Loved Sinners

It’s an incident I don’t think I’ll ever forget.

It wasn’t long after I’d come to faith at the age of about 18, and one of my friends, Norman, had been asked along to a big gathering of Christians on Boxing Day in the King’s Hall in Belfast. And other than that, we didn’t know a whole lot about it.

Norman’s friend Bobby stopped in to pick us up on the morning of the event and straightaway we clocked that something was wrong. Bobby was in his Sunday best, but Norman and I were just in jeans and sweatshirts, and although he tried to put a brave face on it, it was pretty obvious that we were about to transgress some dress code we didn’t know anything about.

Sure enough, when we got to the King’s Hall, we were the only two out of the 800 men there who weren’t wearing suits. It turned out that this was a brethren convention, and although this particular strand of the Brethren weren’t quite as closed as our neighbours here in Balmedie, they obviously felt it was important to dress up for worship.

Now in fairness to them, there wasn’t much in the way of sideways glances or outright disapproval; in fact they were so nice we began to wonder if they thought we were unsaved people who’d wandered in off the street out of curiosity!

But I wonder what would have happened if folk started coming to their regular meetings in more casual clothes. How long before someone would have gently taken them aside and had a quiet word in their ear about what was expected in terms of dress code. Or the church policy on men having long hair; or women not having long hair.

Easy to poke fun at Brethren traditions. It’s not so long ago I sat with a woman who hadn’t been in church like ours for years because she felt that the last time she visited, folk were looking down their noses at her because she didn’t have much money and couldn’t afford to dress as well as they could.

Every institution. over time, develops its own customs and ways of doing things; that’s entirely natural. But when, in the church, those things become too important to us – marking who’s in and who’s out, who belongs and who doesn’t – that’s when we’ve left the path of wisdom. That’s when we step out of the Way of Christ.

‘Why don’t your disciples wash their hands properly?. That’s the latest question the Jerusalem inquisition throw at Jesus; which is just another way of saying “why don’t you teach them properly, you so-called Rabbi?’

But what do they mean by properly?

Well the fact of the matter is that there’s really not much in the Old Testament law that relates to this, so the disciples aren’t breaking any explicit command. What they are breaking is the intricate system of rights and wrongs, do’s and don’ts that grew up around the law – the teaching that we call the Mishnah. The Mishnah was tradition, developed by the elders of the community, but it wasn’t the God-given law.  It didn’t have that status.

The problem was, the Pharisees no longer saw the distinction clearly. Their customs had become too important to them. They felt they were binding on everyone, and if you didn’t toe the line you were – by definition – suspect.

But they were so busy pointing out the speck in everyone else’s eyes they didn’t notice the planks hanging out of their own.

“Hang on a minute” says Jesus. “You’re supposed to be the great defenders of God’s law? You’ve no problem ignoring the law when it suits you! What about the practice of Corban?”

And they’d no answer to that.

The law of Moses was clear that children should take good care of their parents in their declining years, and that included financial care.

But the Pharisees had developed a tradition called Corban – a loophole which allowed children to opt out of that familial obligation if they pledged the money to God instead. And of course, for ‘God’ read ‘temple’ or ‘religious community’.

So in the name of God, according to their tradition, you could leave your elderly parents destitute and sign over everything you might have given them to the religious community.

The law that was given to protect the vulnerable was overridden by the tradition of Corban. In a culture that was supposed to honour the elderly, it was a disgraceful practice.

“And there are many other things like this that you do.” says Jesus.

Unsurprisingly the Pharisees don’t seem to have much to say in response.

But if they were angry at this first exchange, they were going to be apoplectic by the time Jesus finished the second.

Because having defended the primacy of the law over their tradition, he then goes on to redefine that law – the very law of God given to Moses on Sinai. Now what law-abiding Jew in his right mind would do that? The law was untouchable. There was nothing to be added to it! It’s what they had been living by for generations! It’s what set them apart from other nations!

Only God could redefine the law! And of course, as Christians, we’d argue that that’s exactly what’s happening here! Jesus, as God incarnate, is speaking a new word. A word that is good news.

“Listen to me, all of you, and understand. There is nothing that goes into a person from the outside which can make him ritually unclean. Rather it is what comes out of a person that makes him unclean.”

And in that short sentence or two, Jesus, among other things, sets aside roughly 15 centuries of dietary laws in one stroke.

“It’s not important” he says. That’s just external stuff and it really doesn’t matter very much. What really matters is what goes on in the heart.

And that should reach our ears as good news. Because it punctures everything in church life that would seek to judge us on the basis of externals. How we look, how we speak, what we work as or don’t work as, what colour our skin is, who our people are, where we come from, what level of education we’ve attained. None of that really matters, Jesus is saying.

And in a superficial world that judges solely by exteriors most of the time, that’s doubly reassuring. God is telling us that we count. Even if we don’t have a six pack, gentlemen. Or can squeeze into a size zero, ladies. Or if you’re Jessica Ennis, have a six pack and can squeeze into a size zero.

Externals aren’t important. That’s the good news.

