Brookmans Park 30 Dec 2012 (Colossians 3:12-17)

The extract we have heard from the letter to the Colossians seems particularly appropriate for the first Sunday after Christmas. The heart of its teaching is gratitude and I hope we’ve all got reasons to be grateful.

Christmas is a time when families spend some, often unaccustomed, time together; and while this can sometimes be fraught and tense it also reminds us, I hope, of how much we owe one another. The family unit forms a core of the way we organise ourselves as human beings and this is a time in our society when scattered families come together to eat and to simply be in one another’s presence or when groups large or small form themselves into virtual families for the day.

Generations are gathered, cousins meet, relations we barely know are encountered or alternatively friends or, as at Potters Bar this year, strangers, gather.. Not everyone wholeheartedly enjoys every moment of the experience but it has its very great value. Individuals who would like to think of themselves as independent and self-sufficient are forced to acknowledge their debts and their responsibilities, due to where they have come from and how they have been cared for.

In the exchange of gifts we symbolise our knowledge of and connection to all those who form this network of kinship, complicated and enriched by patterns other than those of biological connection. The people who find themselves together on Christmas day become family and this matters. The presents we give one another represent this bond between us and if they work well make us feel valued and known.

In response to this we feel gratitude, not just or even primarily for the usefulness or beauty of the object given but for the evidence it gives that somebody has been thinking about us, putting effort into making us feel good, when we weren’t there and didn’t know we were in their mind. A present is proof that we are valued, that we have a place in the world where we matter.

Our reading from Paul ended with this sentence: “whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.”

What is it, especially, that we are to be grateful for? In this context it seems to be the call to be part of God’s chosen people, remember our passage began with the words; “ as God’s chosen ones” and halfway through Paul reminds us to: “let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body.”

It is indeed right that we should be grateful for this choosing, this calling. It is a great privilege to serve God in the way we do. It is special proof of God’s noticing of us, his remembering of us, as the gifts we receive from our friends and family are of our value to them. God’s calling of us into the Church is a gift to us, as well as a set of demands put on us.

Beyond this, though, the gratitude we are called to here has other, less personal roots. We owe to God the great gift of our own being. This is a gift of another order. That we are at all is a mark of God’s not simply remembering us as he went through a list of those to whom presents were owed. Rather he has gone out of his way to put us on that list. Before we were God owed us nothing, certainly not existence. God chose freely to make each and every one of us and to make us as we are. We are God’s gift to us.

What’s more God didn’t only make us he also redeemed us. As each of us was made each of us was also saved from our sin, our separation from God, in Jesus. God came to be with us in Christ in order to restore to us the gift of life that we seemed to lose through our sin. We are resurrected to new life by God, given the gift again, even after we have thrown it away.

Reason to be grateful, indeed.

So how are we to express our gratitude? Paul helps us to grasp this in our letter and the account he gives us of Christian virtue is beautiful and worth spending time on.

He lists five virtues: compassion, kindness, gentleness, humility, and patience and he joins these together in love, which, he says, binds all together in perfect harmony. We feel gratitude for God’s gifts, this expresses itself in love and this love works itself out through the virtues.

Compassion: as we are shaped and transformed by the love that springs from our gratitude to God we recognise in others the value placed on them by God. When others suffer we see ourselves in their place and feel their suffering as our own. We are never indifferent to those who are weaker or less fortunate than us. Rather we recognise our common humanity, our common dependency on God and open ourselves up to our brothers and sisters.

Kindness: we act on these feelings. We try to find whatever ways we can to ease the burdens of our fellows. We tend to their hurts, we feed their hunger, we comfort their sadness, loneliness, bewilderment. Above all we act to let them know and really to feel their value in our eyes.

Gentleness: in so doing we are careful in our dealings with one another. Our strength is controlled so that others aren’t bruised or otherwise hurt by it. When we have to do with those who are or who seem weaker than we are we are careful not to overwhelm or humiliate them. Our good deeds are never forceful but always tender and gentle.

Humility: in all of this we are constantly aware that whatever we are, whatever we have, whatever we do are not possessions of our own, won by our own merit. They are outworkings of God’s grace in us. Our achievements and our merits are God’s, owed by us to him. Our humility is a real sense of how entirely our value derives from God’s valuation of us.

