Jesus, Pastor and Apostle of the Resurrection: Luke 24:36-49 (Easter 3)

Here is a supposed church chain letter from the United States:

The “Ideal” Pastor
The ideal preacher lasts precisely ten minutes.

He is a harsh critic of sin, yet he never causes damage to others.

He works as the church janitor in addition to working from 8 AM to midnight.

The ideal pastor is forty bucks a week, drives a nice car, has nice clothes, reads good literature, and gives thirty dollars a week to the church.

With forty years of experience, he is 29 years old.

Above all, he has great looks.

The ideal pastor spends much of his time with older people and has a strong desire to work with youth.

His sense of humor, which makes him smile all the time while keeping a straight face, helps him maintain his unwavering commitment to his church.

He visits fifteen homes every day and is constantly available in his office for emergencies.

The ideal pastor consistently makes time for every committee within the church council. He is always engaged evangelizing the unchurched and never skips a church organization meeting.

The ideal pastor can always be found in the church next door!

Just forward this notification to six other churches that are also sick of their pastor if yours falls short. Your pastor should then be wrapped up and sent to the church at the top of the list.

You will receive 1,643 pastors in one week if everyone works together.

There should be one that is flawless.

Trust this letter. In less than three months, one congregation broke the chain and welcomed back its former pastor.

And if you think that’s just a wild exaggeration for the sake of humour, then you haven’t seen some of the circuit profiles I’ve read over the years. Not least do I remember one I read when I was single where the circuit said their ideal minister was married with children. In other words, they wouldn’t even appoint Jesus.

I used to think this problem of expecting the Archangel Gabriel to be your next minister was a grassroots issue, until I got involved in supporting and mentoring probationer ministers. Then I got to see Methodism’s official documents about the required competencies to become a minister. I realised the problem went right to the top.

There is only one person who has exercised all the different New Testament leadership gifts, and that is, of course, Jesus himself. Ephesians talks about leadership offices of apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor, and teacher. Jesus encompassed all of those. No-one else does. It’s why if Jesus is not your minister – and he isn’t – you need a team of people in leadership to cover the bases.

And I say all this, not to have a whinge about my own work, but to introduce the fact that in today’s passage Jesus exercises two of those leadership ministries.

Firstly, we have Jesus the Pastor:

Jesus appears to the disciples and speaks peace to them, offers them reassurance and reasons to grow in faith and deal with their doubts. And even when the disbelief persists, he is patient but persistent with them to bring them to a point of complete belief in his resurrection.

Does this sound like pastoral work to you? Because it does to me.

Where do you turn when fear threatens to overwhelm faith? I think that’s part of the story here. If, as I suspect, this is Luke’s version of the story John later describes in his Gospel where on the first Easter evening the disciples are behind locked doors out of fear that they will be arrested next, then no wonder his first words to them are ‘Peace be with you’ (verse 36). Well, that and the utter shock of his sudden materialisation in their midst, of course.

Sometimes it is the pastoral vocation to speak peace to troubled minds. I wish I could give you examples from my own experience, but I would be breaking pastoral confidences. What I will say is that when I was a young and enthusiastic Christian in my mid-twenties and wondering about my calling, a minister I admired said to me, ‘What most people need is simply the assurance they are loved by God and have a hope in heaven.’

And while that might be a bit simplistic, there is an important truth there. It is a pastoral calling to bring people into an assurance of their faith. And nothing does it like the truth of the resurrection. Those first disciples thought they might be facing imminent and cruel death, just as Jesus had. And the risen Lord doesn’t promise them an escape from suffering, but he embeds resurrection hope in them. When you have that, you can face even death with the peace of Christ.

Therefore, Jesus speaking the word of peace is accompanied by other words and demonstration that his resurrection is true. He isn’t a ghost. He has been raised bodily. He shows them his hands and feet to prove that it is him – just as he will offer Thomas a week later.

