Signs that the Kingdom is coming

Here's the sermon that I shared tonight during the Healing Eucharist at St Andrew’s Wickford:

When Jesus walked the earth, he looked ahead to that future time when the Kingdom of God will be made perfect, and all suffering will come to an end. But he also announced that, because of him, there is a sense in which that Kingdom has already begun. When he healed sick people and brought good news to the poor it was a sign that the Kingdom had come. In the same way, when he overcame death by rising from the dead he became the first fruits of the Kingdom, an example of what we will all become in future.

Jesus wants us to be signs of God’s Kingdom in the same way that he was (Mark 16:14-20). He commanded us, his followers, to love in the way that he did. He wanted people to see us practically demonstrating love, so that we will clearly be recognised as men and women who belong to God.

As Christians, we are called to follow in Jesus’ footsteps by living under the rule and reign of God. We do this imperfectly, so can, at best, create temporary signs of what the kingdom of God looks like in practice but when we feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, welcome strangers, clothe the naked, take care of those who are sick, and visit prisoners, we come as close as we possibly can.

When we put into practice the values of the Kingdom of God here and now, we become signs of what the Kingdom will be like when it is made perfect in eternity. That is what it means to pray, ‘Your Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.’

By the resurrection, Jesus has gone ahead of us in signing and establishing the Kingdom of God and calls us to follow where he leads. In this way, as the theologian Jurgen Moltmann says, the “resurrection of Christ does not mean a new possibility within the world and its history, but a new possibility altogether for the world, for existence, and for history.”

As Christ’s followers today, we inherit the task of putting into practice what Jesus has achieved through his life, death and resurrection. We are the people today who are called to work towards the Isaianic vision of nations streaming to learn what Israel’s God wants them to do, settling disputes among the great nations, hammering swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks, and never again preparing to go to war.

The Holy Spirit – Jesus’ Spirit - is key in this because the Spirit is given to us as the first fruits of the kingdom of God. The kingdom is still to come but we have the Spirit as the guarantee that the kingdom will come. The Spirit comes from the future to anticipate the kingdom in the present by creating signs of what the kingdom will be like when it comes in full. So, the Spirit initiates the mission of God which is to bring humanity and creation to the completed perfection for which we were originally intended; the time when the whole world will freely return to God, worship him and become like him by living in him. As Colin Gunton wrote, “the Spirit is the agent by whom God enables things to become that which they were created to be.”

Our role is to become involved in this work of the Spirit to heal the broken creation, bring it to maturity and reconcile it in Christ. We get involved by creating signs of the coming kingdom here and now in the present.

So, Christ calls us to create signs of the kingdom of God in each generation. Such signs cannot simply repeat what has gone before. They need to be creative re-imaginings of the kingdom for the present time. So, we need to ask, where are the artists, the dreamers, the ideas people and creatives in this congregation and community? Where are energy, inspiration and initiative to be found in the wider community, beyond the congregation, with which we can partner for the future? These are questions we are seeking to answer through our cultural programming and partnerships with creatives locally.

If the Holy Spirit has stirred that fire, passion and desire in you then we need to cry out for the Spirit to come to us. To daily pray, “Come, Holy Spirit.” Come to stir up this desire and longing and yearning and passion in me.

Let us pray: We pray for the dreamers of this life, O God, for those persons who imagine new possibilities, who long for what others cannot perceive, who spin dreams of wonder and majesty in their minds. Defend them from ridicule and harsh criticism, from self-doubt and lack of faith in their dreams, and from abandonment of this call to make things new. Grant that from their dreams may come forth blessings for humankind to enrich the quality of life and the wonderment of us all. Amen (Ashley Marinaccio)

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The Voices Of East Harlem - Giving Love.

Blessed - Address for Ho Wai-On's Memorial Service

Here's the address that I shared during Tuesday's Memorial Service for Ho Wai-On:

The teaching Jesus gives us in the Sermon on the Mount, of which the Beatitudes is part, is based on lessons drawn from his understanding of nature and creation. He looks at the cycle of existence – the circle of life - which enables all creatures to live and flourish in their way and time. We only need look at Wai-On’s music videos to see that she shared this understanding. We began our service observing the antics of a duck as we listened to ‘The Waves’ performed by her good friend Albert Tang. ‘Three Times No Less’ featured images of beautiful lotuses from Canton. Although longer pieces, we could also have included ‘Swan Beauty’ or ‘Fly Wild’, the latter incorporating images from Martin Singleton.

Jesus uses birds as a specific example in the Sermon on the Mount, possibly because they would have been prolific and yet are not reliant on human beings for their survival. The birds don’t do any of the things that human beings do to provide food for themselves – they “do not sow seeds, gather a harvest and put it in barns” – yet, in the circle of life there is a sufficiency of the food that they need in order to survive. In this way, Jesus says, we see that God the Father is taking care of them.

For Jesus, God’s provision for the birds is a sign of the worth that he sees in his creation as a whole and in each specific part. Just as the creation as a whole is “good,” so are the birds which are found within it. If that is true of birds, then is it not also true of human beings? “Aren’t you worth much more than birds?” Jesus asks. Wai-On showed that same sense of value to a woman she sought to comfort as described in a piece we will listen to later entitled ‘You Are Not Alone’.

In one of the Eucharistic Prayers that is said when the elements of Communion are consecrated, we read that in the fullness of time God made us in his image, the crown of all creation. That gives us incredible worth and value, in and of ourselves and regardless of how we feel about ourselves. Our unique position in creation - being conscious creators – speaks clearly to us of this incredible privilege of having been made in the image of God. To what extent do we appreciate this reality? Often, we can be so caught up in the busyness of daily life that we do not stop to reflect on the wonder of existence and our existence. Stop for a moment to think about the incredible complexity of our physical bodies and of our conscious existence. Wai-On clearly stopped in this way in order to create her compositions and the videos that accompany them.

Stop for a moment and think about the incredible achievements of the human race – the great art we have created, amazing technological developments and inventions, the cities we have built, the scientific and medical advancements we have seen, the depths of compassion and sacrifice which have been plumbed by the great saints in our history. Stop for a moment to think about the amazing music and wonderful videos that Wai-On created. While we are also well aware of the darker forces at work in human beings, our positive abilities and achievements reveal the reality of our creation as beings that resemble God in his creative power and energy. We can and should celebrate this reality – realising the worth that God sees in us – at the same time as giving thanks to our God for creating us in this way.

Isn’t life worth more than food and isn’t the body worth more than clothes, Jesus asks us. Often we can be so caught up in the busyness of daily life that we do not realise the wonder of our existence and do not realise all that we could achieve if we were to use our abilities and creativity more fully in his service. “We were meant to live for so much more” is how the rock band Switchfoot put it. Jesus challenges us to be concerned with more than the worries of daily life, to be “concerned above everything else with the Kingdom of God and with what he [God] requires of you.” Stop for a moment and think of the unique way in which you have been created by God – the unique combination of personality and talents with which you have been blessed – and ask yourself how these things could more fully be used for the building up of the Kingdom of God on earth, as in heaven, just as Wai-On made full use of the talents with which she had been blessed.