But the next word is not good news. It’s positively bad news.

It’s not what goes into a person that can make him unclean, Jesus says. “It’s what comes out of a person that makes him unclean. For from the inside, from a person’s heart, come the evil ideas which lead him to do immoral things; to rob, kill, commit adultery, be greedy and do all sorts of evil things; deceit, indecency, jealousy, slander, pride and folly – all these things come from inside a person and make him unclean.”

Now is it just me, or when you hear or read a list like that do you switch off a little after ‘kill and rob’? Most of us aren’t the killing and robbing kind, are we? We’re basically good people, aren’t we?

Or are we? Let’s think a little more about that list.

You’d never dream of stealing anything; but do the companies you invest in quietly rob people of land, resources or opportunities?

You’d never kill anyone; but do you remember when Jesus said that if we harbour anger in our hearts towards someone it’s a form of murder?

You might not commit adultery; but when you’re alone do you gravitate towards websites or TV channels that you’d embarrassed to be found watching?

You might not feel greedy; but when 20% of the world’s population controls 80% of its wealth, how do things look if you’re on the poor side of that statistic?  Have we so confused need and want in our society that we can no longer distinguish between them?

You might not think of yourself as a slanderer, but are you a bit too quick to talk about other people and their business when it would be far better to hold your tongue?

You might not think of yourself as deceitful, but are you always subtly manipulating people and situations so you get to have things your own way?

Seems to me we can make two equal and opposite mistakes when we think about human nature.

We can be naively optimistic about ourselves as though nothing were really wrong and our little sins don’t really matter that much.

But if sin’s such an insignificant thing, why on earth did Jesus take it so seriously? Seriously enough to die to put things right?

Sin screws up our relationships with God, with others and even with ourselves. It’s the root cause of every conflict and cruelty;every act of selfishness. And no matter how ‘good’ we might think we are, the power of sin is alive in all of us. We have to take it seriously.

But we have to hear the other side of the argument too.

There are theologies which encourage us to be unduly pessimistic about ourselves, as though there’s nothing good that might be said about us and we’re utterly worthless because we’re sinful.

But if that’s the case we might well ask why God would bother to save us at all? If humanity is merely something you’d scrape off the bottom of your shoe, why would God bother giving up his son to save us?

The answer is grace, of course. But it’s also that we’re made in his image, broken though it is, and to that degree I believe we are still of great worth to God.

Some of you out there are parents, as am I. Folks, our children, like us, are sinners. Given their genes, they could hardly be anything else!

But when you look at them, is that all you see? A sinner? Of course it isn’t.

You see their uniqueness, their character, their joys, their struggles. You see all that they were, all that they are, all that they might yet become. And you love them for it; sometimes despite yourself when they tax your patience or make choices you know they should never have made. You see the sin; sometimes all too starkly. But you see all the rest as well.

Why would you think that when God looks at us, his children, all he sees is our sinfulness? Is God less a respecter of persons than we are? Does he see with a less generous eye than we do?

The bad news Jesus brings us today is that we’re sinners. There’s no evading that. There’s no playing it down.

But the good news he brings is that we are loved sinners. And that makes all the difference in the world.

I’ve said it so many times in my time here – but I’ll keep saying it because it’s true. God loves you just the way you are. But he loves you too much to let you stay that way.

So where does all of that leave us?

In a place of healthy realism, I hope.

Christians don’t think they’re better than other people. At least, they shouldn’t think so.

No. Christians are folk with a healthy understanding of their own failings and limitations. Their sin. They’re very realistic about it. They don’t ignore it, or pretend it away. They take it to Jesus. They trust in what he did for us.

They say – Lord, I know what I am, and so do you. I need your help here because the truth is, I can’t fix myself.

Thank you that though I am sinful, I am also loved.

Save me, now and eternally, from the power of that within me which loves to do wrong. And help me in the here and now to learn to do the right, bringing joy to you, and life and health to me and those around me.

And what does that prayer do? Kiss it all better? Turn us into perfect people and paragons of virtue?

No –what it does is give us a new trajectory for our lives and new hope for the future.

Faith is never merely about externals. It never has been and it never will be.

We need more than clean hands or an impeccable record of church attendance to make us right with God.

No. Faith is worked out in the heart as we learn to accept our acceptance as loved sinners.

Those whom God loves, just as we are; but loves too much to let us stay that way.

Amen and thanks be to God for his word.

Real Communion

I want to begin this morning by showing you a picture of Heylipol church, which is the only remaining church building on the island of Tiree, where my friend Elspeth MacLean is the minister.

There used to be another building at Kirkapol but after lots of soul searching, the congregation decided to sell it and use the proceeds to maintain and upgrade the church at Heylipol, and we were pleased to see the beginnings of that work when we were over in July.

Heylipol would have been able to seat 300 in its day, but given that Tiree’s population is only 600, and there’s now a Baptist congregation on the island, and most folk don’t go to church, it’s pretty clear that the majority of those pews aren’t going to be filled any time soon.