Patience: we bear with God, knowing that his time and ours are different. When things don’t go as we would like them to, when we are faced with trials, when the promise of eternal and complete happiness seems empty given the struggles we go through we remember that our God is a faithful God. If things aren’t right now then they will be, then. We bear with God, we trust his word, we know that the gifts we have been promised will come.
These are the Christian virtues as Paul lists them and the reasons he gives to try to live into them have little to do either with threats or with rewards, with sticks or with carrots. They are part of a relationship with God that is constituted by generosity and gratitude, with gifts given and received in love. We have had a reflected glimpse of it in our Christmas festivities, let’s carry that spirit with us into the new year,

thanks be to God!

Potters Bar 16 Dec 2012 (Luke 3:7-18)

Last week I suggested that we were still, like John the Baptist, waiting for Jesus, waiting for redemption, waiting for all to be made right by the action of God.

But that’s not quite right, is it? After all John didn’t even know the name of the one greater than he while we have a literature and a tradition rich in detail about the saviour and we are taught that the incarnation, God coming to be with us, changes everything. We have Jesus’ example, Jesus’ teaching, and the belief that his life and his death on the cross transform our relationship with God. We are not, then, really in the same position as John.

This means that when we look at John’s teaching as it is reported in Luke’s Gospel, we have even more problems than when we hear Jesus’ teaching reported in the Bible. We have to work out whether John’s words have any authority for us given that they come before Jesus and then we have to work out what difference the historical and cultural context makes, whether we can agree with what he says, how we might respond. Are these words of John’s of interest, of no interest, a matter of eternal importance, or what?

John, remember, says that the eternal judge is coming and those who hear need to bear fruits worthy of repentance if they’re going to avoid being the chaff consigned to unquenchable fire. This sounds like a matter of urgency – who would want to be chaff? Who would want to be consigned to the fire? If we believed these words of John’s we would, presumably, be eager to bear the fruits and would be anxiously analysing the examples given to work out how they applied to us. None of us are tax collectors or soldiers, as far as I know, but we all have coats and food we could give away.

If we thought John’s teaching had authority, was true and applied to us, we would, I think. sleep uneasy in our beds as long as we hadn’t given away as much as we could afford to. We would also, I imagine, worry about our professional ethics. Were we behaving as John says we should, or do his strictures apply only to certain, rather dubious, jobs, soldiering and collection of tolls on behalf of occupying powers?

Before we got into this, though, we’d need to think about whether Jesus’ coming and Jesus’ teaching make a difference. One obvious comparison is between John’s “give away one coat” and Jesus’ “sell all you have”. In general Jesus doesn’t say much about the right way to do one’s job. His teaching tends to be stark and demanding: “everyone who is angry .. is guilty”; “everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart”; “whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery”;”do not resist an evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also”; “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”; “you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

What Jesus asks of his followers in the sermon on the mount makes John’s “do your job according to the rules” look easy and tame. Think for a moment about not resisting an evil person, for example. Think about being guilty simply if you become angry. Think about the demand that you sell everything you have and give it to the poor. That’s a long way from the conscientious tax collector and soldier being content with what their job description and terms of employment allow them.

So why does Jesus demand so much more of us than John? And where is his pitchfork? Where is the unquenchable fire? What, having encountered Jesus, are we to make of John’s teaching?

Well it’s clear to me that whereas it’s quite possible to do what John demands, to do whatever job we have in the complex division of labour that is modern society within the rules and according to conscience, Jesus’ ethical teaching is much more difficult. Can we really be quite without anger, totally without lust, can we love our enemies and not resist the evil person? These seem impossible standards to meet. One way Jesus changes everything is to raise the bar of behaviour so high as to be out of reach.

He does this, I think, for two reasons. First he announces and inaugurates the direct rule of God: the Kingdom has come near, he says, the Kingdom of God is within you. He often speaks of the Kingdom as still to come but at the same time he implies that it is here, that we can enter it now. This nearness, though, is hard to see: no one can see the kingdom of God, he says, unless he is born again.

Jesus describes, in the sermon on the mount, what it would be to live wholly in that kingdom, to be subject completely and only to God’s law of love. With him God’s rule comes directly amongst us and he shows and tells us what it is like.

At the same time the full realisation of the Kingdom is still to come, when Christ returns in glory, so we struggle, against the influence of the world, to become like him, to live in that way.