Stop for a moment and think about the Kingdom of God as described in the Beatitudes with which Jesus began the Sermon on the Mount. The Kingdom of God is a place of happiness for those who know they are spiritually poor, a place of comfort for those who mourn, a place of receptivity for those who are humble, a place of satisfaction for those whose greatest desire is to do what God requires, a place of mercy for those who are merciful, a place in which God is seen by the pure in heart, a place in which those who work for peace are called God’s children, and a place which belongs to those who are persecuted because they do what God requires. What might God be calling us to do for him to bring the Kingdom of God to others? Wai-On chose to bring that Kingdom to others through music and imagery.

Jesus argues that the goodness and worth of all created things can be seen in the way that creation provides all that is needed for creatures and plants to live and thrive. Our worth is greater still because we are made in the very image of God having power over creation and innate creative abilities ourselves. It is incumbent on us then to use the power we possess for the good of others and for the good of creation itself. Bringing happiness, satisfaction and belonging by giving comfort, practicing humility, sharing mercy and working for peace are all powerful ways of tending and guarding creation and building the Kingdom of God on earth, as in heaven. Stop for a moment to recognise the something more for which we are meant to live. Dedicate your life to be concerned above everything else with the Kingdom of God and with what God requires of you. Then you will know blessing, as Wai-On also did.

To view the Memorial Service see here. For more on Wai-On's exhibition 'From Hong Kong to Wickford' see here and here.

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Ho Wai-On - The Waves.

PARISH STUDY DAY - THE BIG STORY - THE BIBLE IN FIVE ACTS

Today, in this year's Parish Study Day at St Andrew's Wickford, we explored the amazing story told through the Bible from Creation to Jesus and the early Church and looked into the future and what it means for us.

Our ministry team each spoke on one of the five acts. I had Act 5, the Future, and this is what I shared:

Act 5 is the final act in the play and is based on the hints we receive in the Bible about the future and the end of time. These revolve around three key ideas: Jesus’ vindication; resurrection; and the coming in full of the kingdom of God.

Jesus’ vindication

In Mark 13: 1-8, we read of Jesus and his disciples going to the Temple in Jerusalem. As they were leaving, one of the disciples remarked on what a magnificent building the Temple was. Jesus’ response was to predict that it would shortly be completely and utterly destroyed. The Temple, at that time, was central to the whole Jewish faith. What Jesus was saying was that the whole way in which Judaism was practised at that time was going to be destroyed. A whole way of life wiped out. It was a shocking claim about a major crisis.

Mark records this for us because what Jesus predicted actually happened. In AD70 Titus, the adopted son of the Roman emperor Vespasian, “entered Jerusalem, burnt the Temple, destroyed the city and crucified thousands of Jews” (Wright). For Mark the fulfilment of Jesus’ prophecy, although a disaster for all those caught up in it, was the final vindication of all that Jesus had said and been and done. In that day, he says in verse 26 of this same chapter, men will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. In other words, people will realise that Jesus was who he claimed to be, the Messiah. The destruction of the Temple was proof that Jesus had spoken and acted truly; that he was a true prophet.

Christians over the centuries have often interpreted what Jesus said about the Temple and his vindication as a true prophet in terms of his second coming but New Testament scholar Tom Wright has comprehensively and, in my view, conclusively demonstrated that these passages are best understood in relation to the destruction of the Temple in AD70. Because Jesus is vindicated through these prophecies as being a true prophet, we then know that what he does say about the future can be trusted implicitly.

Resurrection

In John’s Gospel, we explicitly hear Jesus speaking about himself as the resurrection - “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live” (John 11:25). In John 6:40, Jesus says, “For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day” and, in John 14:19, Jesus says to his disciples, “Yet a little while and the world will see me no more, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live.”

He is able to make these promises because he knows that God will raise him from death on Easter Day. That truth is what his followers come to understand after his resurrection. St Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15:20, “Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.” What happened to Christ will also happen to use. He is the firstborn from the dead and we are those who will follow him by also rising from death. In Romans 6:5, Paul writes, “For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” and, in Romans 8:11, “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.” Back in 1 Corinthians, we read in 15:21-22, “For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.” In 1 Thessalonians 4:14, we are told that, “For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep.”

Jesus’s death and resurrection provide the template for our future eternal life, along with the assurance that we will be raised as he was raised. Jesus’ resurrected body differs in some ways from his body prior to death, in that he is not always recognised by those who knew him and he is able to appear and disappear at will. However, there is much continuity too between his resurrected body and his pre-resurrected body. This leads St Paul to state in 1 Corinthians 15.40-44, that:

“There are both heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is one thing, and that of the earthly is another. There is one glory of the sun and another glory of the moon and another glory of the stars; indeed, star differs from star in glory.

So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body.”
He concludes that we will “bear the image of the one of heaven”, meaning the image of Jesus.
So, the promise that Jesus gives us is of a resurrected future together with him in eternity. But what will that look like?

The kingdom of God

The kingdom of God was the main topic of Jesus’ teaching during his time on earth. Most of his Parables begin, the kingdom of God is like … buried treasure, a pearl of great price, a lost coin, sheep or Son that are found, and so on. Bringing the news that the kingdom of God was coming was the reason for his travels and preaching across Israel during the three years of his ministry. In doing so, he took on the task that God had originally given to the people of Israel, that of being a light to the nations, which is why he proclaimed himself to be the light of the world.

Through Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, the kingdom of God is established in our world for the first time as, for the first time, a human being lives out God’s intent for humanity in full. In Jesus, we see the rule and reign of God in practice, because Jesus is the fullest expression of God that can be revealed in a human being.

As Christians, we are called to follow in Jesus’ footsteps by living under the rule and reign of God. We do this imperfectly, so can, at best, create temporary signs of what the kingdom of God looks like in practice but when we feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, welcome strangers, clothe the naked, take care of those who are sick, and visit prisoners, we come as close as we possibly can.

However, at an unknown time in the future, God’s kingdom will come in full – as we pray in the Lord’s Prayer – “Your kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven”. St Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15.20-28:

“But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died. For since death came through a human, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human, for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ. But each in its own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. For “God has put all things in subjection under his feet.” But when it says, “All things are put in subjection,” it is plain that this does not include the one who put all things in subjection under him. When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who put all things in subjection under him, so that God may be all in all.”

The prophets, including Isaiah and John, the writer of Revelation, give us glimpses of what this peaceable kingdom will look like.

Isaiah speaks, in 9.2,6&7, of a people who walked in darkness seeing a great light:

“For a child has been born for us,
a son given to us;
authority rests upon his shoulders,
and he is named
Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Great will be his authority,
and there shall be endless peace
for the throne of David and his kingdom.
He will establish and uphold it
with justice and with righteousness
from this time onward and forevermore.”

Then, in 11.6-9, he gives a vision of the peaceable kingdom of God, in which as he prophesies in 2.4 this child “shall judge between the nations and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war any more”:

“The wolf shall live with the lamb;
the leopard shall lie down with the kid;
the calf and the lion will feed together,
and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze;
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.
They will not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain,
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea.”

Building on visions like these, John, in Revelation 21, sees earth and heaven united when the kingdom of God comes in full on earth:

Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!” Then he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.”

This is the culmination of the story that is told in and through the Bible. It is the vision towards which everything points. It is a vision of heaven come on earth, of eternal peace in the presence of God, where evil is eradicated and God’s rule encompassing all things, and where we are resurrected to be with God, with each other and with creation for ever.