So again, after much discussion, they’ve removed a good number of the pews at the rear of the church to open up a welcoming space where children can be looked after and taught during the service and teas and coffees can be served afterwards, because they don’t have any other space of that kind.

A sensible solution to an obvious problem you’d think. But oh, the angst over those pews. Mostly from folk who rarely darkened the door of the Kirk at all, and are adamant that they won’t be back now because of what’s been done.

Funny how we think idolatry’s a thing of the past; but remember than an idol’s just something that’s become more important to us than God himself.

If you’re leaving the church over the sake of a long, wooden, not especially comfortable bench, it strikes me that that bench might have become just a little bit too important to you.

But I digress…

What the congregation have done, in removing those pews, is open up a space where those in the church, and beyond, can experience community over food and conversation, and not just on Sundays.

They’ve made a statement that church isn’t just about the vertical dimension of faith that you’ve heard me talk about on many occasions – me, the minister and God. It’s about the horizontal dimension too – the people around us as we gather for worship; the people we go back to as we return to our daily lives. We need both dimensions for a rounded discipleship.

And the folk in Tiree are making an architectural statement about the importance of face to face community, that horizontal dimension, in an era where our communal life is getting eroded away like never before.

And there are a host of reasons why that’s happening.

Think of the social changes in our community in your lifetime.

It used to take a handful of men to work a good sized farm; now with mechanisation one or two can manage the same amount of land. Farming’s a far less communal experience than it used to be.

People tell me that years ago there was a better community spirit in the villages in our parish. Mums would run clubs for kids during the summer and hundreds of wee ones would pitch up. But those were the days when most women didn’t work outside the home, and there was more time to invest in family and neighbourhood things. There was more cohesiveness.

A century ago, a parish used to be the place you lived and worked and played and worshipped. For good and for ill, you knew everybody. Today, for many folk, home is just the place where you sleep. You work and shop and socialise elsewhere. We don’t really know our neighbours in the ways that we used to.

And I’m no Luddite, but I’m pretty sure that technology’s part of the problem. The many different screens we live with these days are great, but do they tend to take us into ourselves.  Even watching TV is less and less a communal experience. Instead of watching the same thing together your average family’s much more likely to be found watching 4 different things on 4 different devices in 4 different rooms.

And I’m not bemoaning these changes, I’m just using them to illustrate that in the modern world, having a life with and for others is harder than it used to be. The circumstances aren’t kind.

And yet the desire within us to know and be known is still there, and it’s still strong.

I’ve been married to a GP for long enough to know that a good proportion of the folk who come through her door don’t need medicines at all. They just need someone who’ll listen to their problems with compassion and show them some solidarity.

Survey after survey tells us that good friendships, even one or two, make for a happier life. We might have 300 virtual friends on Facebook, but we still need a handful of folk in real life we can see regularly and genuinely be ourselves with.

We’re hard-wired for relationships.

And that shouldn’t surprise us because that’s how God is wired, and as the early chapters of Genesis remind us, we are made in God’s image.

In late July Katie Waltar and I headed down to Edinburgh for a conference called the Abbey Summer School and the subject they were looking at was the Trinity. God existing, somehow, as three persons and yet one God.

And some find that doctrine an embarrassment. They feel it’d be much easier to downplay the Trinity so we can have better and clearer dialogue with our monotheistic brothers and sisters in Islam and Judaism.

But if we lose the Trinity, we lose one of the most precious things we can say about God. That God exists, primarily, as persons in relationship.

We talk of God as Creator, or Almighty, and we’re right to do so, but they are not the first word on who God is.  Before God created anything, or exercised power over anything, God was Father. God was Son, God was Spirit. Persons in relationship.

Not a static, isolated deity, but a dance of persons; a dynamic exchange of divine love.

We often talk about God being love in our tradition – but that wouldn’t be possible if God, before creation, were a lonely singularity with nothing or no-one to set his love upon.

The truth isn’t just that God loves – it’s that God IS love. In and of himself. In the interplay of Father, Son and Spirit.

And creation is the overflow of that love into space and time and ultimately into other persons who can share and reflect his love to one another in community.

And so, as the story goes, Adam was formed and breathed on – the pinnacle of God’s creation. And what does God say next? He says “It is not good for the man to be alone”. From the outset, we needed community. Communion with God, communion with one another. It’s how we’re wired.

We only come to know who we are as we engage with and stay open to the other.

Think of the network of relationships that sustained you in early life and helped you grow into the person you now are. Family, friends, neighbours, teachers, colleagues and mentors. We need each other.

And when Jesus, the second Adam, came into the world – God incarnate – was he any different? Was he so self-sufficient he didn’t need anyone?

No. He too needed and desired community. A family to nurture him as a child; friends and companions as an adult.

So much of his life lived in company: travelling, eating, talking, learning. Making a point of always staying open to the other and speaking with them, even if he profoundly disagreed with them.

Taking time in the company of his Father, but then plunging back in to life among the people. Life lived in community.

God is relational. We see that in the Trinity, and we see it in the life of Jesus. And we too are relational. John Donne was right to state that man is an island. We were made in such a way that we need each other.

