Stebbing Carol Service Sermon 2011

So, what do you want for Christmas?

Let me start by saying that other department stores are available – borrowing their idea does not imply endorsement of that particular one.

Gifts you can’t wait to give.

All I really want to say tonight is that like that little boy, God has a gift for you that he can’t wait to give, that he longs to be able to share with you.

And in spite of appearances sometimes, like that little boy, God is more interested in giving to you than receiving from you or from me or from any of us.

It probably isn’t a gift you’ve asked for, though if you’ve heard about the Alpha course we ran this autumn you may have it on your list.

It isn’t anything you’ll need to unwrap, nor is there is a danger that you’ll want to take it back to the shop and exchange it for something else.

It isn’t embarrassing like those socks or that scarf or that hideous tie, and it won’t break after a week. Its batteries don’t run out – indeed it has its own eternal power source.

Money can’t buy this gift, as the Beatles sang many years ago, but as Michael Ball sang not quite so long ago, it does change everything.

That little lad in the John Lewis ad had been waiting impatiently for a few weeks to give his gift, but God has been waiting for the entire history of the universe to give you – yes you – a gift.

That little lad kept his gift a secret, hiding it away in the cupboard, but God made plain his gift to everyone, a long time ago.

The reason we give gifts at Christmas is to remind ourselves of the gift God gave us that first Christmas – the gift of his love, expressed in the coming to earth of his son born as a poor baby in a small village in the Middle East; Jesus, the Christ.

Money can’t buy love, but as we shall see, love changes everything.

The coming of Jesus was an amazing act of love – that the eternal God should stoop to become a mere human being. Yet the most amazing gift was yet to come, when Jesus died on the cross.

The cross, and the empty tomb of the resurrection are God’s way of saying “I have a gift for you”. In a way then, this gift has been on clear display under a metaphorical Christmas tree for 2000 years, waiting for us to notice it, and claim it as our own.

And many people have done just that. 2.3 billion people, that’s 33% of the population of the world are Christians today. And tomorrow there will be 80,000 more Christians, as across the world 80,000 people accept the gift that God longs to give, the gift of his love in Jesus Christ.

The compelling thing about that little lad in the advert is that we are set up by the music and pictures to think that he is waiting impatiently to receive gifts, not give them. 

What makes it so moving – or creepy depending on which YouTube channel you watch, is that he confounds our expectations and walks past the gifts piled up for him to fetch and give a single special gift to his loved ones.

And some people here I am sure are thinking that God only wants to take from us, just wants to receive our worship, our money our time and so on. Yet as I have already said, God is more interested in giving than receiving, and that’s true all the time, not just at Christmas.

We give of those things willingly if we have received the gift God gives – the gift of his love, the gift of new life in Jesus Christ.

And how do we receive this gift, how do we get this eternal life, you may be inwardly asking.

It is by invitation only. That is, you have to invite the giver into your heart.

When we come before God and ask forgiveness for the things we have done wrong, and invite Jesus to enter our lives, to become a part of who we are, he comes willingly and gives freely of his love.

Now don’t get me wrong, God’s love is always there for everyone, but to really know that love we need to ask Jesus to give it to us. We can also ask to be filled with the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus. What a gift that may turn out to be for some of you tonight.

One final thing though. That advert has a pleading refrain – “please please please let me get what I want …”

As much as God longs to give you that gift, he won’t badger you or beg or plead. Look at this picture – its called “The Light of the World” by Holman Hunt.

 It depicts Jesus standing by a door, waiting to enter. The painter explained that this represents our hearts, our lives that Jesus longs to be part of. His critics said “but there is no handle on the door, how will he get in?” Hunt replied, “ the handle is on the inside.”

The handle is on the inside – Jesus can only enter our hearts if we open the door and let him in.

I started by asking you what you want for Christmas. I know what God wants – a relationship with you. And if that’s what you want too, your wish can come true tonight.

At the end of the service our trained prayer ministry team will be glad to help you ask for and receive the gift that God longs to give you, but for now, let us pray …

I-dolatry?  A sermon involving Steve Jobs

This sermon was preached at St Mary's Stebbing on 9th October 2011
The readings were Exodus 32, 1-14 and Matthew 22 1-14.

Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Computers, who died this week, said in 2005 “You’ve got to find what you love”. He meant in terms of career choice, but I’m stealing his wisdom for us today as we look at what our priorities should be as Christians. This is not a re run of our “your church needs you” thing from last month, though if you hesitated then you might not today!

You’ve got to find what you love. You’ve got to find things in life that will nourish strengthen stimulate and grow you to be the person God made you to be. You need to work it out. That sounds as if I’ve gone all heretical and forgotten about grace, but our working out of course will involve God, or at least it should.