Living God’s future now

Our calling in the present is to creating signs of this coming kingdom by living as fully as we can in anticipation of the coming kingdom. That is why we emphasise Being With as a key theme or idea for our Parish and our lives. In the coming kingdom, there will be nothing for us to fix, there will simply be being with God, with each other and with creation. Each of these will involve endless exploration because, in God, there is always more to discover.

Wonderings

I wonder what excites you about this vision of the future.
I wonder what questions it raises for you about the future.
I wonder how you think we can best live God’s future now.

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Leonard Cohen - Going Home. 

The kingdom of God belongs to such as these

Here's the sermon that I shared at St Catherine’s Wickford this evening:

Throughout Church history, Jesus’ followers have often wanted to build worship primarily around the experiences and preferences of adults and thereby exclude children from encountering Jesus. This tendency goes right back to Jesus’ first disciples who mirrored the perceptions of a society in which children had no status and therefore actively sought to prevent children from encountering Jesus.

Jesus, as he so often did, turned their perceptions upside down by stating that the kingdom of God belongs to children and that anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it (Mark 10:13-16).

Too many of those who come to church as adults are in danger of not receiving the kingdom of God because they are unable or unwilling to receive God and to worship God as a child can and does.

All age worship is one of the aspects of Church life and worship where this unwillingness to receive from God as a child becomes most apparent. There are many benefits to all age worship. As the name states, it provides an opportunity for all ages to worship together - a time when we can truly be a worshipping community. Children can enjoy being with adults in worship in ways that are not usually open to them. Adults have the opportunity to worship in a different way, one that is not so word-based, being more visual and interactive.

The church is intended to be a family and when have separate worship for different age groups, we forget that. An all-age service reminds everyone—from the smallest child to the most seasoned believer—that they belong here. Together. Children get to see the big picture of church and older generations can find purpose in showing up for the next generation. And everyone walks away feeling like they’re part of something bigger.

Discipleship happens when generations live out faith side by side. All-age services create space for those moments—where a child sees faith modelled by an adult who’s not their parent, and older generations see their investment bearing fruit. That is where the church gets strong.

The church should also be a glimpse of what’s coming. And in heaven, worship won’t be divided by age. When we worship together, we get a small preview of that future day. It’s not about musical styles. It’s not about personal preferences. It’s about bringing everyone together to focus on the One who brings us together. That kind of unity is powerful. And it’s well worth building.

In addition, to all these things all age worship teaches adults the fundamental truth that to genuinely and fully experience God and receive from God, they must become child-like. The resistance we have to this, like the resistance people have towards having their feet washed on Maundy Thursday, is based ultimately on the pride that we take in our own self-image.

As parents and grandparents, we quickly learn that if we cannot get down on the floor or the grass or the sand alongside our children or grandchildren, then our interaction and relationship with them will be severely constrained. We become better parents and grandparents when we share our children’s and grandchildren’s experiences and interests. It is just the same in church, we become better Christians as we worship in ways that involve and engage children.

All too often as adults, we think we have everything to give to children and nothing to learn from them. That’s how Jesus’ first disciples also thought. They were wrong then and we are often wrong now in just the same way. Jesus says to us, as he said to them, Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it. And he took the children in his arms, placed his hands on them and blessed them. May it be so with us too. Amen.

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Damien Rice - On Children.

Sharing our doubts with Jesus

Here's the sermon that I preached at St Mary’s Langdon Hills and St Andrew’s Wickford this morning:

One of the things that I love most about the Bible is its honesty. In particular, the way in which it is honest about the flaws and failings in all of the great heroes of faith. The great leaders of Israel from the Old Testament and the Apostles in the New Testament, none of them are portrayed as being super-human, instead we are told about their failures as well as their obedience.

Look at John the Baptist in Matthew 11: 2-11, for example. He’d had a great ministry. He’d gone from being a nobody to having the religious leaders of his day coming and asking whether he was the next Elijah. He had not only recognised Jesus as Israel’s Messiah but had baptised him as well. And as he had baptised Jesus, he had seen the heavens open and God’s Spirit coming down on Jesus and had heard God the Father saying to Jesus, “This is my own dear Son, with whom I am well pleased.”

He had had an incredible ministry which had included some incredible experiences of God. But at the end of his life, everything came to a crashing halt as he was imprisoned by Herod, until his life was cut short by Herodius asking for his head on a platter. How was he affected by his imprisonment and this sudden end to his ministry which had had such an impact?

Well, we get a clue from our gospel reading because John sent a message to Jesus to ask if Jesus was the one that they had been expecting or whether they should look out for someone else. In other words, as he sat in his prison cell, John the Baptist doubted what he had earlier been certain of. After he had baptised Jesus, John had seen the Spirit of God come down and stay on Jesus and therefore he had confidently told others that Jesus was the Son of God. Now though he wasn’t so sure and so he sent some of his disciples to Jesus with this question.

Now isn’t that similar to our experience as Christians? Don’t we often go through times when we experience a real sense of closeness to God when we feel absolutely certain of what we believe. Times when God feels so close to us that we could almost reach out and touch him. Times when we are so convinced of the truth of what we believe that we cannot understand how other people can be so dull that they can’t see it for themselves. But then there are other times when that kind of confidence and that awareness of God’s presence seem to be far away in the past and we wonder how we could ever have been so sure about what we believed. In these times we haven’t lost our faith, although we might wonder whether that is what is happening to us, but we don’t have that sense of assurance that we once had.

Does this mean that we have lost our faith or are not following God’s plan for our lives? Does it mean that we have failed or sinned or stopped trusting? The answer to all those questions is no. Think for a moment about the way in which Jesus replies to John’s question.

First, Jesus doesn’t criticise John. He doesn’t tell him to pull up his socks or to be more trusting or to have more faith or to repent for his sins. And then he tells the crowds that there has never been a man greater than John the Baptist. Jesus knows that doubt is part of the journey of faith. Even the greatest man who ever lived experienced periods of doubt. If John the Baptist did, then we should certainly expect to, too.

Jesus also welcomes the fact that John comes to him with his doubts and sends back a message of encouragement. John was isolated in his prison cell. He obviously had some contact with his disciples, but he was not free and his disciples would only have been able to see him at certain times. In his isolation, it would have been easy for him to retreat into himself with his doubts and allow them to grow and play on his mind without being answered. But that is not what John did, instead he shares his doubts with Jesus. In the same way, we need to share our doubts and difficulties with each other and with God himself. And when others share their doubts and difficulties with us, we need to be like Jesus and give encouragement.

In the message that Jesus sends to John, he asks him, firstly, to look again at himself, at Jesus. When we do this, when we honestly look at the Jesus who is revealed to us in the gospels, we see a man who is genuinely like God. We see a man who does and says the things that only God could do and say:

“the blind can see, the lame can walk, those who suffer from dreaded skin diseases are made clean, the deaf hear, the dead are brought back to life, and the Good News is preached to the poor.”

When we doubt our faith, as we all do at different times in our lives, one of the best things we can do is to remind ourselves of what Jesus is like. Could anyone do and say the things that Jesus did and said and not be God?

The message that Jesus sends to John also asks John to look at the signs of the kingdom that can be seen in Jesus’ ministry. Those things that Jesus said and did were the first signs that the rule and reign of God was coming about on earth. As John looked at these tangible signs of God’s kingdom, he could see the prophecies about God’s rule on earth coming true. Like John, we also need to look in our world for signs of God’s kingdom in changed lives and changed communities.