And this is what Paul is telling the church in Corinth in the passage Malcolm read to us earlier. Yes, there are different gifts in the church, says Paul (As a wee aside - I’ve always enjoyed the fact that he places those who teach above those who work miracles!). But there are different gifts and we need each other for the body to function well.

All of you are Christ’s body, he says. Each one has a part in it.

And that’s a key thing in church life. In community everybody has something to learn and something to bring. Everybody.

You may not have deep Bible knowledge, but you have life experience. That’s what you bring. You might not know Greek, but you can bake a mean lasagne. That’s what you bring. You might be tone deaf, but you care about justice. That’s what you bring.

Everyone has something to bring, and also something to learn.

Are you humble enough to admit that you haven’t got life and faith sussed all the time? That there are things that confuse you or anger you or hurt you or utterly defeat you at times?

Are you willing to learn from the person who might be just one step ahead of you on the same journey, or are you too proud to ask? Or do you think you already have all the answers and can afford the luxury of a closed mind?

Everybody has something to learn and something to bring. We need each other. It’s not good for us to be alone.

But if it’s not good for us to be alone, nor is it easy for us to be together, sometimes.

The Apostle Paul knows this.

And that’s why he follows his discussion of the body and gifts with this famous discourse on the imperative of love.

And although this reading’s often used at weddings, it’s not primarily about marriage. It’s about living life alongside other human beings, whatever the context.

To get along with each other we have to exercise patience and kindness. We’ll have to curb our jealousy, our selfishness, our irritability. We’ll have to tear up or burn our record of wrongs.

Community is the place where we learn to love when it’s not easy and it doesn’t come naturally.

We’re given to one another in community for our maturation as people.

And that’s why we need to keep meeting together.

My friend Matt jokes that with individualism rampant in the States, pretty soon everyone will opt out of church and they’ll just stay home with a good cappuccino and their favourite preacher on MP3.

Now I’m all for good coffee; but that approach to faith is missing the point.

Each of us has something to learn and something to bring to the community that we call the church and we won’t learn it from our armchairs. And nor will we grow and mature in our ability to love one another if we always keep the other at arm’s length.

We need each other.

Covered a lot of ground –

Seen that as human beings have a deep desire for community, and we need it to help us grow.

Community reflects the character of God who is three and yet one.

Acknowledged that it’s not good to be alone, but nor is it easy to be together.

Each of us has something to learn and something to bring to the community we call the church,

being part of that family will require us to act in love, even when it’s not easy.

Some questions to reflect on.

How’s your home life? How are your relationships?

Are you getting what you need to get, are you giving what you need to give in those situations?

Are you really in communion with the people you share your life and your home with? Very often it’s those folk we’re most likely to take for granted. If not, what steps can you take to improve things?

And here in church – are we a real community; or are we more like an aggregate of individuals – sharing the same space week by week, but not much else?

How can we be more open to the other, be they longstanding member we just don’t know, or the stranger who’s here for the first time? How can we be the ones who take the initiative?

And lastly - Are you plugged in? Plugged into God, first and foremost? Responding to his call to faith and friendship? And then plugged into the church – bringing whatever it is you can bring, and learning whatever it is you need to learn.

We were made for real communion with God and with one another, and our hearts won’t let us rest until we find it.

Friday 15^th July was the first night of the Tiree music Festival. And it was an utter washout. There was so much rain that the campsite had to be abandoned, and the 600 Islanders went out of their way to put up the 1000 campers who’d come over from the mainland for the fun.

40 of them were hosted in the church at Heylipol. And guess where they slept? In that new space created by the removal of those pews. And when I saw her a few weeks later, Elspeth was full of stories of conversations, laughter and even some tears from that night as she and her folk looked after the campers and then just sat and talked with them.

An impromptu community, thrown together by the elements became a place where God was seen to be at work in the kindness of his people.

And it couldn’t have happened, unless both the building and the people were open.

Amen, and thanks be to God for his word.

Sermon for Ordination and Induction of Rev Alastair Bruce, Ellon Parish Church

Isaiah 30:15-18           Mark 1:29-39

There’s a story told about a minister who was conducting a baptism
as part of morning worship, and she’d been running around so much
before the service she didn’t realise that there was no water in the
font until they were halfway through the baptismal hymn.

So as discreetly as she could, she started making eyes to the
Session Clerk and nodding towards the font, and he – being quick on
the uptake – realised what the problem was and slipped out to try
and find a solution.

Now this was a wee country church, and the only receptacle he could
find to hand was a vase with some flowers in it. So he wheeched out
the flowers and filled up the vase with fresh water from the tap
outside. But how on earth was he going to get it into the font?

Well, of course there was no discreet way to do it, so ended up
doing the only thing he could.. He strode back into the church during
the last verse of the hymn, holding the vase out before him with
great pomp and ceremony. Poured the water into the font with a
flourish, bowed to the minister and sat back down in his pew.

And afterwards everyone was saying ‘wasn’t that a lovely thing they
did with the water. I’ve never seen that done before – wasn’t that a
lovely thing.”