But there is more good news. Not only does Jesus announce the coming of the Kingdom, the already and not yet reign of the prince of peace. He also promises us that we will enter it, by God’s grace, not because we are able to prove ourselves worthy, but even though we can’t. Even where we fall short, even where we feel anger, are driven to resist evil, where we can’t love our enemies, God sees our potential, sees our worth and reaches out to us in love.

Jesus tells us what it is to be a citizen of the holy city and says that God will fit us to live there, that we don’t have to earn our entry, we have to have the humility and the courage to accept it as a gift.

This is a different teaching from John’s. John described a righteousness we could achieve and threatened us with awful judgement if we fell short. Jesus describes a bliss we can’t achieve on our own and promises us mercy and love in our weakness.

John was a good and an honest man. Jesus was more. Here’s what Jesus has to say about John

Among those born of women there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist; yet he who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he … John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon.’

 

Jesus goes on to say The Son of Man (one of Jesus’s favourite ways of speaking about himself) came eating and drinking, and they (those who reject him) say, ‘Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and “sinners.”’

Jesus says that John followed and demanded the strictest rules of behaviour and was called mad, whereas Jesus reaches out to the lost and rejected. He looks, to the righteous, like a glutton and a drunkard. He promises forgiveness, he throws open the gates of the kingdom and invites all to enter who will acknowledge God’s love and allow themselves to be transformed by it. He is our friend.

Thanks be to God.

Potters Bar 9 Dec 2012 (Second Sunday in Advent – Luke 3:1-6)

Later in this service we will be receiving Colin into membership of this congregation so it seems a good moment to think about what membership of this church, what membership of the Church of Christ, is all about and there can be few better times to do so than this second Sunday of Advent. This Sunday is often the time when we remember John the Baptist, the precursor or herald of the ministry of Jesus.

John announced the necessity of repentance, he practised baptism, he promised the coming of one greater than himself, who would thresh the harvest and burn the chaff with eternal fire. John was a fiery and energetic preacher of religious renewal and preparation for judgement.

There are a lot of different ways to think about what the Church is, what it means to belong to it, what it is meant to do, and as we think together over the coming months about the future shape of our life together I have no doubt that we will want to explore many of them. In what has been an eventful and fascinating week for me not the least interesting meeting was that which began to plan our elders’ away day in March.

Today I want to think about what it might mean to see the Church as continuing the ministry of John the Baptist, the ministry that prepares for the coming of Christ. This may seem strange at first sight, after all Christ has come, we are preparing, during advent, to remember the coming of Christ, no longer anticipating the revelation of an as yet unknown saviour,

I would like us, though, to retain a sense of anticipation, not just the slightly awkward anticipation of a remembering, but a real anticipation of something astonishing and wonderful, something impossible to comprehend until it happens, something that transforms life even more completely than the first falling in love with the person who is to be one’s partner in life.

I would like us to hear and feel the gospel, the good news about Jesus, as not only the good news about what he has been and what he has done for us but also about what he will be and what he will do.

We began to talk about this idea at Bible study on Monday and our discussion has given me plenty of food for thought. I knew I was unable to get across, as we talked about Adam, Eve, the apple and the expulsion from Eden, why I felt so strongly that we were all necessarily in the wrong with respect to God. Why, like John the Baptist, I want to say that we should all repent.

Thinking about it afterwards and reading again about John’s ministry, its end in his death, its relationship to the ministry of Jesus, I had an inkling of why. The world we live in cannot, in my view, be the world as God intends it to be and we cannot be the people God means us to be.

If God loves all of us perfectly, as I believe he does, the suffering and pain of so many must mean that something has gone amiss in creation. In the midst of all that is so bad it is impossible for us to be perfectly good and perfectly happy, as we were made, I think, to be.

We cannot simply jump clear of it all, of the misery, the injustice, the cruelty, starvation, loneliness and death that surround us. We can’t be clean in a world so dirty. No good intention, no purity of heart, no effort at holiness can free us from our entanglement with so much that is wrong, The Church cannot claim to follow Jesus’ way of love, service, humility and dedication if it tries to cut itself off and to be an isolated island of godliness surrounded by outer darkness. This would not be the kind of love of neighbour to which we are summoned.

Our only hope, it seems to me, is in the promise we are given, that in God’s good time Christ will come again, will come again in glory. will make all things right. This coming again is hard to picture, impossible to imagine, will take some form we do not know. Perhaps it is a metaphor for some series of events over long periods, perhaps it indicates some sudden and dramatic reversal that leads to the promised reign of peace. I don’t know. What I do know is that, for me, the present, with all its anguish, all its guilt, is made bearable by this vision of a future that is quite different, transformed by love.