Sometimes as preachers we give the impression that the Christian life should be all highs and no lows. Sometimes preachers even deliberately preach that God’s plan is that we can all become champions, successful in all that we do. But that is to preach and read only a part of what the Bible says, not the whole.

God’s way for us often involves apparent failure and hardship. Look at John in this passage. Think of Paul reflecting on a ministry full of beatings, imprisonment and shipwrecks. Think ultimately of Jesus and the cross. When we experience hardship, failure and doubt in our faith and ministries we are often sharing in the suffering of Christ. A faith that survives the difficult times is longer lasting that a faith that only knows ease and comfort. It is in the testing times that our faith is stretched and grows.

Jesus understands our doubts, he encourages us to share our doubts with others and to support others in their doubts and difficulties. He points us to himself and to the signs of God’s kingdom in our lives and the lives of those around us as an encouragement to us to hold on in those difficult times and see our faith grow and develop as a result.

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Eminem ft. Justin Bieber - Even When I Doubt You.

Signs of the coming kingdom

Here's the sermon that I shared at St Catherine’s Wickford and St Gabeiel’s Pitsea this morning:

How many of the early signs of Christmas have you spotted? They begin in the shops with displays of Christmas gifts from early autumn while, at work, the Christmas meal or party is being booked. Into November, and the displays of Christmas decorations and foods begin appearing. Then the Christmas displays in shop windows go up and the Christmas lights are put up in Town Centres. Before long the first Christmas decorations go up in a home near you triggering the annual competition to see who can cover their house in the most lights or have the largest illuminated Snowman. Bets begin to be taken on whether we will have a white Christmas and you are given the name of a colleague to buy a Secret Santa present for. Before you know it there are children on your doorstep singing the one carol that they know and people start saying there only X number of days to go. These are some of the signs that Christmas is coming and we all recognise them, probably with dread!

In our gospel reading today (Luke 21. 5 – 9) Jesus told his disciples to watch out for the signs of their times. He wanted them to watch out for what God was doing in their world and it was of vital importance for them because it spelled disaster for Jerusalem as well as vindicating all that Jesus had said and done.

Jesus had told his disciples, the crowds following him and the religious leaders that the Temple in Jerusalem would be destroyed because the people of Israel had not fulfilled God’s plan for their lives. The kind of place that Jerusalem should have become had been set out in Isaiah 2; a place that all nations could come to to hear from God:

“Many nations will come streaming to it, and their people will say,
‘Let us go to up the hill of the Lord, to the Temple of Israel’s God.
He will teach us what he wants us to do;
we will walk in the paths he has chosen.
For the Lord’s teaching comes from Jerusalem;
from Zion he speaks to his people.”

Instead of that vision happening, the Temple had become a symbol of Jewish identity with all sorts of people excluded from worship at the Temple unless they conformed to the detailed requirements of the Mosaic Law. The Temple and the worship in it was actually preventing the free access to God’s word that God wanted to see for people of all nations. Therefore, Jesus prophesied that the Temple would be destroyed and told his disciples that they had to watch out and be ready for when this disaster would come about.

They had to be watchful and ready because Jesus did not tell them when this would happen, only that it was going to occur. They had to be watchful and ready because this act would vindicate Jesus; would be the final sign that in Jesus God had been acting to defeat evil and bring in his kingdom and rule. To those people who had not encountered the risen Christ, Jesus of Nazareth looked like just another failed would-be Messiah who had died a shameful death. The destruction of the Temple, however, would be the sign that Jesus had been right and that what he had said was true.

Tom Wright, a former Bishop of Durham has said that when they saw this sign, the vindication of Jesus, for themselves, they knew they were to get on with the task of implementing what Jesus had achieved. Jesus believed “that Israel functioned to the rest of the world as the hinge to the door” so “he envisaged his followers becoming … Isaianic heralds, lights to the world.”

As Christ’s followers today, we inherit that task of putting into practice what Jesus has achieved through his life, death and resurrection. We are the people today who are called to work towards that Isaianic vision of nations streaming to learn what Israel’s God wants them to do, settling disputes among the great nations, hammering swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks, and never again preparing to go to war.

How can we do that? Well, here is a story of a father and a rock band who have tried to do just that:

“Gordon Wilson held his daughter’s hand as they lay trapped beneath a mountain of rubble. It was 1987, and he and Marie had been attending a peaceful memorial service in Enniskillen, when a terrorist bomb went off. By the end of the day, Marie and nine other civilians were dead, and sixty-three had been hospitalized for injuries.

Amazingly, Gordon refused to retaliate … He knew that the terrorists who took his daughter’s life were anything but remorseful, and he maintained that they should be punished and imprisoned … [but] he refused to take revenge.

‘Those who have to account for this deed will have to face a judgement of God, which is way beyond [my] forgiveness,’ he said. ‘It would be wrong for me to give any impression that gunmen and bombers should be allowed to walk the streets freely. But … whether or not they are judged here on earth by a court of law … I do my very best in human terms to show forgiveness … The last word rests with God.”

On the evening of the Enniskillen bombing, in Denver, Colorado, the Irish band U2 and playing a gig on their world tour. Their lead singer Bono asks, “Where’s the glory in bombing a remembrance day parade of old age pensioners, their medals taken out and polished up for the day? Where’s the glory in that? To leave them dying, or crippled for life, or dead, under the rubble of the revolution that the majority of the people in my country don't want.” And he leads the crowd in a shout of “NO MORE!” before launching into the song Sunday Bloody Sunday. This is a song which ends:

“The real battle just begun
To claim the victory Jesus won
On a Sunday bloody Sunday …”

Eleven years later, in 1998, U2 are playing another concert. This time it is in Belfast and it is a concert to draw support for the national vote on the Good Friday/Northern Ireland Peace Agreement four days later. In the concert, Bono is able to bring on stage David Trimble and John Hume, leaders of the traditionally opposing Ulster Unionist Party and Social Democratic and Labour Party, respectively. The political leaders stand on each side of Bono as he raises their arms together in a show of unity. Four days later, the Peace Agreement is approved overwhelmingly by voters in both the North and South.

We all know that there are still many difficulties in living with the legacy of terrorism in Ireland and of making and keeping peace. But these are two stories of Christians in very different situations who have been looking out for God at work in their world, looking for the signs of peace, and seeking to claim the victory that Jesus won.

Although we have waited two thousand years for the coming of God’s kingdom in full, there have always been clear signs of that coming kingdom throughout the years in the lives of committed Christians like Gordon Wilson and U2. Our job is to join them in being watchful and alert to the signs of God at work in our world and in implementing what Jesus has achieved, claiming the victory that Jesus won on a Sunday Bloody Sunday. May it be so for each one of us. Amen.

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U2 - Sunday Bloody Sunday.

An upside-down kingdom

Here's the sermon that I shared at St Margaret’s Bowers Gifford this morning:

At my first training weekend as a curate the then Bishop of Barking, David Hawkins, performed a handstand to demonstrate the way in which Jesus, through his teaching in the beatitudes (Luke 6: 20-26), turns our understanding of life upside down. His action turned our expectations of Bishops and their behaviour upside-down at the same time as it perfectly illustrated his point.