And lo and behold – a new tradition was born!

How do we end up doing the things that we do within the church?

I wish I could say it was all by careful thought and prayer and
design, but we’re a human institution as well as a spiritual one, and
our reasons for doing things aren’t always as spiritual as they might
be.

Some of our practices owe more to accident and circumstance than
deliberate planning. Speaking to some of our members you’d think
that the old tradition of celebrating communion twice a year was the
eleventh commandment rather than a quirk of fate.

It’s well known that John Knox wanted the new church to celebrate the sacrament
every Sunday, there just weren’t enough ministers to make that possible in the early years of the Reformation. An accident of history that became a cherished tradition.

Some of the things we do in the church we do because it’s aye been
that way; and we in the Kirk are rarely in the vanguard of change.
We keep doing things that were meaningful for previous generations
without stopping to ask if they continue to have meaning for this
generation.

And some of the things we do in the church, we do simply because
we’re swept along in a river of well-meaning activity borne out of a
sense of duty, We ought to do this, we ought to do that. It’s what
the writer Gerry Hughes calls a hardening of the oughteries.

I heard a sketch a while ago by Adrian Plass in which a man comes to
faith.

“So what do I do now?” he says to his Christian friend….

“Well there’s the Bible Study on Monday, the Prayer Meeting’s on
Tuesday; on Thursday there’s a new Nurture Group starting – you’ll
need to get to that. Friday there’s a bus going to hear an American
Evangelist, Saturday there’s a day-long conference on next year’s
Mission and on Sunday there’s the service in the morning, Christian
Aid meal at lunchtime and communion in the evening.”

“Hallalujah!” says the new convert.  “Free at last”

We’re so busy doing things in the church. But I often wonder if
we’re too busy. Do we speak about the grace of God, but then find
ourselves living with the Pelagian anxiety that it all comes down to us
and our efforts? 

It’s easy to be busy in the church, especially in these challenging
times. It’s much harder to be busy with the right things.

But what are the right things? How would we even begin to know?

Well Isaiah and Mark have some wisdom to share with us on that
question this evening.

God, through the prophet Isaiah, is addressing his people. And his
accusation is that they are busy making their own plans about how to
deal with the challenges they face. Parleying with stronger nations,
forging alliances, playing politics, or failing all of that – simply
running away from danger. Fleeing on horses.

Their sin isn’t that they live in the real world and have tough choices
to make. It’s that they’re acting as though their hope and their
salvation lies entirely in their own hands.

And isn’t that a little like us, sometimes? Aren’t we tempted to think
that salvation lies in the next programme, or scheme that we start
in church life? If we could only get this group going, or get that
initiative started, or raise the money to do this piece of work, then
our fortunes would change. If we could only get that nice young,
capable minister and convince him and his family to stay around for a
few years, then we’d be sorted!

Well we need plans and programmes, and we need people to serve
the church in a whole host of different ways. But the place we need
to start isn’t with the doing, it’s with the being. Hear the word of
the Lord this evening through Isaiah:

God says: “In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and
trust is your strength”.

Alastair; good people of Ellon church - let those words encourage
you tonight. God is reminding you of your need to draw aside. To
rest; to change your thinking; to be still; to trust. Why? So that
when you go out in his name to live your life in all its aspects you’re
working from a place of centredness and contentment in God. You’re
channelling God’s energies, not just trying to summon your own.
You’re working to God’s priorities and not just pushing on with your
own. 

As ever, in recent years, there’s been a lot of talk about new
structures in the church and positive change is always welcome, but
what our church really needs isn’t new structures but deeper people.
Folk who, like a tree planted by a river, put down deep roots into
God that see them growing, stable and fruitful.

Can you imagine the powerhouses our congregations could become if
more of our people were willing to make that inner journey? We’d be
ready to take a few more risks. We’d be more willing to lend a hand
and not leave the work to others. We’d know in the core of our being
that we are loved with an unfailing love. That love might even spill
over to those around us and draw them into the circle of what God is
doing in the world.

I’ve believed for many years that the greatest task that our church
faces isn’t the task of mission; that’s a hugely important but
ultimately secondary task.

Our biggest task is to rediscover what is means to be disciples.
Knowing God for ourselves, not as a philosophical construct or a
tradition, or a printed word in a book, but as the loving Father in
whom we live and move and have our being. The God who’s closer to
us than our own skin.

If all of us could get closer to that God in that way, I’m pretty sure
all the work needing done in our churches would soon fall into place.

The writer and poet Antoine de Saint Exupery says

“If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood
and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long
for the endless immensity of the sea.”

The longing and love have to come first – then the doing naturally
follows. That’s why God says to us this evening:

“In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is
your strength”.

And in tonight’s gospel reading we see the fruit of that in a very
immediate, practical way in Jesus’ life. A way that can help us in our
living.

Jesus is in Capernaum and as usual, once the healings start, there’s a
press of bodies at the door looking for his time and attention. A
busy evening stretches out into a late night, but after a few short
hours of sleep he gets up while it’s still dark and manages to step
through the thicket of snoring disciples without waking anyone;
heading off to find some time and space to be with his Father.