When we read the narrative of the golden calf, once again we are going to be likely to identify ourselves with Moses, who remained faithful and who intervened on behalf of Israel so that the Lord relented. Yet I am convinced that every church today and down the ages has its Golden Calf. We have a golden calf and we need to allow God to break it down and burn it up as Moses did with the original.

What is our Golden Calf? It could be many things, but I think watching this video might help us see what we need to do to root it out - by the way, ignore the captions, they are a bit distracting.

So what’s more important to us – rules, or love? For 5 years I’ve been working towards a situation here where our church is seen as inclusive and welcoming of all people of all ages and all social groups, and I know I am not alone in rejoicing at the fact that there has been a sea change. You only have to look at our Alpha course to see that the village community does not see itself as so separate from the church community any more. At last more and more people are beginning to trust us, beginning to realize we are not that weird and that we are committed to the transformation of this community.  But there are still more steps on this journey.

The thing is when the Israelites made the golden calf they did it with the co-operation and direction of their acting leader Aaron. He was trying to keep the community focused on God – after the calf and its altar are made he says “Tomorrow there will be a festival to the Lord” – in his mind this is still Yahweh worship, not idolatry. That’s a hugely important lesson for leaders – or potential leaders, in the importance of authority and of faithfulness to the truth, to God, to his Spirit and his Word. If we lose that, we don’t just lose direction for ourselves, but for the people we lead.

Now, I’m not going to compare myself to Moses and I could point you to some Aaronesque leadership mistakes I have made in the distant and recent past, but preachers I feel work best when they include themselves in the teaching – we, rather than you …

The consequences of the idolatry of the Golden Calf was a reduction in numbers of the people of Israel by about 3000, after Moses commanded the Levites to effectively cull the people. Our golden calves, our over adherence to the way we do things, to the expectations we have of what church is for, even our reliance on technology, all have the potential to destroy this fellowship if we let them get in the way of the task that God is calling us to – to reach out to the people of this community with the good news of the love of God. We are not a stiff necked, stubborn people, are we?

Now Alpha is the most significant way in which that has been done during my time here, but I am convinced there is more to do. Alpha is not for everyone – in fact church was we do it today is not for everyone.

We are unlikely in the short term to be setting up a skate park or a rock venue, but at least we are trying to express church differently – in Feast and Soul Space, in YouthConnect and Scamps. If you don’t get what is going on in those contexts don’t panic cos to be honest it probably means they are not designed for you. There is an argument that says fresh expressions of church can be spoiled if too many established Christians go to them1 Perhaps we should be encouraging people to come with us if we do go – as happened on Sunday at Feast.

Worship can sometimes be a golden calf – as in the kind of church we like to go to. That tends to function more on an individual basis, but it is true that we can make an idol out of worship itself – as addressed in the song “the heart of worship” by Matt Redman. As I will never tire of saying, worship is not primarily supposed to entertain us, it is supposed to bless God, and  in so doing we are also uplifted and nourished then that’s great, but the primary focus of our worship must be God, and not the quality of our playing or singing, the snazziness of the visuals or the sound system or the lights.

Worship is not a consumer product to be bought and sold on iTunes, it comes from our hearts and goes to the heart of God. It may come as a surprise to you but God does not have a favourite form of worship. He just longs for us to share in the celebration of his Kingdom.

And to bring our two readings together, the presence of a golden calf, an idol, disrupting the spiritual life of a person or a church, is likely to be a reason why that person, that church, end up being cast in the role of the invited guests, who miss out on the wedding banquet because their priorities are wrong and they put themselves first, not God, not the Kingdom.

And those who are on the edge of church – who get married here, who come to a funeral here, who bring their children for baptism, who are on Alpha, or who come to Soul Space, to Scamps or even some of the families who come to Feast, in my mind these are the ones – both good and bad please note – that the servants of the king go out and invite to the banquet.

The sad thing is in the long view, many of us started off there, as seekers, as people who were invited to church, to socials to Christmas services and so on. We came to faith through the witness of the Christian community, but somehow we have become infected by what has been called churchianity, where the church – what we stand for, how we think people should behave, how we want things to stay, all that has become the rules that we live by, replacing or strangling the relationship we should be living by – a relationship with God in Christ, a saving relationship.

Now to my mind the way to shake the burden of that idol off our shoulders is to look outside the church – no one could fail to be moved by the stuff Becky shared with us about Uganda, or the stuff we hear from Ukraine, Romania and India – but just as we are blessed to hear the testimony of those who come to faith, let us resolve to keep our faith as fresh and new as those people we hear about.

