Tempted to live independently of God

Here's the sermon I shared at St Mary’s Runwell this morning:

Jesus’ baptism was a mountain-top experience for him. Through his baptism Jesus was commissioned for God’s work; for ministry. Jesus said to John the Baptist, who questioned the need for Jesus’ baptism, “Do it. God’s work, putting things right all these centuries, is coming together right now in this baptism” (The Message).

Jesus was equipped by the Spirit to carry out this work and affirmed in the rightness of this work when the Father said, “This is my Son, chosen and marked by my love, delight of my life.” Jesus then knew he was in a partnership with God working to put the world to rights.

Immediately after the high of his baptism, he has the low of forty days in the wilderness being tempted (Luke 4: 1-13). This is a common pattern in scripture and one that mirrors the story of the Exodus. Moses and the Israelites have a mountain-top experience at Sinai where they are commissioned by God to be a nation of priests then they have a wilderness experience for forty years.

We too can expect to experience times of great closeness to God – spiritual highs – followed by times of temptation, struggle and wandering. Both are part of living authentically as Christians and the season of Lent is almost an attempt to institutionalise that pattern; to set a period each year in which each of us deliberately set out to use experiences of self-denial or sacrifice in order to refocus or faith and commitment.

Talking about Jesus, the writer to the Hebrews says in Chapter 14 verse 5, “we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are.” Jesus is in touch with our reality when it comes to temptation because, when Jesus was tempted, the temptations with which he was confronted were the same temptations to which we, in our culture, regularly succumb.

Jesus was tempted to provide for his own material needs himself by turning stones into bread. He was tempted to gain prestige and celebrity for himself by throwing himself from the highest point of the Temple and surviving; in other words, to boost his own ego. Finally, he was tempted to gain all the power and wealth of the world for himself; tempted to pursue his own ambitions.

In all these ways he was tempted to live independently of God, to refuse to view life as God’s gift to him and to refuse to live out God’s purpose for his life. Jesus knew that he had been commissioned at his baptism to put this world to rights but was then tempted to see his work as something for himself and not for God. He rejected these temptations; continuing to thank God for the gift of life itself and living his life to fulfil God’s purposes.

We are continually tempted in the same and similar ways. The temptations to provide for ourselves, boost our own egos, and pursue our own ambitions are likely to be or to have been familiar ones for us; particularly in our workplaces. And, as Tom Wright has pointed out, these temptations “are not simply trying to entice us into committing this or that sin ... they are trying to distract us, to turn us aside, from the path of servant hood to which our baptism has commissioned us. God has a costly but wonderfully glorious vocation for each one of us. The enemy will do everything possible to distract us and thwart God’s purpose.”

As those who follow Jesus, ultimately we are called to the same job of work. Whatever our specific work role or ministry, we are called to work together with God in the shared task of putting the world to rights. This is what Paul means when, in Romans 8.21, he says that the world is crying out for the children of God to be revealed.

To do this we need the same resource as Jesus; the equipping and leading of the Spirit. Led by the Spirit, our work can involve creativity, care and collaboration; biblical signs that work is undertaken in partnership with God. The five marks of mission also indicate what we are to do: tell the good news of the Kingdom; teach new believers; tend human needs by loving service; transform the unjust structures of society; and treasure the integrity of creation.

“As God’s children,” Tom Wright says, “we are entitled to use the same defence” as Jesus himself. “Store scripture in your heart,” he writes, “and know how to use it.” When we do, we are able to see through the temptation to think of all that we have as our own and, instead, to view our lives and all that we have as a gift from God.

The Bible tells us that we are stewards and stewards have the job of looking after something that belongs to someone else. As Christians, we are stewards of all that God has given to us – our life, our talents, our time, our money, our possessions, our family, our community, and the world in which we live. God has rescued each of us from sin and gifted us with time, talents, treasure, people and the world in which we live. After Easter, we will be reflecting more together across our three churches on these themes of stewardship.

For now, let us view life as a gift, let us give back to God generously and joyfully, let us remember our calling to partner God in putting this world to rights and, in and through these things, “say a firm ‘no’ to the voices that would lure us back into darkness.” May it be for each one of us. Amen.

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Mark Heard - Treasure Of The Broken Land.

The whole purpose of a political leader is to make successful alliances

Last Sunday The Observer published an interview with Neil MacGregor in which he made what seem to me to be some of the most pertinent observations that I have heard to date on the issues surrounding the EU referendum and the possibility of Brexit. In the interview he talks about acts of memory as a defining difference within Europe:

'In Germany, he says, “the thing I continue to find striking is that in the centre of Berlin you keep coming across monuments to national shame. I think that is unique in the world.”

Did they really have an option but to confront what had happened though?

“Well,” he says. “Austria hasn’t done it. Post-Soviet Russia hasn’t done it. Japan hasn’t done it.”

And, he would suggest, Britain and France have never really done it. “If you compare the way we remember, the perfect example was the opening ceremony of the Olympics, that selective national memory: all true but not looking at any of the difficult bits.”

Two things, he says, in the past couple of months have highlighted that complacency. The Cecil Rhodes statue debate “shows that we still cannot look at the past dispassionately, even a hundred years on”. Likewise, the centenary of the Easter Rising. “There is still no appetite to look hard at British behaviour in Ireland. What I find so painfully admirable about the German experience is that they are determined to find the historical truth and acknowledge it however painful it is. You can’t be an informed adult – or an artist – in Germany without doing that.”