But before long, Simon and some of his friends have noticed Jesus’
absence and when they finally track him down he’s greeted with

‘”Where have you been?! Everyone’s looking for you!”

Of course they are. There’s more work to be done. There’s always
more work to be done. More healings, more exorcisms. More need.

And in the face of that need, Jesus does something we just wouldn’t
expect Jesus to do. He says ‘no’.

Let me say that again because it might fly in the face of some of
your ideas about Jesus. Faced with real human need in those
circumstances, Jesus says ‘no’ and he moves on. Not unkindly, but
that’s what he does.

Why?

Well, he tells us in verse 38 of chapter 1

“Let us go somewhere else—to the nearby villages—so that I can
preach there also. That is why I have come.” 

That is why I have come.

Apparently, Jesus is clear in his own mind about his purposes, and
even when something that’s good and worthy comes his way, if it
doesn’t fit with the plan God’s given him then he feels free to say
‘no’.

That’s a liberating story for you and me and I want to end by making
just one observation about it. And it’s this -  You can’t say ‘NO’ to
things until you’ve said your definitive ‘YES’.

Jesus knew what he needed to be about. I think it’s safe to assume
that in his times of repentance, rest, quietness and trust he grew to
understand what God was calling him to be and to do and he said YES
to it.

And once he’d made up his mind about that, the rest was pretty
straightforward. When something came along that didn’t fit with
the plan, even something good, he said ‘NO’. It simplified things
immensely.

It wasn’t that the other things weren’t important – they often were.
They just weren’t what he was giving himself to at that time. They
were good, but they weren’t the best. They were worthy, but they
weren’t his particular calling.

His saying ‘YES’ to a few things allowed him to say a kind ‘NO’ to all
the rest.

Is part of the reason we get so overcommitted and stretched in life
is that we’re not clear on what we’ve given our ‘YES’ to, so we find it
really hard to say ‘NO’?

Is that why so many ministers, in the memorable words of Flannery
O’Connor, become a quivering mass of availability?

It’s much better for all of us to do two or three things well with
vitality and joy than ten things half-heartedly and with growing
resentment.

But how do I know what I should give my YES to?

Well that’s where the time away from the crowd comes in.
Repentance, rest, quietness, trust. Discerning where your particular
gifts and responsibilities lie; where you can best serve God’s
purposes. It’ll look different for each one of us. And it’ll look
different at different stages of our lives. But all of us need to
discern what we’re called to say YES to, so we’re able to say a life-
preserving NO when we need to.

I heard a wonderful reading many years ago at an ordination and I
think it’s worth sharing this evening. It’s from the Methodist Church
in Singapore and’s entitled ‘Called to Something Smaller’. It’s
addressed to the ordinand, but it has a word for the whole
congregation.

And it reminds us all that a pastor’s primary call isn’t
to become CEO of the local congregation. Leadership is the shared
task of the Kirk Session. The pastor’s call is to say a YES to the
particular tasks of ministry for which he or she has been set apart,
and then a gentle NO to everything  else which might detract from

that calling.

The liturgy says:

Tonight, in your ordination, you aren’t been called to ministry;
That happened at your baptism

You aren’t being called to be a caring person;
You’re already called to that.

You aren’t being called to serve the Church in committees, activities
and organisations;

That’s already implied in your membership.

You aren’t being called to become involved in social issues, ecology,
race, politics, revolution;
For that is laid upon every Christian.

You are being called to this charge, for something smaller and less
spectacular.

To read and interpret the sacred stories of our community, so that
they speak a word to people today.

To remember and practice those rituals and rites of meaning that in
their poetry address people at the level where change happens.

To foster in community, through word and sacrament, that
encounter with truth which will set men and women free to minister
as the body of Christ.

Ministry has always been the work of the whole people of God.

Ministers are simply those called to prepare the people of God for
the task.

To minister in Christ’s church in whatever capacity, is both a great
privilege and a significant responsibility. It will often ask more of us
that we feel able to give.

So may God help us remember that “In repentance and rest is our
salvation; in quietness and trust is our strength”.

Pentecost

Talk 1 – Fire

 

Why fire?

 

When the Spirit falls at that first Pentecost, the disciples are crowned with tongues of fire. Burning flames that don’t burn. There’s no sizzling of hair here, no scorching of flesh, no howls of pain. Just an experience of wonder that’s at one and the same time profoundly individual and deeply communal.

 

But why fire?

 

Christians tend to forget that Jews were observing Pentecost long before the Spirit came. The Old Testament feast of Pentecost was observed 50 days after Passover as a harvest festival, but also as a celebration of the giving of the law to Moses on Sinai. A time when God descended on the whole mountain wrapped in smoke and – Fire.

 

Maybe the tongues of flame are a reminder of a Holy God who descends and draws near to bring us blessings.  Or maybe they’re meant to say something about the nature of that God.