The other day, the Co-Op was in the news for pricing errors they made on their goods that would be delivered by the Deliveroo service. Jars of Loyd Grossman pasta sauce, Costa ground coffee, and Fox’s cookies were all free of charge. Robinson’s squash went down from £1.50 to 15p. At least one of those who dived in before the mistakes were corrected forty-five minutes later did at least donate his stash to his local food bank, but not all did.

Others steered clear, because we talk about things being too good to be true, and that seems to have been the disciples’ mindset. Luke says, ‘they still did not believe it because of joy and amazement’ (verse 41). So as well as having shown them his wounds and his flesh and bones (verse 39), Jesus eats fish in front of them (verses 42-43).

Too good to be true? No! It’s too good and it is true.

A few years ago, the Christian musician Matt Redman said that the familiar Christian expression ‘good news’ sometimes almost seemed to weak for what it represents. He wanted to use a stronger expression, and opted for ‘beautiful news.’

But whatever form of words we choose to use, we’re talking about something that goes against everything our culture and education tells us. That’s why it needs to go down deep. That’s why, I think, Jesus doesn’t mind offering more than one proof to the disciples so that it sinks in.

And that’s why the task of the pastor is to encourage us in all the ways that help the radical Christian message of the resurrection go deep into our lives and over-write the negative messages of our society. That’s why I will forever bang on about the importance of engaging with prayer and the Scriptures not only on a Sunday morning but in daily devotions and in small groups for fellowship and Bible study.

Jesus the pastor, then, brings the truth of the resurrection to troubled hearts and distorted minds in words and action.

Secondly, Jesus the Apostle:

Jesus takes the disciples on a Cook’s tour of the Scriptures (as they existed at that point). He shows them how they were all leading up to the Messiah suffering and then being raised from the dead (verses 44-46). All well and good. Just the sort of thing you might imagine happening in a home group. It also sounds quite similar to what Jesus did with Cleopas and his companion on the Emmaus Road, that we thought about last week, when we talked about interpreting Scripture in the light of God’s great story that points to the Resurrection and the New Creation.

Except that this time there’s a punchline:

and repentance for the forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. (Verse 47)

Now there’s a practical application! And if the disciples hadn’t been expecting a suffering Messiah who would also be raised from the dead before the end of history, then they wouldn’t have been anticipating this, either. For in what we call the Old Testament there is a lot of emphasis on the nations coming to Jerusalem to worship Israel’s God at the Temple, but now instead the divine message goes out from Jerusalem to the world.

And that’s going to require a new approach, one that was rarely seen in the Old Testament. You do have Jonah being sent to Nineveh, but as we know, he wasn’t keen on the idea. Now, it seems, Jesus says, this is the new norm. I’m not waiting for the nations to come to the Temple. I want to take the Temple to the nations.

An apostle is one who is sent with a message. That could describe the coming and the ministry of Jesus. But now, as the supreme apostle, he commissions his disciples with the apostolic call to be sent from Jerusalem to everywhere.

After all, when Jesus, as the risen Lord, returns to heaven in the Ascension, his presence will be available everywhere through his Spirit. Therefore, you don’t need to come to Jerusalem anymore. Jesus, the New Temple, can be accessed anywhere and everywhere. So it’s only appropriate to take that message everywhere and call on people to connect with Jesus where they are.

And by definition, a calling like that cannot be fulfilled by one person. It requires everyone who follows the risen Jesus to hear and respond.

But you might reply to that by saying, wait a minute, Dave, didn’t you say we don’t all have the same gifts, let alone all the gifts? Absolutely, I did. And we are not all apostles or evangelists. Quite right.

However, we are all witnesses (and that is not a leadership gift). Every Christian has encountered the risen Jesus in their lives and can bear witness to what that means for them. We bear witness in our words when we find the appropriate times to tell our friends about what Jesus has done in our lives and what he could do for them. We bear witness in our deeds when we live out the teaching of Jesus not only in the church but also in the world.

In all of this, though, we make that New Testament resurrection change of direction from the nations coming to Jerusalem where the Temple is, to taking Jerusalem to the nations, because Jesus the True Temple is accessible everywhere.