G. K. Chesterton used a similar image in writing about St Francis of Assisi: “[Saint] Francis, at the time … when he disappeared into the prison or the dark cavern, underwent a reversal of a certain psychological kind … The man who went into the cave was not the man who came out again … He looked at the world as differently from other men as if he had come out of that dark hole walking on his hands … If a man saw the world hanging upside down, with all the trees and towers hanging head downwards as in a pool, one effect would be to emphasise the idea of dependence … It would make vivid the Scriptural text which says that God has hanged the world upon nothing.”

In what ways do these images and Jesus’ teaching in the beatitudes turn our understanding of life upside down? Jesus’ radical heartbeat can be sensed in every word of the Sermon on the Mount. The core of the sermon is a call for God’s people to be entirely different. Some of the greatest examples of the call to be different are found in the Beatitudes.

The Beatitudes give us a sense of the radical kingdom lifestyle that Jesus calls us to. It is as if Jesus has crept into the window display of life and changed the price tags. It is all upside down. In a world where ‘success’ and ‘self-sufficiency’ are applauded, and ‘the beautiful people’ are ambitious, accomplished and wealthy, Jesus teaches: “Blessed are you who are poor.” Our culture encourages us to discard guilt and the sorrow that accompanies pangs of conscience. Happiness is everything, entertainment is king but Jesus teaches: “Blessed are you who weep now.”

Donald Kraybill writing about this upside down kingdom says: “Jesus startles us … good guys turn out to be bad guys. Those we expect to receive the reward get a spanking instead. Those who think they are headed for heaven land in hell. Paradox, irony and surprise permeate the teachings of Jesus. They flip our expectations upside down. The least are the greatest. The immoral receive forgiveness and blessing. Adults become like children. The religious miss the heavenly banquet. The pious receive curses. Things aren’t like we think they should be. We’re baffled and perplexed. Amazed we step back. Should we laugh or should we cry? Again and again, turning our world upside down, the kingdom surprises us.”

It is the humble poor who know their need of God and those who have nothing who know they need everything. So, we should pray for those moments when we and others experience poverty, hunger and sadness, as they are moments when we are more likely to turn our faces to God looking for salvation. We need to pray for the opening of doors in us and others that gain and comfort have locked tight.

The Gospel announcement, our salvation, is truly comprehensive, is truly for all, because it is offered to losers, by circumstance or choice. The poor have no means of becoming rich but the rich have within themselves the possibility of becoming poor. There is nothing that we don’t have that will bar our entry to this upside-down kingdom and so we can pray to be rid of what we do have that God’s kingdom may truly come to all. In this way, as the Beatitudes state, our lives are turned upside down and we are blessed with poverty, with grief, with meekness, with hunger, with mercy, with purity, with peacemaking, and with persecution (Gerard Kelly, Humanifesto).

As opposed to the survival of the fittest or looking after No. 1, the kingdom of God, as it is described in the Beatitudes, is a place of happiness for those who know they are spiritually poor, a place of comfort for those who mourn, a place of receptivity for those who are humble, a place of satisfaction for those whose greatest desire is to do what God requires, a place of mercy for those who are merciful, a place in which God is seen by the pure in heart, a place in which those who work for peace are called God’s children, and a place which belongs to those who are persecuted because they do what God requires. That is what those, like St Francis, that we call saints came to realise. It is what we must seek through prayer as we too respond to our calling to be saints.

May God forgive our attempts to be loved, our pride, our pleasure-seeking and our leisure-seeking and instead turn our lives upside down and bless us with poverty, with grief, with meekness, with hunger, with mercy, with purity, with peacemaking, with persecution and with his upside down kingdom. Amen.

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For All The Saints.

Faith as small as a mustard seed

Here's the sermon that I shared at St Gabriel’s Pitsea this morning:

Brother Lawrence was a member of the Carmelite Order in France during the 17th Century. He spent most of his life in the kitchen or mending shoes, but became a great spiritual guide. He saw God in the mundane tasks he carried out in the priory kitchen. Daily life for him was an ongoing conversation with God. He wrote: 'we need only to recognize God intimately present with us, to address ourselves to Him every moment.'

Brother Lawrence also said that ‘We ought not to be weary of doing little things for the love of God, who regards not the greatness of the work, but the love with which it is performed.' The Parable of the Mustard Seed is an illustration of this truth. In that brief parable a small action, the sowing of a small seed, leads to the growth of a large plant. Jesus says that, in a similar way, the kingdom of God has small beginnings but grows to become something much larger. In today’s passage (Luke 17:5-10), Jesus says we only need a small amount of faith – faith as small as a mustard seed – to accomplish great things, like moving a tree to the sea. As a result, we should, like Brother Lawrence says, in no wise despise small actions.

The phrase a ‘mustard seed’ has entered our language as a little idea that grows into something bigger and that is of course literally what happened with the Jesus movement itself. It was a relatively small grouping of obscure people that died when its founder, Jesus died, but which, following his resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost grew to become the largest religion in history and also within the world currently.

We also see this illustrated in Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. Here is a man who was born in an obscure village, the child of a peasant woman. He grew up in another village. He worked in a carpenter shop until He was thirty. Then for three years He was an itinerant preacher. While still a young man, the tide of popular opinion turned against him. He was nailed upon a cross between two thieves. Long centuries have come and gone but all the armies that ever marched, all the navies that were ever built; all the parliaments that ever sat and all the kings that ever reigned, put together, have not affected the life of man upon this earth as powerfully as has that one solitary life.

The Early Church reveals the same pattern to us. Paul writes to the Christians at Corinth and says, “think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth.” He says in this letter that, in the eyes of the world, Christians are foolish and the message of the cross is foolish.

The same words could actually be applied to us: none of us are major intellectuals or academics; none of us have major influence or power in terms of work or politics; none of us, so far as I know, were born into the aristocracy. The reality is that wonderful as each of us are, we are not major players on the world stage and that makes us, in human terms, one among millions of other human beings around the world. When we think of ourselves in those terms it easy to see ourselves and what we do as being small and insignificant.

We may not like to think of ourselves as being foolish, as well as insignificant, but that is how Paul describes the Corinthian Christians from the perspective of those considered wise in their culture. It is no different today, Richard Dawkins wrote in The God Delusion that God is a “psychotic delinquent” invented by mad, deluded people and our faith in God is a “process of non-thinking,” “blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence.”

BUT what Jesus demonstrates through his life, death and resurrection and what Paul states in his letter to the Corinthians is that “the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength.” The Message, a contemporary paraphrase of the Bible, puts it like this:

“Isn't it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these "nobodies" to expose the hollow pretensions of the "somebodies"? That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God. Everything that we have—right thinking and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start—comes from God by way of Jesus Christ.”

So, the kingdom of God is a place of multiplication. The kingdom of God is a place of exponential growth. The kingdom of God is a place where the tiniest seed can become the biggest plant. The kingdom of God is where faith as small as a mustard seed can move a mountain. The kingdom of God is a place where a grain of yeast can make a whole batch of dough rise. The kingdom of God is a place where a child’s lunch can feed 5,000. The kingdom of God is a place where the salt of our behaviour can flavour the community in which we live. The kingdom of God is a place where the little we can offer can be used to the praise and glory of God.