 

What is God like? What is fire like? Frederick Buechner offers us this by way of reflection:

 

Fire has no shape or substance. You can't taste it or smell it or hear it. You can't touch it except at great risk. You can't weigh it or measure it or examine it with instruments. You can never grasp it in its fullness because it never stands still. Yet there is no mistaking its extraordinary power.

The fire that sweeps through miles of forest like a terrible wind and the flickering candle that lights the old woman's way to bed. The burning logs on the subzero night that save the pipes from freezing and give summer dreams to the tabby dozing on the hearth. Even from millions of miles away, the conflagration of the sun that can turn green earth into desert and strike blind any who fail to lower their gaze before it. The power of fire to devastate and consume utterly. The power of fire to purify by leaving nothing in its wake but a scattering of ash that the wind blows away like mist.

A pillar of fire was what led the children of Israel through the wilderness, and it was from a burning bush that God first spoke to Moses. There were tongues of fire leaping up from the disciples on the day of Pentecost. In John's apocalypse it is a lake of fire that the damned are cast into, and the one called Faithful and True, he says, has eyes of fire as he sits astride his white horse.

In the pages of Scripture, fire is holiness, and perhaps never more hauntingly than in the little charcoal fire that Jesus of Nazareth, newly risen from the dead, kindles for cooking his friends' breakfast on the beach at daybreak.

 

Fire – powerful, moving, homely, wonderful, terrible. This is our God. This is his Spirit.

 

 

Talk 2 – The Personal Spirit

 

Fire, wind, breath.  All these metaphors for the Spirit serve us well, but they’re all incomplete because they lack one key ingredient and that’s the element of personality.

 

Many people, especially in charismatic churches, speak of God's Spirit as a force, or a power – and understandably so. How can you ‘pour out’ a person or be filled with a person. That’s how Scripture speaks of the Spirit, yet it’s also equally clear that the Spirit is personal.

 

If you scan through the Bible you'll discover that God's Spirit can be grieved and resisted, and He can speak, think, teach, testify, forbid, search out secrets and intercede on our behalf. That doesn’t sound like an impersonal force to me.

 

When we dig a little deeper, discover that this Spirit’s involved in divine work, like creation, resurrection and sanctification.

 

He's described as all-powerful and eternal. And Paul, in the First letter to the Corinthians, tells us that the Spirit knows and understands the deep things of God:

For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the man's spirit within him? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.

 

So in the same way as you and I have a Spirit, it seems that God has a Spirit, and that Spirit, like the Father and the Son, is fully divine.

 

So with that kind of evidence, it's hard to escape the conclusion that Holy Spirit, rather than being an impersonal force, is a personal divine being, co-equal with the Father and the Son.

 

And that takes us into Trinitarian territory – but we’ll leave that mystery for another day.

 

So fire, breath, wind – all good metaphors. But never forget that the Spirit is a person, with will, intent and character of his own – not a force to be sent this way and that at either God’s or our bidding.

 

And one last thing on personhood.

 

All along I’ve spoken of the Spirit as ‘him’. But is the Spirit a ‘him’? If you look at the Greek, the word for Spirit – pneuma - is actually neuter, so by rights I should be calling the Spirit ‘it’, but when you do that in English you tend to turn the object into a thing rather than a person.

 

We need to remember that when we talk about God, all our gendered language is metaphorical. When we use male pronouns about God, we’re not saying that God is somehow male. That’s a category error like asking what colour accountancy is or how fast the letter ‘h’ can swim. It doesn’t make sense. Gender is a property of limited, embodied creatures not the infinite divine spirit. God is beyond gender. Genesis teaches that both male and female are made in God’s image, so by definition, both genders must reflect aspects of who God is. God isn’t bound to either maleness or femaleness. Those terms don’t really apply.

 

But given that the second person of the trinity was incarnate in a male form, as Jesus – and that we’ve been taught from the cradle to refer to God in male terms, as Father, theologians and hymn writers for many years, but especially more recently, have started speaking of the spirit in feminine terms to try and redress the balance a little.

 

In her hymn  “Enemy of Apathy” Kathy Galloway writes “For she is the Spirit, one with God in essence, gifted by the saviour in eternal love; and she is the key, opening the scriptures, enemy of apathy and heavenly dove.”

 

Despite the fact that the work of the Spirit is often nurture, guidance, counsel, birthing new things, some of you might find that feminine language strange. I want to reassure you that it’s not heretical! It’s fine. Don’t get hung up about gendered language. But never mistake the Spirit for a thing. He/she/it is personal.

 

  

Talk 3 - The Empowering Spirit

 

So with a fiery outpouring, God’s Spirit descends in person and comes to rest on the disciples.

 

But how do we know that it ever happened?

 

Because we tend to believe the Bible, I guess. But also because the evidence for the change in the disciples is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that the Resurrection really happened and the Spirit really came.

 

These men go from cowering behind doors to preaching to thousands in a matter of days. From leaving Jesus in the lurch to going to their own crosses for the sake of his name. This is not normal. What we are seeing in the disciples is the transforming work of the Spirit at its most exceptional.

 

So what is this gift of the Spirit? What does the Spirit bring them?