So out with all those lame strategies where we wait for people to come to us. Jesus never lived like that, and he never expected us to do that, either.

And when we leave our churches on a Sunday morning it isn’t merely to go home, it is to go into the world as commissioned by our risen Lord. The thought may make us tremble. We shall need the power of God in the Holy Spirit. But that is to jump ahead in the story.

May 4, 2025 0

Advent, The Prologue and Relationships: 2, Jesus and John the Baptist (John 1:1-18)

John 1:1-18

Isn’t it strange that just as ‘I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here’ is on our screens yet again that John the Baptist comes into focus in the church year? The man whom Matthew tells us wore clothes made of camel’s hair and lived on a diet of locusts and honey[1] sounds perfect for the bush tucker trial.

And speaking personally, I’d rather engage with John the Baptist than Nigel Farage. Which is one major reason I’m not watching this year.

But we think of John at this time due to his connection with Jesus – not simply that they were related through their mothers[2] but that they were related in the purposes of God. We talk about John as the ‘Forerunner’ of Jesus. Their relationship is important for the Advent story.

But it’s not just interesting historical detail. John’s mission of preparing the way for Jesus is also a model for the ways in which God gives us our mission of pointing to Jesus.

I’m going to explore that in two phases today.

Firstly, John was sent.

We are used in the Methodist Church to the idea of ministers being sent. I was sent to this appointment by the authority of the Methodist Conference. The Salvation Army send their officers; the Roman Catholics send their priests. (Other denominations are different and speak less of the church sending and more of God calling.)

But being sent isn’t just a churchy thing. It happens in other areas of life, too. As I mentioned to some around Remembrance Sunday last month, I am the first man in my family for a couple of generations not to go into the Royal Air Force. My Dad only did National Service, but I often thought he might have fancied a longer time in it than that. My uncle served for many years, and so did my three male cousins.

The armed services’ concept of a ‘posting’ is very much a sending, and young families are often in an area only for a short time before the next posting happens, with adverse effects upon socialisation and education. One of my cousins was awarded the MBE for work he and his wife did on RAF bases with lonely families.

John the Baptist’s sending comes not from the church or the armed services, but from God:

⁶There was a man sent from God whose name was John.

And yes, John has a very special calling that we mark at this time of year. And yes, we are used to the idea that certain Christians have particular callings in which they are sent by God.

Sadly, what we forget in all that is that every Christian is called and sent by God in some respect. Being sent by God doesn’t automatically mean being sent to dark jungles to be attacked by ferocious creatures and wild savages. Sometimes, God has already sent us to the place where we are, and this is the place where we are called to be fruitful and faithful for him.

Perhaps we still have that mediaeval Roman Catholic view of being sent that regarded the only vocations worth mentioning as those where someone was called to the church – priests, monks, and nuns. At least the Reformers broadened out that sense of vocation so that Martin Luther, ever provocative in his writing, could say that were the job of village hangman to fall vacant, the devout Christian should apply.

I am not here to recruit any hangmen today! But I am here to invite us all to consider our sense of being sent. Has God sent us to the particular job where we work? The neighbourhood where we live? The social groups in which we mix?

And if we think that’s possible, how does that change our attitude to those workplaces, neighbourhoods, and social groups? Are we on a mission from God in those places? Have we been placed there to live out our faith and bless those we meet with the love of God in our attitudes and actions? Has God sent us there as a sign of his abiding truth to those who may or may not want to know about it?

And for others of us, have we become restless where we are? Is it because we have not embraced the sense that God has sent us here, or is God preparing us to take up another posting and be sent somewhere else? Is this an issue that some of us should be praying about?

Secondly, John was specifically sent as a witness.

One of the things I do when I go to preach at a new church is I always ask for an assurance from the person on the sound desk that they will turn my microphone off during the hymns. Much as I love music, I am not blessed in that area with any personal ability. I was once next to my aunt in a congregation and she said to me afterwards, “I’m glad my bad singing voice has passed down another generation in the family.”

