Here's the sermon I shared this morning at
St Andrew's Wickford:
The Christian movie “
Jesus Revolution”, which was released earlier this year has surpassed the $50 million mark in cinemas and is now available on digital platforms and soon on Blu-ray. Released by Lionsgate, the movie telling the story of the 1970s Jesus People movement earned more than $51 million in box office receipts. That makes it the ninth highest-grossing faith-based film of all time. The film stars Kelsey Grammer (“Frasier”) Jonathan Roumie (“The Chosen”), and Joel Courtney (“Super 8”).
The story it tells is of the last major Revival to date in the Western world, which saw thousands converted to Christ, several new denominations started, and the beginnings of Jesus Rock, which has become the Contemporary Christian Music industry. The book on which the film is based is called ‘
Jesus Revolution: How God Transformed an Unlikely Generation and How He Can Do It Again Today'.
Today’s Psalm is a prayer for revival, restoration and return (
Psalm 126). Exile is a key theme in the Bible with important lessons for us to learn.
Sam Wells has described the story of exile which is told in the Bible. He writes that:
‘There was a small nation on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, which we call Israel. It was made up of twelve tribes, but the northern ten tribes were destroyed in the eighth century BC. Only two tribes remained, based around the city of Jerusalem and its glorious temple. But at the start of the sixth century BC, the remnant of Israel, known as Judah, was destroyed and its ruling class was transported five hundred miles away to Babylon.
In Babylon the exiles reflected profoundly on their history and identity. They wrote down stories of how they had once been in slavery in Egypt and how under Moses they’d been brought to freedom. They recalled accounts of how at Mount Sinai Moses had met the God who had brought Israel out of slavery, and had received a covenant that bound Israel to that God forever. They perceived that that liberating God had also, at the dawn of time, created the world out of nothing. They remembered that after the ways of the world had gone awry, that same God had called the great ancestor Abraham to be the father of the people Israel and to inhabit the promised land. They commemorated the way the covenant with Israel, inaugurated in Abraham and renewed in Moses, was tested during forty years in the wilderness but came to fruition when Joshua entered the promised land and by endeavour and miracle subdued that land (sometimes brutally) and made it Israel’s own.
In Babylon the exiles recorded that it was a long time before Israel had a settled pattern of leadership and government, but eventually Saul, and then David, and then Solomon became kings of a united people. After this high point, the kingdom split and departed frequently from the path of the covenant; it was this weakness and shortcoming that led eventually to the nation’s destruction and deportation to Babylon. This was the story Israel came to understand in exile. Yet after fifty years of exile, Israel returned to the promised land, rebuilt the temple and city walls, and resumed the life of the covenant.’
Psalm 126 describes that moment expressing themes of redemption and joy and gratitude to God. Jewish scholarship often pairs this psalm with
Psalm 137, which commemorates the beginning of the Babylonian exile just as Psalm 126 describes the end of that exile. In a similar way, the Jesus Movement was an unexpected revival in the midst of the growth of secularism and at a time when the established churches viewed Sixties youth culture as a wholly negative development. The Holy Spirit often surprises us with the people and places and times in which it moves.
The key insight from the exile for Israel, however, was not that God restored the people at the end of exile but that God had been with them through exile. Wells writes, ‘Out of the exile came ancient Israel’s new insight that the God they thought was for them was actually something much better—a God who was with them.’
He applies this insight to our own day and time where we see a decline in the numbers of people attending church and a growth in secularisation. The people of God have tended to be closer to God in times of adversity than in periods of plenty, he says, so, ‘if we’re experiencing adversity in our church life right now, this is precisely the time we expect God to be close to us like never before’. He says that: ‘This conviction—this trust—is perhaps the hardest part of Christianity to believe. But it is the most wonderful to behold.’ When we see the Lord restoring the fortunes of Zion in that way, then we will be like those who dream. Then our mouth will be filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy; then will it be said among the nations, ‘The Lord has done great things for them.’ The Lord has done great things for us, and we rejoice. So, as we experience a degree of exile currently within society, let us learn the lesson of the Babylonian Exile and make our prayer that of the writer of Psalm 126.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