 

Well, we part of it, I guess, is enthusiasm and energy. And Lord knows we need as much of that as we can get!

 

That very word, enthusiasm, comes from the Greek – en theos – in God. When people are genuinely in God there’s a lightness about their Spirits, a hope, a joy. There’s a movement to their living; there’s a sense of quiet purpose. An optimism that’s founded in who God is, not how things are.

Even as I wrote those words, I thought ‘Lord, I want to be more like that’! This is the kind of person I want to be.

 

Gloom, pessimism, weariness – they can become our norm, if we let them. It takes an encounter with an enthusiast to shake us out of them. Someone who doesn’t deny the challenges in life, or pretend them away, but has the vision to see through them and beyond them to where God is already working to bring life and hope.

 

What did the Spirit bring? Enthusiasm. Energy. And also Power. Wherever the disciples went after this, things happened. Provocative things, disturbing things, amazing things, good things. People noticed what they were doing. Some responded in faith, others threw rocks at them or clapped them in irons. But they were rarely if ever ignored.

 

The influential author and pastor AW Tozer once said:

 

“If the Holy Spirit was withdrawn from the church today, 95 percent of what we do would go on and no one would know the difference. If the Holy Spirit had been withdrawn from the New Testament church, 95 percent of what they did would stop, and everybody would know the difference.”

 

That’s an observation worth pondering. If the Spirit upped and left our church today, would things just roll on as usual?

 

Are we working out of our own power to our own ends, or are we working out of God’s power to God’s ends

 

Let me say one more thing as I end this little chunk of the sermon.

 

There are churches around the world who read this story in Acts and come to the conclusion that if we’re filled with the Spirit, then speaking in tongues, miracles and healings and so on will follow – as they did for the apostles.

 

Now God must be God in the church, and it’s up to God how and when he blesses his people with supernatural gifts. But I think it’d be a mistake to assume that what we’re seeing here in Acts 2 is a norm that we should all be aspiring to.

 

The Spirit, it seems respects context. The Spirit gives us the gifts we need in the moment to be about the work God would have us do.

 

What’s happening in Jerusalem at Pentecost? Thousands of Jews from across the world have gathered for the celebration. Dozens of languages are spoken by the visitors to the city.

 

What does the Spirit do? The Spirit blesses the apostles with the gift of language. Not the babbling prayer language we call speaking in tongues – actual understandable languages. That was what was needed. That’s what the Spirit gave, so the word could go out to the assembled crowds in ways they would understand.

 

What do we need from the Spirit in our time, so the words we speak and the way we choose to live reach our generation with the good news?

 

Faith? Courage? Innovation? Generosity? Hospitality?

 

Let’s bring it even closer to home. What gift do you need from the Spirit to reach the people God’s placed you with?

 

 

Talk 4 - The Here and Now Spirit

 

Provocative words from Barbara Brown Taylor to end with, reflecting on today’s story from Acts.

 

The question for me is whether we still believe in a God who acts like that. Do we still believe in a God who blows through closed doors and sets our heads on fire? Do we still believe in a God with the power to transform us, both as individuals and as a people, or have we come to an unspoken agreement that our God is pretty old and tired by now; someone to whom we may address our prayer requests but not anyone we really expect to change our lives.

 

There’s a lot of fine teaching and writing out there on the Holy Spirit. And I hope that none of it satisfies you.

 

I hope that you’re not satisfied until you’ve felt the Holy Spirit blow through your own life, and maybe even set your own head on fire a little bit.

 

It still happens.

 

Moments of insight, strength, courage, prompting, conviction that can only come from God.

 

As I prepared for today I cast my mind back through my own back catalogue of those kinds of experiences. Things I’ve shared with you in sermons over these ten years – times when God’s spirit seemed to speak very clearly.

The evening in September ’86 when I gave my life to Christ. Praying, after nearly getting mugged on a train in Morocco. Sitting with my brother as he died of cancer. Walking the labyrinth at the Bield in Perthshire.

 

And even as I remembered those times, and others, the Spirit spoke wordlessly in my heart once again. She said: “Paul, why do so many of your stories of me come from the past? Are you missing me in the present? Has it all become routine? Are your eyes open to the opportunities I’m setting before you today? We need to make some new stories together, you and I.”

 

Indeed we do. We all do.

 

Let’s go, in the power of the Spirit, and make them.

As I prepared for today I cast my mind back through my own back catalogue of those kinds of experiences. Things I’ve shared with you in sermons over these ten years – times when God’s spirit seemed to speak very clearly.

The evening in September ’86 when I gave my life to Christ. Praying, after nearly getting mugged on a train in Morocco. Sitting with my brother as he died of cancer. Walking the labyrinth at the Bield in Perthshire.

 

And even as I remembered those times, and others, the Spirit spoke wordlessly in my heart once again. She said: “Paul, why do so many of your stories of me come from the past? Are you missing me in the present? Has it all become routine? Are your eyes open to the opportunities I’m setting before you today? We need to make some new stories together, you and I.”

 

Indeed we do. We all do.

 

Let’s go, in the power of the Spirit, and make them.