using isolated Bible texts as weapons to hurt people. There will always be the odd prejudiced person who accuses us of that and we can’t do anything about that, but our main task is to listen to the Scriptures and share how they point to Jesus. The Holy Spirit uses this to make Jesus real to people and lead them to him.

However, most of the people we encounter will not be reading Bible passages and asking us to make sense of them to them – although it might happen occasionally. We instead need to be people who are listening to the Bible ourselves anyway and looking for how it points to Christ. As we feed ourselves in this way on Jesus, the Bread of Life, we shall be more fully equipped for the conversations we have with friends and family members who don’t share our faith. Our own willingness to engage in spiritual discipline with the Bible is not only good for us, it has benefits for our witness.

Conclusion

When we consider mission and especially evangelism, we give a lot of emphasis to speaking. And the speaking is of course necessary.

But we need to appreciate the importance of listening too, as Philip knew. We need to listen to the Holy Spirit, who guides us into divine appointments. We need to listen to those we are aiming to reach, so that we may share our hope in Christ in a way that connects with them and challenges them. And we need to listen to Scripture, particularly to the way it points to Christ, because that is the truth we are seeking to share.

Thank you – for listening.

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Video and Text Of Sermon: Third Sunday Of Advent, Hope-Filled Anticipation

Here’s the video of this week’s act of worship, followed by the text of the sermon.

Matthew 11:2-11

From time to time, I have told you little episodes from the bigger story of how God led me to an Anglican theological college in Bristol when I was exploring what my sense of calling was.

A significant part of that story concerns the fact that in those days we were still in the time of educational grants for further education. My Local Education Authority turned me down for a grant.

I lodged an appeal against that decision. The college gave me a deadline to guarantee to them that I had the funds for my first year.

Forty-eight hours before their deadline expired, I learned that I had lost my appeal.

Forty-eight hours to go, and no money. Of course, I had been saving every month, but on its own it was nothing like enough for tuition and accommodation.

You can imagine that in that situation I started to wonder whether I was called to college after all. I had a collection of all sorts of notes of Bible verses, things trusted friends had said to me, and passages from books that had jumped out at me, which collectively pointed the same way.

But now it was all collapsing. Like I said, forty-eight hours to go and no money.

I’m sure you can see some similarities with the story of John the Baptist here.

He has been so sure of his calling. He has preached his heart out, without fear or favour. He has heralded his cousin Jesus as the Messiah.

But no longer. He’s in prison. Soon he will be executed. And so our reading begins,

2 When John, who was in prison, heard about the deeds of the Messiah, he sent his disciples 3 to ask him, ‘Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?’

Note how two things here conspire to lead to John’s sense of doubt. One is that he’s in prison. The other is that he asks these questions ‘When … he heard about the deeds of the Messiah’. It’s as if what he hears Jesus is up to doesn’t fit with his ideas of the Messiah’s job description.

You wouldn’t think that someone with John the Baptist’s calling would be so full of doubts, but he is. The negative circumstances push in on him and create doubt.

Does that in any way sound familiar? Are there bad events in your life that have had an effect on your faith? The loss of a job which had seemed so right for you. An early bereavement. A child going off the rails. A significant injustice. A beloved church leader falling into serious sin. A great dream for your life manifestly not coming to fruition.

If you are struggling in some way like that this Advent, then consider with me what Jesus offers in this passage in response to John the Baptist’s dark night of the soul.

Two things. Firstly, focus on Jesus.

How does Jesus respond to John’s disciples when they come to him with their leader’s questions?

4 Jesus replied, ‘Go back and report to John what you hear and see: 5 the blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor. 6 Blessed is anyone who does not stumble on account of me.’

Look at what I’m doing, says Jesus. I’m fulfilling prophecy. This is straight from Isaiah 35, which is the Old Testament Lectionary reading paired with this Gospel reading.

Listen to Isaiah:

5 Then will the eyes of the blind be opened
    and the ears of the deaf unstopped.
6 Then will the lame leap like a deer,
    and the mute tongue shout for joy.

It corresponds closely with what Jesus describes himself doing here, and other parts of what Jesus says here show him fulfilling parts of Isaiah 61.

And if you started singing ‘O for a thousand tongues’ when I read those words from Isaiah 35, then bonus points for you, because these were part of Charles Wesley’s inspiration for that hymn.