Just as in the parable of the mustard seed, our small inputs can have a big effect and, just as with Jesus’ words about faith here, the influence that one person can have can move a mountain. We could respond to this by thinking what small thing can I do today that will have a big effect but the reality is that we are rarely able to accurately predict future effects. Instead, we can learn, like Brother Lawrence, to value small, mundane actions in the knowledge that, if well done for the love of God, these actions can have significantly larger impacts.

And, because we know of this process or pattern or plan of the small, the insignificant, the foolish, being used by God to achieve great change, we can trust that our lives also have meaning and significance as we put our faith into practice in small acts of compassion here and little words of witness there; at home, in church and in the community. We don’t know what God will cause to grow from these actions and words but we trust that they will take root and grow because that is the pattern that we, and Christians throughout Church history, have observed in practice. May it be so for each one of us. Amen.

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Randy Stonehill - Strong Hand Of Love.

A model prayer – beautiful, balanced and brief

The sermon I've been sharing today at St Andrew’s and Holy Cross Basildon and St Peter’s Nevendon is adapted from Discovering Prayer by Andrew Knowles, published by Lion Publishing:

When the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray, he responded with a model prayer – beautiful, balanced and brief (Luke 11: 1-13). It has come to be known as the Lord’s Prayer. In his book ‘Discovering Prayer’, Andrew Knowles, a former Canon Theologian of Chelmsford Cathedral, simply and succinctly takes us through the different sections of this prayer for life.

We begin with God - Jesus reminds us to whom we’re talking. We’re coming to Almighty God who is also our Father. We aren’t phoning through a big order to a supermarket store which sells everything. Nor are we practising some weird and wonderful thought-process guaranteed to release psychic powers. We’re coming simply, humbly into the presence of our Creator, having received the invitation to do so from Jesus himself.

It’s good to remember that God is ‘our Father’. We belong to a great, trans-national, cross-cultural family, some of whom have already died and some of whom are yet to be born. Wherever we are around the world, and at whatever point in time we live, we own God as our Father and Jesus as our Lord. So when we pray this prayer, we’re sharing with our Christian brothers and sisters, across every division of colour and class, of politics and economics, of time and eternity.

We say ‘yes to God’ - Not only do we begin with God, we also ask that all he wants to do in our lives and in our world may come about. We ask that all he wants to do in our lives and in our world may come about. We ask that men and women everywhere may realise who he is and humble themselves before him.

We ask that God’s kingdom may come - The kingdom of God exists wherever God is King. It isn’t located on a map, nor do we enter it by holding a passport! The exciting truth is that God is already King of millions of lives. He is already acknowledged as Lord in a vast number of situations. We see the effects of his rule when hate is turned to love, when bitterness is dismantled by forgiveness, when disease is overwhelmed by health, and when war gives way to peace.

But we must remember that God is a father and not a dictator. For this reason his kingdom can only come when individual people invite him into their lives and submit themselves to the changes he wants to make.

This phrase, ‘May your kingdom come’, more than any other in the Lord’s Prayer, has a tendency to rebound on the user. If we really want God’s kingdom to come, then we must open ourselves and our circumstances to God, whatever the cost.

And if we’re looking for the kind of changes in the world that only God can make, we may find that he promptly enlists us in his service! We may find ourselves doing anything from bathing an invalid to mailing a cheque for famine relief. We may even find ourselves called to lob in our whole life as the only fitting contribution we can make to the service of God’s kingdom in a particular situation.

We bring our needs to God - In the second half of the Lord’s Prayer we ask God to meet our basic human needs. We ask him for enough to live on, for forgiveness, and for protection.

‘Give us day by day the food we need’ has a strong echo of the days when the Israelites were supplied with manna in the desert. Every day they had ‘enough’, and the Lord’s Prayer asks that we may have the same experience of god’s faithful provision each day as it comes. In an age when many people are run raged by their desire for money and possessions, this is a wonderful promise from Jesus. All the same, we should notice that it is everything we need that God will provide, and not everything we want.

‘Forgive us our sins, for we forgive everyone who does us wrong.’ This reminds us that our standard of living is more than a roof over our head, food on the table and a shirt on our back. Our well-being is intimately tied up with personal relationships – within ourselves, between ourselves, and between ourselves and God. Our recurring need here is for forgiveness. We hurt people by our self-centredness, our anger and our prejudice. We hurt God by going our own way in defiance of his loving law, wilfully defiling all that he intended life in this world to be.

So we ask for forgiveness. We feel the need and we say the words. But it’s no easy matter for God to forgive us. It cost him the life of his only Son to show the reality and consequence of sin. As he died on the cross, Jesus took on himself the results of all our sin. This is the only way by which we can be forgiven and restored to spiritual life. This is the Christian Good News: that life with God – something we can never earn and certainly don’t deserve – is his free gift to us through the death of Jesus. Our sins are not only forgiven but forgotten, and if we mention them to God again he’ll wonder what we’re talking about.

But as we ask God to forgive us, we must check if there is anyone who in turn needs our forgiveness. How do we feel about our worst enemy? Is there any member of the family, or anybody at work, against whom we’re nursing anger, bitterness or resentment? Only as we forgive others can we enter fully into the wonderful experience of God’s forgiveness of us. This is not just a nice idea. It’s a condition for our own forgiveness. Elsewhere Jesus warns that if we don’t forgive, then we in turn shall not be forgiven. This teaching alone, if we take it seriously, will completely change our lives.

‘And do not bring us to hard testing.’ Sometimes this is translated, ‘Lead us not into temptation,’ and we may well wonder when, why and how God could possibly want us to be tempted. And we would be right – he doesn’t. But while God will never lure us into evil, he will sometimes allow us to be tested. Just as we will put ourselves through all kinds of discomfort to get fit or lose weight, so God will allow pressure on us to strengthen our faith or increase our insight.

In the face of this testing, Jesus includes a very human plea that God won’t go over the top in his efforts to refine us. It is encouraging to hear Jesus say this, because he was tempted over a longer period and with greater intensity than we’ll ever know. Enticed by Satan, or daunted by God, we often given in at a very early stage. Our Christian integrity disintegrates and snatches at hypocrisy to cover our shame. But while we often capitulate, Jesus never did so.

The Lord’s Prayer recognises that temptation is an integral part of our daily life. We’ll never lose it, so we must learn to use it. If we can use the force of temptations to push us closer to the Lord, rather than sweeping us away from him, then we’ll be harnessing their power for our benefit.

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Marvin Gaye - The Lord's Prayer.

The Kingdom of God has come near you

Here's the sermon that I shared at St Mary's Runwell and St Catherine's Wickford this morning:

In the National Gallery in 2013 you could find a St. Francis without a head and with a candy-grabber crane that went inside his body and which, if you were lucky, pulled out a T-shirt saying chastity, obedience and poverty; another St. Francis was mounted on a donation box and, when you put money in, he hit himself over the head with a crucifix. Michael Landy’s large-scale sculptures consisted of fragments of National Gallery paintings cast in three dimensions and assembled with old machinery, cogs and wheels, meaning that visitors could crank the works into life with a foot pedal mechanism.