By engaging with those who do not yet know Jesus, we gain an understanding – or in my case a reminder, of what it is like to live like that. Moses had to plead with God for the Israelites, and I’ve spent a fait bit of time recently pleading with God for the people of this Christian community and those whom he has chosen who are currently beyond it.

God is at work out there, and as we have been saying a fair amount recently, we need to look for what the Spirit is doing, and join in. If that means we have to take risks then that’s fine, in fact I’d say its more likely that we will coincide with the work of the kingdom if we are taking risks, and if it means we fail then that’s also OK as long as we get back up and keep going – let’s not forget Apple sacked Steve Jobs in 1980.

In the same speech in which Jobs said you have to find what you love – which reminds me by the way, we should do that because that’s what God did, that is the message of the parable of the lost sheep -  in that same speech to Stanford University graduating class in 2005, Jobs gave 2 other pieces of advice which are relevant to our situation. He said, “Stay hungry, and stay foolish”.

If we let our spiritual hunger, our desire to know God more intimately, to get deeper into his word and to walk in step with his Spirit, if we let that subside, we risk the creation of a golden calf, the idol of static faith that thinks it has got there, thinks it has arrived and got everything sorted. That’s when relationship with Jesus turns into relationship with rules.

And if we never want to appear foolish, if we are always going to play safe and keep ourselves to ourselves, we won’t be able to take the risks necessary to reach out from our comfort zone into the world we don’t know any more.

You’ve got to find what you love

Stay hungry

Stay foolish

For many are invited, but few are chosen.

Jesus loves Osama - now that's got your attention!

Now that Lent is over I am back to using a script (just so that I can meet the challenge to deviate from it when prompted) I can post here the sermon from this morning. It will soon also be available in audio format at the St Mary's Stebbing website.

The readings were Acts 2, 36-41 and  Luke 24 13-35

Luke 24 verse 14 & 15


“They were talking with each other about everything that had happened.”

Well this week there has certainly been a lot of stuff for us to talk about in the news, nationally and internationally. From the Royal Wedding to the death of Bin Laden to the elections on Thursday, opinions continue to be divided in homes, shops, pubs, newspapers and across the world via the internet.

“As they talked and discussed these things with each other, Jesus himself came up and walked along with them.”



I wonder, would our discussions of world and local events differ, if we remembered more frequently that Jesus is walking with us, and wanting to inform how we think and act in response to what we hear.

That’s exactly what he was doing on the road to Emmaus, bringing clarity and understanding, restoring hope and faith and ultimately revealing himself in the breaking of bread.

At Easter I usually teach on counter arguments to objections to the resurrection, and this year was no exception. It was therefore a slightly strange experience this week to be reading of a death, and the non-appearance of a body, leading to claims that the person wasn’t really dead.

Christian voices around the world are saying quite a variety of things about the death of Osama Bin Laden. Almost as soon as it was announced, the internet news media were flooded with various versions of a quotation from a 1963 work by Martin Luther King, who said,

• "Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness:

only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that."

He of course was speaking of how the life and ministry of Jesus inspired his own life and ministry, yet those words cut to the heart the uber-patriotism of the chanting crowds at Ground Zero.

And since then both Bishop Tom Wright and Archbishop Rowan Williams have expressed disquiet about the raid on Abbottabad. I am sure they both did that prayerfully and after serious reflection. In other words, they allowed their relationship with Jesus to shape their thoughts. The Emmaus road experience, of having Christ at our side to make sense of things, can be a useful one these days, and not just for Archbishops!

So how do we tune in? How do we access that experience that Cleopas and his companion were blessed with?

Well there are three things we can say about Emmaus.

The first is, “they were talking” – the sharing of thoughts, emotions, worries hopes and disappointments in fellowship with our brothers and sisters, is a way we can learn how God works, how we are the body of Christ. It’s a big reason why Christianity is not am individual but a corporate faith. So an Emmaus principle is “talk to someone about it, and listen to others”

Related to that is “we had hoped” – the two were unafraid (because they didn’t know it was him) to tell Jesus all the things they had hoped for – even as they thought they had lost them. I’ve said it before, and I’m sure I’ll say it again, that we are the walking wounded, not a triumphant conquering force. The way of the cross is a way of suffering, not of human power and authority. So let us be unafraid to express our struggles, our doubts, our difficulties, for in so doing we may grow in faith and confidence – even if only because we realize “it’s not just me then”.

The second is “in all the Scriptures”. If we want to know how Jesus’ mindset was formed, we need only read the Old Testament. We need Jesus to guide us thought it too, we need New Testament coloured glasses to read the stories of genocide and invasion, otherwise we are liable to fall into the trap of those Ground Zero chanters again.