So when my friends in the church youth group formed a band, I was the only one not to be part of it. They became quite popular in local church circles and sold out some concerts.

I talk in the first chapter of my book about some of the socially awkward ways in which I related to them. Yet one Saturday evening in December, and I think it proved to be their biggest concert ever, they involved me by asking me to be the compère.

It stayed with me, because the next morning the Advent theme was John the Baptist, and the preacher spoke about how John was the compère for Jesus. Given my rôle the previous night, that description stuck with me. Just as the compère’s job is not to point to themselves but to the act everyone has paid to see, so the rôle of John the Baptist is not to big himself up but to be ‘a witness to the light’:

⁷He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe. ⁸He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light.

This rôle of a witness is seen in some of the other New Testament models for those who speak of Christ. We have the herald, who brought ‘good news’, rather like a town crier. ‘Good news’ was a technical term in the Roman Empire for the announcements heralds made that either the Roman army had won a great battle or that there was a new emperor on the throne. The first Christians translated this to their heralding of a different good news, the good news that God had won a great battle against evil at the Cross and that there was now a new king of the universe, Jesus the Lord.

And we have the ambassador that the Apostle Paul talks about. The purpose of an ambassador is to represent the king and the kingdom that sent them to an alien land. Paul and the first Christians saw themselves as representing Christ and the kingdom of God in an alien land.

All of these images – the witness, the herald, and the ambassador – have one thing in common. These spokespeople are not drawing attention to themselves but to Jesus Christ and the good news of God’s kingdom.

This was John’s purpose in a particularly special way when Jesus came into the world and thirty years later began his public ministry. It is also our calling.

For the New Testament also calls us witnesses. We may not all be evangelists, but we are all witnesses. Every Christian has the ability to witness to Jesus Christ by speaking about what he has done for them and what he has done for the world.

Think of a witness in a court of law. The witness speaks of what he or she has seen or heard, or about what he knows to be true. These are the things we do as witnesses for Christ, too. We speak about our experience of Jesus. We speak about what we know about him. Sure, we are not all what the courts call expert witnesses – perhaps those are the evangelists – but if we think about it, can we not all think of what Jesus has done for us, what he means to us, and what we know for sure about him?

Conclusion

Last week we saw that the Father’s relationship with Jesus said something about our relationship with Jesus, too. This week, John’s relationship with Jesus also has something to say about our relationship with Jesus.

Last week we saw that just as the Father’s relationship with Jesus was characterised by unity, love, and light, so too was Jesus’ mission to the world. This week with John we find that we are sent by God as heralds and ambassadors of King Jesus and his kingdom of unity, love, and light.

May the Holy Spirit show us the place where we are sent. And may we depend on that same Spirit to empower us as witnesses to Jesus and all that he has done.

[1] Matthew 3:4

[2] Luke 1:36

December 10, 2023 0

Seven Churches 3: Pergamum (Revelation 2:12-17)

Revelation 2:12-17

You may have spotted that I’m one of those ministers who only wears a clerical collar for formal occasions or when it’s absolutely necessary, such as when I visit someone who doesn’t know me and I need to be identified as a minister.

One of my Anglican friends noted this attitude of mine and said to me, “Dave, you’re not so much low church, you’re more like subterranean!”

Others, more particularly older and more traditional church members, have questioned me on this and claimed that the dog collar is like some magical Open Sesame that gains ministers entry into places others can’t go. The usual claim is that it allows us to get into hospital wards outside visiting hours.

I have to disappoint these people and tell them that I have no more right to go into a hospital ward out of hours than anybody else, unless I’m a member of the hospital chaplaincy team. And then what would gain me access is not the dog collar but a hospital lanyard.

If I’m feeling particularly mischievous in the conversation, what I then retort is that since Methodist doctrine says that ministers hold no priesthood that is different from the priesthood all believers have, then maybe all Christians should wear the collar!