They sound like pieces designed to mock St. Francis and other Saints represented and yet Landy is an artist who is fascinated by the renunciation and kindness that Saints like Francis have shown through their lives. Landy is best known for two works. The first being an installation in a former C&A store on Oxford Street, where over a two week period, he destroyed all his possessions except for the clothes in which he stood. The second being ‘Acts of Kindness’ where Landy asked members of the public who had witnessed or taken part in acts of kindness while travelling on the tube, to write about them. So, as at least one of the art critics reviewing the show at the National Gallery, has noted while enjoying the jokiness of the lucky dip St. Francis, “you also sense that Landy thinks Britain could do with a little of St Francis’s spirit.”

St. Francis lived out his faith and that is what today’s Gospel reading (Luke 10. 1 – 11, 16 – 20) is all about. This passage from Luke’s Gospel gives us Jesus’ inspirational team talk just before sending his disciples out to be his advance guard preparing those in the towns and other places to be visited by Jesus shortly after. He gives his disciples a message to share – “The Kingdom of God has come near you” – but his main focus is on the behaviour and attitude of his disciples; the way in which they live and act.

He instructs them to live simply (“don't take a purse or a beggar's bag or shoes”); to be focused (“don't stop to greet anyone on the road”); to be peace givers (“whenever you go into a house, first say, ‘Peace be with this house.’”); accept hospitality (“stay in that same house, eating and drinking whatever they offer you”); bring healing (“heal the sick in that town”); share your message (“say to the people there, ‘The Kingdom of God has come near you.’”); and move on when not accepted (“the dust from your town that sticks to our feet we wipe off against you”).

These instructions of Jesus became a model for itinerant preachers throughout Church history including St. Francis and his followers. The words “Preach the Gospel at all times, if necessary use words” are often attributed to St. Francis but, while certainly reflecting something of what he said and did, that is not a phrase he actually used. ‘Francis did focus on proclaiming the word in deeds – as well as in words. And if you have ever read any of Francis’ own writings it is easy to see that Scripture is infused everywhere in his words, his life and his being – and his actions. It is easy to see where the oft-quoted phrase came from; for example, the Legend of the Three Companions’ includes this inspirational team talk from St. Francis:

“Calling together the six brothers, Saint Francis, since he was full of the grace of the Holy Spirit, predicted to them what was about to happen. “Dearest brothers,” he said, “let us consider our vocation, to which God has mercifully called us, not only for our own good, but for the salvation of many. We are to go throughout the world, encouraging everyone, more by deed than by word, to do penance for their sins and to recall the commandments of God. Do not be afraid that you seem few and uneducated. With confidence, simply proclaim penance, trusting in the Lord, who conquered the world. Because by his Spirit, He is speaking through and in you, encouraging everyone to be converted to him and to observe his commandments”’ (http://friarmusings.wordpress.com/2012/09/26/preach-the-gospel-at-all-times-if-necessary-use-words/)

But what has all this to do with us, as we are generally not being called by God to become itinerant preachers? The answer is very simple, that our actions, as well as our words, speak powerfully about our faith. Negatively, this is the reason why Christians are often criticised as being hypocrites; others look at what we do and complain that we aren’t practising what we preach. When our actions and our words come together, however, then our witness is powerful; to see that we only have to think of examples provided by Saints like Francis or more recent followers of Christ like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King Jnr, Mother Teresa, Oscar Romero, Desmond Tutu, among others.

This is also one reading of the message which Jesus gave his disciples to proclaim. Do you remember what it was? It was not quite the message that we might have expected or anticipated. The disciples weren’t given the message that ‘God is love’ or to ‘repent and believe’; instead they were told to say that “The Kingdom of God has come near you.”

What did that mean? The disciples were the heralds for Jesus’ imminent arrival in that place, so it would certainly have meant Jesus is coming and the Kingdom of God arrives where he arrives. But, because the disciples were also living out their faith in practice, as those bringing peace and healing into the communities they visited, it also meant that the Kingdom of God could be seen in their lives and examples too. This can still be true for us today. Doing good, for Christians, is not about our salvation – it’s not about earning God’s love – instead it is a consequence of our salvation; because God has loved us so much, we then want to love others and, as we do, the Kingdom of God comes close to those we love, help and heal.

That is the challenge of this passage for us today and so, in the words of St. Francis:

Dearest brothers and sisters let us consider our vocation, to which God has mercifully called us, not only for our own good, but for the salvation of many. We are to go throughout the world, encouraging everyone, more by deed than by word, to do penance for their sins and to recall the commandments of God. Do not be afraid that you seem few and uneducated. With confidence, simply proclaim penance, trusting in the Lord, who conquered the world. Because by his Spirit, He is speaking through and in you, encouraging everyone to be converted to him and to observe his commandments.

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Big Star - The Ballad Of El Goodo.

A new possibility for the world, existence, and history

Here's the sermon I shared at Holy Cross Basildon and (in a condensed form) at St Andrew's Wickford this afternoon:

To us, the resurrection is a wonderful event. One that we have been celebrating since Easter Sunday in hymns such as Jesus lives! and Thine be the glory risen, conquering Son. But to the women who first encountered the resurrection it was anything but wonderful. Instead, it was a shocking, unexpected, fearful experience.

We are often surprised to read that that was their reaction because we are so familiar with the resurrection stories and the idea of resurrection itself. And we wonder why they weren’t instantly grateful to know that their teacher and Lord was alive again. But those people who were there at the time were on unfamiliar and disturbing ground and they were unable initially to see the wonder and glory of what had occurred.

And many people today who are not Christians would react in ways that are similar to the reactions of those women. Many would struggle with the whole idea that someone can rise again from the dead and would view this central Christian belief as a reason for rejecting, rather than accepting, Christianity.

So, what I would like to share with you this evening then are two things from this passage that suggest that Jesus did rise from the dead and two things that suggest why his rising is important for us today.

First, the reaction of the women suggests to us that there was nothing in the Judaism of their day that had prepared them for the idea that one person could rise from the dead. They were distressed and fearful, in part, because they had no way of understanding or comprehending what had happened. It was totally outside of any frame of reference that they had.

Most Palestinian Jews at the time believed that God would resurrect the bodies of the dead at the end of the age. When Jesus had spoken to the disciples about his own resurrection, it is probable that they would have understood him to have been meaning that he would rise again as part of this general resurrection at the end of the age. This belief in a general resurrection was not accepted by all Jews. The Sadducees, in particular, argued that there was no resurrection at all. But even where this belief in a general resurrection was held, there was never any thought that one person would rise ahead of everyone else.

The reaction of these women - bewilderment and fear – is entirely consistent with situations where we are confronted by things that are totally outside our way of understanding the world and life itself and which radically challenge beliefs which we had thought were unchallengeable. The idea that one person could rise from the dead was so far outside their understanding of life, death and God that they could not have invented it. And, if they had, then they would not have responded with astonishment and fear because they would have known where the idea had come from and would have wanted to have appeared confident in their claim. You don’t convince anyone by being confused and in hiding.

So, instead the reaction of these women suggests that something significant had occurred and that that significant something could only have been the bodily resurrection of Jesus.

The second factor in this story which suggests that Jesus did rise from the dead is the idea that it was women who first discovered his resurrection. The Judaism of their day, like most cultures at that time, was patriarchal. The testimony of women, particularly in a court of law, was either inadmissible or regarded as of lesser value than the testimony of men. If the disciples had wanted to make up a story about Jesus rising from the dead then they certainly wouldn’t have said that it was the women in their group that had discovered his resurrection.