Jesus explained to Cleopas and his companion how God’s plan was laid out in the Hebrew Scriptures; they shared a knowledge of those scriptures but Jesus gave them new meaning. How often do we share things we have learnt or read in our Bible study with our friends or family? One of the legs upon which our fellowship stands is the Bible. Let us then be accountable to each other in reading it and sharing that experience.

Another of those legs is our tradition. “Then their eyes were opened”. This is the third resource that Emmaus gives us.

The Emmaus story is one of the reasons that I am such a sacramental person. Cleopas and his friend and family had their eyes opened to Jesus when he broke the bread. Now, we don’t see Jesus like that in communion, but I see here a strong encouragement from Christ to his church to break bread together, that we may continue to grow in faith, to tap again into the Emmaus road experience – a knowledge of Christ’s presence with us along the way.



And that final thought brings us to the Acts reading, about which I could go on at great length, but that’ll have to wait for another day. Suffice it to say that here also faith is expressed in what we now refer to as the sacrament of baptism – repent and be baptised. A key verse, which will bring us back to where we started, is verse 39 “the promise is for you and your children and all who are far off”.

I have 2 things to say about this as I conclude.

First, the promise is for you and your children. I don’t think that means “your children when they grow up” it means the children standing next to you now. That’s why I remain an advocate of the baptism of infants, and of the admission of believing children to communion, as well being committed to an all-age church.



Second, “all who are far off”. This is ambiguous to a degree – I’m sure there are missionaries who read this and were called “far off”, but it most powerfully speaks to me of the people who are far off from the gospel, from a knowledge of the love and saving power of God. It is easy to forget, to quote a church poster displayed across Australia in 2006, that Jesus Love Osama.



So let us allow the Emmaus experience to build our faith and our fellowship, that all who are far off may hear and respond to the message we declare.

Good Friday 2011 The Way of the Cross

One of the blessings of the late Easter this year is that our annual Good Friday pilgrimage across the benefice was never going to be troubled by the horizontal snow and high winds, rain and hail that we had enjoyed on the same walk in previous (earlier) Holy Weeks.

This year the weather was hot; very hot. It was always a relief to reach the next church and enter, to feel the cool air suround us. We used the Common Worship Way of the Cross, with a dramatised passion narrative ably performed by members of all 4 churches. There is already talk of upping the ante a little next year with the addition of costumes and the possibility of setting Peter's denial in the White Hart in Stebbing High Street.

People of all ages from 5 to 75 (at least) took part, and although not every pilgrim walked the whole way, everyone was glad of the hot cross buns and drinks at the end of the journy in St Mary's, Lindsell

Nothing compares ...

Once again the old steam driven tower pc I persist in using won't let me cut and paste into a Facebook note so I am replying to one I was tagged in here.
It is the "Favourite Music for Worship" meme, following hot on the heels of a previous one about your least favourite chorus, which I declined to do (as it would have taken all day to decide which one of many cringeworthy things I have sung over the years would get that title).

So here are the questions
1.What is your favourite piece of music for congregational singing? Why?


2.What is your favourite piece of music for performance by a group of specialist musicians within a liturgical context? This might be a worship band or a cathedral choir or just a very snazzy organist or something else entirely, but the point is that it is not congregational singing and it is live music in liturgy.

3.What is your favourite piece of music which makes you think about God to listen to outside of your place of worship? Why? This could be secular music.

4.What is one thing you like about the music at your usual place of worship? Have you told the musicians about this lately?

And these are my answers. Reading this? You're tagged!
 
1. My favourite piece of music for congregational singing would have to be Keith & Melody Green's "There is a Redeemer". It was a close run thing between this and "Thine be the Glory", but I went for it in the end because it was sung at my ordination, and also because it was one o f the first songs I learnt following  my conversion in the mid 80's. The slight downside is that I usually end up thinking about Rory McGrath while singing it because he kind of looks like Keith Green...
 
2. I don't like the idea of performance in worship (justabout getting used to the concept of worship musicians having a "set list") but I am always very blessed by the worship team at St Mary's Church, Stebbing, when they play during the distribution at communion services. It doesn't really matter what they play!
 
3. The title of this post gives this one away. "Nothing Compares 2U by Prince (or more usually Sinead O'Connor). It's like a Psalm for me, a lament, though I know not all the lyrics really work. I'd love to do just the chorus in a Taize service one day.
 
4. See 2, and also, the organists in Lindsell and the Salings (who are both reading this via Facebook) never cease to bless me with their dedication and talent and desire to diversify.