Why am I telling you this? Because what Jesus writes to the church at Pergamum is all about being identifiably Christian. If we ask what Jesus praises them for, it’s being identifiably Christian. If we ask where he calls them out, it’s for when they hide their Christian identity.

Firstly, then, let’s listen to the praise Jesus heaps on the church at Pergamum:

¹³I know where you live – where Satan has his throne. Yet you remain true to my name. You did not renounce your faith in me, not even in the days of Antipas, my faithful witness, who was put to death in your city – where Satan lives.

They wore their Christian uniform, so to speak, and were clearly identifiable as followers of Jesus. They knew it would put them in the firing line in a place ‘where Satan has his throne’. Whatever that phrase means precisely, we can be sure that Pergamum was a tough place to identify as a Christian, because hostility, opposition, and even violence would come their way. Yet they still did it. And it even cost one church member his life.

This wasn’t unusual at the time Revelation was written. We are fairly sure it was written around the time that Domitian was the Roman Emperor (that’s AD 81-96, fact fans). A cruel and ruthless ruler, he only tolerated religions other than the Roman emperor cult if they could be assimilated into that Roman culture. If they stood out, it seems persecution was the consequence.

Indeed, the Book of Revelation is not so much cryptic prophecies of future end-time events as a document to give hope to persecuted Christians. Throughout the centuries and around the world, the persecuted church has taken great comfort from it.

Today, we hear inspiring and shocking stories from around the world about what it means for many Christians to ‘wear their uniform’, to be publicly identifiable as disciples of Jesus.

Here’s one I found through an email from Christian Solidarity Worldwide:

[In August], hundreds of people stormed a Christian colony in Jaranwala city near Faisalabad in Pakistan. Up to 25 churches and chapels and hundreds of homes were ransacked and set on fire.

Why? Two local Christian residents, Rocky Masih and Raja Masih, had been accused of blasphemy. Mobs, stirred up by reports that the men had desecrated religious scriptures, attacked the colony, demanding to execute the two men themselves.

Rocky and Raja were subsequently arrested and charged with insulting Islam and defiling the name of the Prophet Mohammed. Other Christians in the area have fled in fear of their lives.

This is what happens in many places around the world when you publicly identify as a Christian. Lies, false charges, violence, and the risk of death.

But what does that all mean for us, in a country where it is much safer to be a Christian, even if it is less well received than it once was?

I think there are a couple of applications.

One is that we need to take seriously what happens to other members of the Christian family around the world. We need to use our freedoms to support them and campaign for them. I strongly recommend that we look into the work of organisations like Christian Solidarity Worldwide, whom I just quoted, or Open Doors, who do similar work. Who else is going to speak up for suffering Christians if not the rest of the church? These organisations can provide us with material for prayer, for lobbying Parliament, and so on.

The other application I would draw is this. If our situation is easier, then why do we allow relatively trivial opposition to close our mouths from speaking up for Christ? I know we want to avoid the stereotype of Christians being judgmental, but the mockery or opposition we would face is nothing in comparison to what our sisters and brothers in Pakistan, Nigeria, India, Iran, North Korea, China, and so many other countries face.

Surely we could find a bit more courage to nail our colours to the mast?

Secondly, why does Jesus call the church at Pergamum to repent?

You may know one of my favourite sermon stories. It concerns a question set in a training examination for police recruits:

‘You are on the beat and you see two dogs fighting. The dogs knock a baby out of its pram, causing a car to swerve off the road, smashing into a grocer’s shop. A pedestrian is severely injured, but during the confusion a woman’s bag is snatched, a crowd of onlookers chase after the thief and, in the huge build-up of traffic, the ambulance is blocked from the victim of the crash.

‘State, in order of priority, your course of action.’

One recruit wrote, ‘Take off uniform and mingle with crowd.’[1]

I think that’s rather like the issue Jesus had with Pergamum:

¹⁴Nevertheless, I have a few things against you: there are some among you who hold to the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to entice the Israelites to sin so that they ate food sacrificed to idols and committed sexual immorality. ¹⁵Likewise, you also have those who hold to the teaching of the Nicolaitans. ¹⁶Repent therefore! Otherwise, I will soon come to you and will fight against them with the sword of my mouth.

