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.