In that sense to be a member of the Church is to undertake to represent that future to the present, to strive to be a sign of God’s kingdom, to speak for God’s love and God’s promise.

That is the sense in which remembering John, the voice crying in the wilderness, is a perfect preparation for us to welcome and embrace a new member of our community.

Together we Christians are given the task of calling out, in the wilderness of our fallen world:

‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.

Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth;

and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.'”

in the name of the father, the name of the son, the name of the Spirit Holy

amen.

Brookmans Park 2 Dec 2012 (1st Sunday in Advent Luke 21:25-36)

Jesus says: “I tell you the truth, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.”

“This generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened”. How many generations have there been on earth since Jesus said those words? It must be approaching 100. So did he just get it wrong? Have those 100 generations passed away? Have “all these things” happened?

I’ve been thinking about “passing away” a lot this week. On Monday we were asked to think in our Bible Study about what the Church of 2050 would look like. Nobody present thought that this building would still be a church in that year. If we look around this morning we can see why. We all belong, in a sense, not to “this generation” but to a previous generation. We are of an age where we are not going to be having any more children. We are part, in this way, of the past of the species, not of its future. Our church, too, might be seen as part of the past. So that was Monday.

On Tuesday I made my first visit as a minister to a bereaved family for whom I will be conducting a funeral. This was a difficult visit for me but that is nothing to what that family is going through. The reality of death and loss, of what it means for someone to “pass away” were inescapable and made it even more difficult and perplexing to return to these words from Luke’s gospel.

Later on Tuesday I attended, along with Nelda and Valerie, a meeting called by the St Albans area of our Synod, Thames North, of the United Reformed Church. This meeting brought together six churches, this one, Potters Bar, Hatfield, and the three in Welwyn Garden City and was part of a process looking at the deployment of ministers in the Synod. We were reminded, again, that the URC is a declining denomination and that the provision of ministers is marked by that. The St Albans area, which includes 30 churches, has had its allocation reduced to 8.5. This implies that each minister needs to serve in an average of more than three churches, which in turn seems unlikely to help in reversing the decline of the denomination. What a contrast to the vibrancy of the early church, so clearly expressed in Luke as in the rest of the New Testament.

Then on Wednesday evening I attended a performance of Ralph Vaughan-Williams wonderful operatic adaptation of Pilgrim’s Progress. The climax of this is a scene where the Pilgrim who is the central character achieves his goal of reaching the celestial city through death. The way to God, this suggests, lies through death. This is not an uncommon thought in our tradition, think of hymns like “How great thou art” or “Guide me o thou great Jehovah”. “Land me safe on Canaan’s side”.

Perhaps this tradition, that life is a pilgrimage towards a destination reached only after death, can help us to grasp the truth our gospel reading is presenting. This generation will not pass away until all these things have happened. I’m sure we can all think of people who have been lost to us through death. People dear to us we can no longer see, no longer speak to. Have they passed away? Are they no more? Or are they resting safe with God?
As we enter Advent we look forward not just to a festival in which we remember Jesus. As we look forward to the fulfilment of God’s promises to us we don’t only look forward to a rest with God. No we look forward to Christ’s return in glory, to him coming with clouds descending.

These images from the Bible may not quite be literally believable to all of us. Perhaps we don’t all think that Jesus will actually come down to earth from the sky on a cloud but what this means is still essential to the Christian faith.

We pray that God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven. This means that our world, this world, will be put into a state that accords with God’s intention, with the will of someone who loves us without reserve or limitation. In a world like that surely all our losses will be made good, all our hurts healed, all our needs met. That is what we’re taught to pray for, that is what Christ’s return is about, about a world and people made whole.

So as we think about passing away, as we think about decline, as we think about ourselves, as we think about our church, let’s remember what we’re promised. We’re promised resurrection life, we’re promised communion with God, we’re promised that in the end Christ will come and all will be restored. This resurrection, this salvation, this restoration, don’t depend on anything we do, they aren’t achievements for us to strive for, they come out of God’s gracious love and will for our good.

As we move into this wonderful season of Advent let’s turn in faith to the coming Christ, the great sign and worker of God’s love, in gratitude and also in expectation.As Barack Obama recently promised: “The best is yet to come”.