Effectively, the Christians at Pergamum had taken off their uniform and mingled with the crowd. How? Note the reference to eating food sacrificed to idols and committing sexual immorality. It sounds very much like some of them were joining in with the practices of the local pagan religious cult.

The management guru Peter Drucker once famously said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” and this rather sounds like the local culture had eaten the Christians for breakfast. After all, surely it doesn’t harm to mingle with the local crowd if the alternative is sticking out like a sore thumb as a Christian and getting in trouble as a result?

But the problem here is that in letting themselves be absorbed by the surrounding culture they ended up imbibing a lifestyle that denied the Gospel. So no wonder Jesus calls them to repentance.

Could it be that we face the same challenge? Sadly, there is plenty of evidence of both individual Christians and the church corporately taking off uniform and mingling with today’s crowd. We do it when we baptise the world’s ethics and try to convince ourselves they are consistent with the Gospel.

We take off our uniform when we succumb to the politics of ‘might is right.’

We mingle with the crowd when we adopt a celebrity cult in the church, just as the world does.

We do it when we worship the god of individual choice, or the idol of consumerism. And you don’t even have to buy anything to worship consumerism: you can just treat church as a consumer choice, that exists solely to meet your needs and tastes.

Yes, we are every bit in as much danger as the Pergamum church of letting the culture eat us up and losing our Christian distinctiveness.

And when we do this, we are saying we are ashamed of the Gospel, and of he One who went to the Cross for us. That’s serious.

We might do well to reflect on whether there are any ways in which we have bent the shape of our faith to fit what’s popular in our society, rather than calling our society to change shape in conformity to Christ.

Each one of us needs to examine ourselves from time to time to consider whether we have compromised our faith to fit the wider culture.

In conclusion, we have a choice and each choice will lead to a different response from Jesus.

If we choose to take off our uniform and mingle with the crowd, rendering ourselves indistinguishable from the wider world, then Jesus has a solemn response. He says,

¹⁶Repent therefore! Otherwise, I will soon come to you and will fight against them with the sword of my mouth.

In other words, he will speak against us. Is that what he has done when scandals have been exposed in the church that is exposed in the world?

But there is good news from Jesus if we take the more difficult route of staying in our distinctive Christian uniform in the world:

¹⁷Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To the one who is victorious, I will give some of the hidden manna. I will also give that person a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to the one who receives it.

The ‘hidden manna’ surely means he will sustain us in difficult, wilderness times in our lives. The ‘white stone’ is what a not guilty verdict was returned on in the local courts and indicates Christ’s acceptance of us. The secret name likely signifies his intimate knowledge and love for us.[2] These are ways in which Jesus strengthens us when times are tough.

So there we have it. We are faced with a tough choice, whether to identify publicly as Christians at a potential cost or to go underground and be indistinct from the rest of the world.

But the easy road is confronted by the opposition of Jesus, and the tough road takes us into the blessing of Jesus.

Which will we choose?

[1] Adapted from Murray Watts, Bats In The Belfry, p137 #232.

[2] See Ian Paul, Revelation (Tyndale New Testament Commentary), p90.

October 22, 2023 0

Witness At The Family Fun Day

On Saturday, we held our annual church family fun day. A bouncy castle, crafts, treasure hunt, a children’s entertainer and the like – all offered free of charge to the local community. Today, I heard about some of the great conversations that occurred on the day, and it inspired me to write about our witness for the church magazine. What follows picks up on that experience and is heavily influenced by Neil Cole‘s book Organic Church …

“Why do you do this?”

No, not a question of despair, but one asked several times by visitors to our recent Family Fun Day. (And let me add to my children’s public thank-you of Dianne for her tremendous organisation of the day.)

Why do you do this? Why do you put on an event free of charge, with no strings attached? They are good questions, just the ones we wanted people to ask. And they are easy to answer if we know the Gospel. We say, God is like this. God gives love unconditionally. He wants people to respond, but he gives in the first place. He gives, whether we give back or not.