Now these were probably not the verses John the Baptist had in mind for his cousin Jesus. He had described his cousin in quite fierce terms at times, and he might have wanted to go just before the healing of the blind, the deaf, the lame, and the mute in Isaiah 35:5-6 to the preceding two verses where the hearers are told not to worry, because their God will come with vengeance.

And John might have expected Jesus to go beyond the part of Isaiah 61 about proclaiming the good news to the poor to subsequent verses that talk about the day of vengeance of our God.

But as we know, Jesus postpones the talk of vengeance to the Last Judgment. It is there in his teaching, but he is clear that his incarnation, which we celebrate at Christmas, is about coming with the offer of salvation.

I don’t know, but maybe John could have done with a bit of vengeance as he sat in the dungeon of Herod Antipas. Perhaps it was easy to lapse into that way of thinking given the popular expectation of a military Messiah.

But sometimes what helps us when we are in our metaphorical dungeon is to be able to see a different part of Jesus’ character or ministry. Essentially, that’s what Jesus does here. Roughly speaking, he says to the disciples of John, look at the evidence and see that I’ve come to bring the promised salvation. That’s what my advent is about.

There is always more to Jesus than we have fully appreciated. The part of Jesus’ ministry to which he refers the disciples of John may not be what helps when we are in darkness because a loved one has not been healed. At those times it may be the way Jesus embraced human suffering himself that brings light to our darkness. Or the wonder of the Resurrection may be what brings us hope when we walk in the valley of the shadow of death.

More Jesus is always a good thing. We might want to read the Gospels more fully. We might find that a trusted Christian friend leads us to the aspect of Jesus that we need to lift us during our troubles.

The late Dr W E Sangster, the famous minister at Westminster Central Hall, once wrote that the Gospel is like a many-faceted diamond. We need to find the facet that shines the Good News into our particular situation.

We could adapt that very slightly and say that Jesus too is a many-faceted diamond, and that we simply need to find the facet of his Person and Work that shines his light into our situation.

Secondly, focus on Jesus’ estimation of you.

7 As John’s disciples were leaving, Jesus began to speak to the crowd about John: ‘What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed swayed by the wind? 8 If not, what did you go out to see? A man dressed in fine clothes? No, those who wear fine clothes are in kings’ palaces. 9 Then what did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet. 10 This is the one about whom it is written:

‘“I will send my messenger ahead of you,
    who will prepare your way before you.”

11 Truly I tell you, among those born of women there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist; yet whoever is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.

Undoubtedly in Jesus’ eyes, John the Baptist was the one prophesied by Malachi to be like Elijah come again as the forerunner to the Messiah, or the messenger in Isaiah who prepares the way. In other words, he was someone who had a profoundly important rôle in God’s plans.

Yet matched with that greatness was the humility of his standing, where even the least in the kingdom of God was greater. John was familiar with the humility needed, for as he had said of Jesus, ‘He must increase, but I must decrease.’

In other words, John was exactly who he thought he was before his crisis of faith. His call remains. God’s estimation of him remains.

How might this apply to us? I don’t know the calling of every individual who watches this video. I can’t even tell who watches it, only the overall numbers who do so.

But what I can say about all of you is that what hasn’t changed even when you had a crisis of faith, even when you doubted the very goodness of God, is that you remain beloved of him. You are still made in his image, carrying special dignity and responsibility for him in the world. You are still one for whom Jesus Christ came, lived, died, and rose again, that the barrier of sin between you and God might be removed and you be usefully employed in the service of his kingdom. You remain one whom your God will never forsake.

Your circumstances may make you question God’s love and God’s purposes for you. But remember that even Jesus expressed a sense of God-forsakenness on the Cross, and what could be darker than that? Yet his Faither brought him through that, using the Cross for good, and vindicating him in the Resurrection. Wait through your night for the dawn that God will bring.

The Christian writer Ann Voskamp says,

Christ-followers do more than believe some things are true, they trust that SomeOne is here.

She goes on to say,

This is a heart-broken planet, but this is not a forsaken planet. …

What electrifies all the dark is that Emmanuel is with us, and the current of His love holds the power to transform the darkest parts of our story into light.

His Withness heals all this brokenness.

May that be our hope this Advent and Christmas.

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