The great thing a museum can do is allow us to look at the world as if through other eyes

That reflexive act of memory also colours the great political schisms of our times. Much has changed in Europe in the 18 months since the British Museum’s Germany show and the first publication of his book. It contains many chapters of forensic storytelling, but the one that stands out reading it now is MacGregor’s analysis of a simple refugee cart. That cart was representative of one of the most forgotten events of the last century: the forced “repatriation” of German speakers from eastern Europe after the war. About 30 million people were “ethnically cleansed” and 12-14 million returned to a devastated homeland they didn’t know, and became absorbed into a society that was rebuilt and reordered within a decade.

“If you try to explain why Germany has taken its unique stance on Syrian refugees in Europe you can’t ignore this,” MacGregor says. “Some argue the policy is another way of atoning for the Nazi era. But another absolutely central motivation, rarely mentioned, is that almost everybody now in Germany in their 20s or 30s has a grandparent or great-grandparent who has been a refugee. Pretty well every German has direct family experience of knowing what it means to be welcomed.”

The other debate that has become more charged since the book first appeared is the notion of sovereignty. MacGregor believes that the British and Germans mean completely different things when they use that word. Partly because of its own traumatic experience of nationalism and partly because of the history of shifting borders and alliances during the Holy Roman Empire, in Germany, he says, sovereignty always means an appetite for coalition and compromise. “Any German knows that as well as the Bundestag there are 16 other parliaments making laws within its borders. In Britain we don’t have the language for that.”

The European debate in Britain looks so strange if you are a German for precisely this reason, he suggests. “German people see the whole purpose of a political leader is to make successful alliances. The proper use of sovereignty is all about pooling it to achieve your aims. The British idea that you should entirely do these things on your own and try to assume total control over your environment is unthinkable.”'

This, it seems to me, explains, in part, the shortcomings of the argument currently being made by anti-EU campaigners that Barack Obama is guilty of double standards when he encourages the UK to remain part of the EU. What those campaigners fail to acknowledge is that the USA is, as it says on the tin, a Union of States. Obama recognises the importance of cooperation rather than isolation and interdependence rather than independence because that is built in to the existence of America, part of its raison d'être. By contrast, the anti-EU campaigners believe, as McGregor notes, that we should entirely do these things on our own and try to assume total control over our environment. In my view it is this refusal to recognise the value of cooperation and interdependence that causes the shallowness in the arguments made in favour of Brexit.

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Woody Guthrie - This Land Is Your Land.

Shaped and defined by Jesus

One of the big dilemma’s parent’s face is how to enable their children to become independent and make their own way in the world. At the point that their children ’leave the nest,’ parents have understandable worries about the extent to which their children will cope in the ‘real world’ and what the world will do to their children. While we know that life in the ‘real world’ involves confronting challenges and, at times, dangers, we know too that children cannot be kept ‘wrapped in cotton wool’; they have to be enabled to mature into adults and developing independence from those who have nurtured them as children is an important element in maturing.

In Acts 20.28–end and John 17.11–19, we hear Jesus and Paul expressing similar anxieties in relation to the disciples and churches that they are leaving behind. Jesus prays for God the Father to protect the disciples in a world which may hate them and to which they do not fully belong. Similarly, Paul commends his churches to God expecting that, at times, they will be attacked by savage wolves.

Their sense is that the world can be a conflicted place for Christians and we might therefore expect them to pray that we should be kept entirely away from danger. Instead, just as parents can ultimately do more harm to their children by keeping them cooped up at home, so the place Jesus and Paul want Christians to be is in the world, despite its dangers, but for us to be shaped by God there, and not by the world. That seems to be what Jesus means when he says that his disciples do not belong to the world, just as he does not belong to the world.

Eugene Petersen, in his paraphrase of this passage, puts it like this: “I gave them your word; the godless world hated them because of it, because they didn’t join the world’s ways, just as I didn’t join the world’s ways. I’m not asking that you take them out of the world but that you guard them from the Evil One. They are no more defined by the world than I am defined by the world. Make them holy—consecrated—with the truth; your word is consecrating truth.”

In these passages, both Jesus and Paul spoke of Christians as sanctified. To be sanctified, as Eugene Peterson, makes clear is to be shaped and defined by God (his word and the message of his grace), rather than shaped and defined by the world. If Christianity means anything and makes any difference in the world then it must be because we live and act differently as a result of its influence.

In the Diocese of Chelmsford, where I ministered before coming to St Martin-in-the-Fields, the Diocesan strategy is called ‘Transforming Presence’ and is based on that same thought that “there should be something distinctive and attractive about the way we live our lives,” as, “if our lives are indistinguishable from anyone else’s it is little wonder that people conclude that the Christian faith is our hobby; a fascinating and exhausting pastime, but not the life changing transformation that is evident in the lives we lead Monday to Saturday.”

That is the prayer of Jesus and Paul, in these passages, that we grow as Christians by living in the ‘real world’ but shaped and defined (consecrated) by the Spirit and words of Jesus as we do so. As a result, instead of our lives being shaped and defined by the world, we become a transforming presence for Christ within the world.

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Delirious? - Paint The Town Red.