Obviously, we hope that as a result people will engage with us more through events like Holiday Club and Messy Church as a result. We hope, too, that we might be known in the community as a group of people whose actions in love provoke regular “Why do you do this?” questions, not just for what we put on together as a church, but from the deeds of our individual lives.

Yes, it’s easy to answer these questions. You don’t need to have studied academic Theology like I have in order to give good answers. All you need is a personal experience of Christ in your life. Because we answer out of our own spiritual experience, and relying on the Holy Spirit. There is a place for intellectually defending our faith, but it’s not everyone’s calling.

Sometimes we’ve made it too hard to be an effective Christian witness. We’ve expected people to jump the hurdles of church committees and study courses before trusting them to say anything in the name of Christ.

What poppycock! Jesus healed people or led them to faith and then sent them out immediately to tell their friends and families what they had experienced. How crazy we are to think we know better than him!

Yes, it’s right to look for maturity, but if we think maturity comes from sitting in a classroom reading a textbook, we are deluded. Maturity comes from experience.

So I want to encourage you all in this simple message this month. What is your experience of Christ? Recount it. Write it down, if it helps.

And cultivate that quiet reflectiveness that listens for the promptings of the Holy Spirit.

If we went out into the local community like that, we wouldn’t need fancy programmes, we wouldn’t need massive budgets, we’d have the richest resource of all: the Spirit of Christ.

Remember: we may not all be evangelists, but we are all witnesses. And witnesses simply have to describe what they have seen and experienced. It’s surprisingly powerful, even when engaging the most intellectual of people.

Do you think we can rise to the occasion? I think so.

June 24, 2009 0

Sabbatical, Day 85: Random Links And Thoughts

There’s not a lot to report today on the cat front. Debbie had a long phone conversation with a woman who runs what amounts to a clearing house for people who cannot keep their pets. We’ve expressed an interest in two separate pairs of cats, and now await a call back regarding arrangements to visit them.

In the area of church and sabbatical, there is also little to say today for delicate reasons.

So instead of the usual, I offer you a pot-pourri. (No, not popery, Mr Paisley.)

Here are some interesting links I came across.

Some Video Fun
How about Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody played on old school computer equipment?

(Via the weekly Mojo magazine email.)

Here’s a parody of the Christian worship – ahem – ‘industry’:

Jesus Stuff

Not a link, but a couple of great quotes from an interview with J John in the Summer 2009 issue of New Wine magazine, pages 10 and 11:

If we are all witnesses, does that mean we are all evangelists?
Not everyone is an evangelist, but everyone is a witness. In a court of law, you have a lawyer who takes the facts and presents them in a convincing manner. As an evangelist, that’s what I do. I take the facts and try to get people to the point where they are convinced that Christianity is true. An evangelist will communicate much more of the substance of Christianity.

But if you are a follower of Jesus, then you are a witness. And a witness in the court stands up and says, ‘Well I don’t know very much, but let me tell you my story.’ Everyone that’s a follower of Jesus has a testimony of what Jesus has done for them. Therefore everyone can answer. It’s not hard at all.

How do you approach people of other faiths?
I don’t get defensive. Rather, I ask questions such as: in what way does your faith help you in your life, give you confidence for the future or help you face death? I reveal cracks in their philosophy and show them that in Christ, we have a confidence and a hope. But I wouldn’t ever put people down. All we have to do is lift Jesus up.

(This material copyright New Wine Magazine and used with permission.)

Chopping down the Sunday tree: radical thoughts on how to approach a potentially dying church from Graham Peacock. HT: Maggi Dawn.

Mr Tweet recommended Mike Todd on Twitter to me. I found his blog, Waving Or Drowning, and among a feast of riches I found in this post a brilliant quote from Brian McLaren about what Christians might consider to be a proper view from the economic crisis. Do read it. He says that we might contemplate recovery in the way an addict does, in which case we don’t want recovery to be a return to our old addictive highs, but a facing of the addictions.