It is interesting, in this context, that the first known pagan written critique of Christianity builds on the Gospels’ report of women as the first witnesses and proclaimers of Jesus’ resurrection. It is called The True Word and was written by the middle Platonist Celsus in A.D. 175. Celsus claims that a ‘hysterical’ female was the witness to Jesus’ resurrection. To Celsus’ patriarchal mind all women were unreliable witnesses because they were hysterical and as a result, he then discounts the claims of the Gospels about the resurrection.

Both these factors then can give us confidence that the resurrection stories are telling us about actual events because if they weren’t then the Gospel writers would not have written them as they have. If the stories about the resurrection had been made up, then in order to be convincing they would have had men as the first people to discover that the resurrection had occurred and those people discovering the resurrection would be portrayed as entirely confident and clear about what they had seen and heard instead of the portrayal that we actually have, one of confusion and fear.

These are not the only factors which give us confidence that these stories have the ring of truth but they are two that emerge clearly from this account of the resurrection in Mark’s Gospel. What of the meaning of the resurrection though? Why is it so important and how can it affect us today if we believe that it occurred?

Again, two ideas drawn from this account. First, the message of the young man to the women (verse 7) – “He is going … ahead of you”. Literally, this means that Jesus had gone to Galilee where he would show himself to the disciples when they followed him there. But, at another level, it indicates what Jesus’ resurrection means. We read in 1 Corinthians 15 that Jesus has been raised from death as the guarantee that we will also be raised from death. He is described as being the first fruits of those who have died. In rising from the dead, he has gone ahead of us into the new risen body and existence that we shall experience in future when Jesus returns to this earth to fully bring God’s Kingdom into existence here.

When Jesus walked the earth, he looked ahead to that future time when the Kingdom of God will be made perfect, and all suffering will come to an end. But he also announced that, because of him, there is a sense in which that Kingdom has already begun. When he healed sick people and brought good news to the poor it was a sign that the Kingdom had come. In the same way, when he overcame death by rising from the dead he became the first fruits of the Kingdom, an example of what we will all become in future.

Jesus wants us to be signs of God’s Kingdom in the same way that he was. He commanded us, his followers, to love in the way that he did. He wanted people to see us practically demonstrating love, so that we will clearly be recognised as men and women who belong to God. When Christians take action on behalf of the world’s poorest communities we not only put into practice the values of the Kingdom of God here and now but also become signs of what the Kingdom will be like when it is made perfect in eternity. That is what it means to pray, ‘Your Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.’

So, by the resurrection, Jesus has gone ahead of us in signing and establishing the Kingdom of God and calls us to follow where he leads. In this way, as the theologian Jurgen Moltmann says, the “resurrection of Christ does not mean a new possibility within the world and its history, but a new possibility altogether for the world, for existence, and for history.” That’s the first indication of what resurrection means in this passage.

The second, takes us back to the women and their position in a patriarchal society. God deliberately chooses women to discover Jesus' resurrection because the Kingdom of God, of which the resurrection is the first fruits, is to be a place of equality and inclusion. In his ministry, Jesus consistently included in God’s Kingdom those people in Jewish society that were excluded – he included women in his followers, he brought lepers and possessed people back into the community by healing them, he ate and drank with tax collectors, sinners and prostitutes.

Therefore, it is significant that it is people who were thought of as being second class in the society of his day who become the first witnesses to his resurrection. In the Kingdom of God which Jesus’ resurrection inaugurates, no one is second class and this is why the Apostle Paul writes in his letters, “there is no difference between Jews and Gentiles, between slaves and free men, between men and women; you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Just as we are called to be signs of God’s Kingdom in the way that we love, so we are also called to be signs of God’s Kingdom by the way in which we include those who are excluded in our day. In our churches we need to be able to demonstrate that we are all one in Christ Jesus by there being no difference in the way that we accept men and women, white and black, rich and poor, straight and gay, non-disabled and disabled, the settled and the migrant, people of faith and people of no faith. We are called to be a people of liberation who cross the divides erected by our society. Who, as Jurgen Moltmann has said, in solidarity enter “the brotherhood of those who, in their society, are visibly living in the shadow of the cross: the poor, the handicapped, the people society has rejected, the prisoners and the persecuted.”

Jesus’ resurrection is the first fruits of a new way of being human – a way of being human that ultimately knows no death, no grief, no crying, no pain, no inequality and no exclusion. Jesus’ resurrection is the first fruits of the healing and renewal of human beings, human society and the entire world. This is the meaning of the resurrection. This is where we, and our world, can be heading, if we get on board with God.

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Delirious? - Our God Reigns (Forever His Truth Shall Remain).

Hope: The light of the promised future that is to come

Here's the reflection that I shared during Reflective Evening Prayer this evening at St Mary's Runwell. 
The readings were Lamentations 3:19-33 and 'Hope' is the thing with feathers by Emily Dickinson.

Disasters are frequent occurrences, “some natural, many more due to man’s ham-fisted neglect of the planet or our inability to get by without recourse to violence.” “The result is always the need for a new start, and how we respond and rebuild colours an uncertain future more than ever. Yet, for all the carnage and chaos that catastrophes bring, an odd truth is apparent: disasters do give us the chance to shape things differently.”

As a result, as Terry Eagleton writes in Hope without Optimism, “the most authentic hope is whatever can be salvaged, stripped of guarantees from a general dissolution.” It is whatever survives a general ruin. This is where we find the writer of Lamentations; bowed down with the reality of exile, yet trusting that it is in the nature of God to bring a new beginning from this disastrous affliction which is “wormwood and gall” to him. Similarly, Emily Dickinson claims that, hope is heard most sweetly in the Gale, “the chillest land” and “on the strangest Sea”.

Hope, Eagleton writes, “is to be found in the unfinished nature of the actual, discernible as a hollow at its heart.” “Potentiality is what articulates the present with the future, and thus lays down the material infrastructure of hope.” Hope is about a vision for a future that is different from the present; one which therefore requires imagination and vision. For Christians that vision is of the kingdom of God; which has begun to be realised but is still to come in its full reality.

As a result, in Theology of Hope Jürgen Moltmann argues that “Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it. Peace with God means conflict with the world, for the goad of the promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present. If we had before our eyes only what we see, then we should cheerfully or reluctantly reconcile ourselves with things as they happen to be. That we do not reconcile ourselves, that there is no pleasant harmony between us and reality, is due to our unquenchable hope. This hope keeps man unreconciled, until the great day of the fulfilment of all the promises of God.

The Church, then, is intended to be “the source of continual new impulses towards the realization of righteousness, freedom and humanity here in the light of the promised future that is to come.” Our hope should “provide inexhaustible resources for the creative, inventive imagination of love.” It should constantly provoke and produce thinking of an anticipatory kind in love to humanity and the world, “in order to give shape to the newly dawning possibilities in the light of the promised future, in order as far as possible to create here the best that is possible, because what is promised is within the bounds of possibility.” “Thus it will constantly arouse the ‘passion for the possible’, inventiveness and elasticity in self-transformation, in breaking with the old and coming to terms with the new.” The Christian hope should always have “a revolutionary effect in this sense on the intellectual history of the society affected by it.”

“Wherever that happens, Christianity embraces its true nature and becomes a witness of the future of Christ.”

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Van Morrison - These Are The Days.