Tech
1st Web Designer: 28 Online Photo Editing Sites To Have Fun With – via@problogger.

Read-Write Web has great first impressions of Wolfram-Alpha, not a ‘Google killer’ search engine but a ‘computational knowledge engine’ that will cross over into Wikipedia‘s domain. TechCrunch reports there will be a public preview on Tuesday, streamed live from Harvard.

April 26, 2009 1

Tooth Extraction

This morning, I went for a tooth extraction. It failed. Not that I blame the dentist at all: she called in the senior partner, who confirmed that the roots of the tooth were, er, too healthy to come out. They were long and awkward. I have been referred to a specialist dentist for them either to cut into the gum or even into the bone next to the gum to get the roots out. It will be either more local anaesthetic or sedation.

It must have been bad, even my wife was sorry for me. I was sorry for myself, anyway – natch! I’ve kept trying to make the site of the work cold to reduce the soreness. After a couple of hours, I gave into the dentist’s counsel and took some ibuprofen.

The experience reminded me of something the Jesuit John Powell wrote in one of his books. Someone said to him, ‘When you have a toothache, who are you thinking of?’

‘Myself,’ he replied.

‘Exactly,’ said the other person. Powell drew the lesson that when we are in pain it is so easy to be consumed with ourselves.

When I remembered that story in the middle of my inconsequential gum discomfort today, I thought all the more of the people I know whose witness under extreme, chronic and sometimes terminal pain is quite extraordinary. I think of a woman in one of my congregations here who suffers from degenerative lung and skin conditions. Yet she and her husband are a tonic to visit. She has a compassion for others that is equalled by few. Her own pain is complicated by the fact that in the past she has received ‘miraculous’ healing from God. Not with her current conditions, though, at least not to date.

I long that she does not continue to deteriorate in the way she is doing, slowly. I hope and pray for her winsome witness to play out in a pain-free life. I would rather see any Christian eventually die ‘old and full of years’ as Scripture puts it, rather than from some hideous, yes evil condition.

Yet we follow One who thought of others in the midst of unmentionable physical and spiritual pain, the One who said, ‘Today, you will be in Paradise with me’ to the penitent thief and who ensured his own mother would receive care.

Sometimes pastoral ministry means a relentless contact with people in terrible situations. I can find my mind consumed with morbid thoughts of mortality as a consequence. But there is also an immense privilege in encountering those who know suffering I hope I never personally experience, yet who think not of themselves but of Christ and others.

January 12, 2009 4

Shaun Murphy’s Faith

An interview by Matthew Syed with Shaun Murphy, the world snooker champion, appears in today’s Times. Here are the first two paragraphs:

Many attributed Shaun Murphy’s unswerving self-belief to his faith in God after he triumphed in the World Championship this year as a 150-1 outsider. It is a plausible theory. The 23-year-old is an unabashed biblical literalist who views the multicoloured world of snooker through the black and white prism of Christian fundamentalism.

“I am convinced that God has a plan for my life that encompasses success in snooker,” he said when I met him at the Royal Automobile Club in Pall Mall, the venue for today’s Pot Black Cup, where he faces Jimmy White in the first round. “Before matches, Clare (his wife) prays that God will anoint my hands so that I can play to my full potential.”

Two things struck me about these paragraphs. First is the attribution of Murphy’s belief that God had a plan for his life to ‘black and white … Christian fundamentalism’. Certainty makes you a fundamentalist. When I first read it my hackles rose against the reporter. But I have sat listening this morning to Scott McDermott preach about the need to avoid spiritual indecision in the face of a culture that would prefer us to be indecisive. So no wonder the journalist has to categorise Murphy like this. He’s captive to the culture.

Secondly, I love the prayer for the anointing of his hands so that he can play to his full potential. This takes ‘anointing’ out of the limited, churchy context it is too often constrained within right into the workplace and therefore the place of Christian witness. God bless you, Shaun.

October 29, 2005 0

Tag: witness