Encountering God

Passage for reflection: Isaiah 6: 1 - 8

Last Monday, 24 May, was the day the Church remembers the conversion of the founder of Methodism, John Wesley. Remember in the evening of 24 May 1738, John Wesley went unwillingly to a meeting in Aldersgate Street in London where he heard Martin Luther’s preface to Paul’s letter to the Romans being read and we know at about a quarter to nine while the reading was shared - words about how God can work in us - he felt his heart strangely warmed. He had an encounter in that meeting with God and it changed him forever. 

Methodism was raised up as a heart religion. It was born out of a meeting with God. Its members were on fire because God was real. Wesley said later about the movement he began:  “ My fear is not that our great movement, known as the Methodists will eventually cease to exist or one day die from the earth. My fear is that our people will become content to live without the fire, the power, the excitement, the supernatural element that makes us great.”

Where’s the fire in our belly today? Do people see any excitement in us? Do we encounter the power of God in our worship? Will we feel it this Sunday as we gather for worship? When we go to church, and we have our service we need to expect that like Wesley we will be changed by an encounter with the divine, his mystery, his holiness, his glory, his overwhelming love for us. We’ve become very fussy about our worship, which hymns we like, how hard the pew is, where we sit and the quality of the preacher! I used to ring my Mum on a Sunday afternoon and ask her how the service had been that morning. They had an 11am service. She’d say “it was good” sometimes. “What was good?” I’d ask. “He finished at ten to.” Under the hour was good. I’m not sure there was much encounter with God going on. 

If we are to be credible, our primary reason for being here is to meet God and to expect to be changed. And God should be met by anyone coming into our churches. We enter into the mystery, we come in awe, we glimpse some of God’s character, we lose ourselves in wonder, love and praise. Our churches are not social clubs, they are places where God and his people meet. When Lis and I got together she took me to her home church — Peterborough Cathedral. It was a Sunday afternoon Evensong in June 2016. I remember sitting in the choir stalls and saying out loud “WOW!” An appropriate response really! We got married in that cathedral less than a year later. I’m still blown away every time we go in it. 

This week’s Old Testament reading is one of my favourites. It’s a vision of God. Isaiah – already a prophet – is in the temple and suddenly sees something beyond what’s physically there. God. God in glory, God in mystery, God who is beyond what Isaiah’s eyes can see or comprehend – but God who is certainly not abstract. The God whom Isaiah sees is certainly incomprehensible – in the old sense that he cannot be contained, cannot be compassed by Isaiah’s vision. There is mystery, but there is also glory. There is the unseen but also the seen. The house was filled with smoke, but also, Isaiah saw the Lord.

And that seeing was a commissioning. When Isaiah saw the Lord, that vision of mystery and glory wasn’t for himself alone. Nor was it a single occasion with no impact on the rest of his life. Seeing the Lord – in mystery and glory, in Threeness and oneness – was a call. When he saw the Lord, Isaiah realised his own sin and the sin of the society he lived in – I am a man of unclean lips, I live among a people of unclean lips. He realised he needed to repent and be forgiven. And he realised that God had a task for him.

It is seeing God – God in glory and mystery – which makes Isaiah realise who he is – a sinful man, in a sinful society - and what he is called to do – shout God’s glory, God’s mystery, God’s justice into that society, proclaim God’s condemnation on acts of pride and arrogance, oppression and violence, on greed that ignores and disregards those it tramples underfoot. 

Isaiah’s vision teaches us that the better we know God, the more we see of God, the more clearly we will see ourselves and our world and the better we can respond to God’s call. That’s certainly what Wesley experienced. That meeting with God on a May evening in a meeting he didn’t really want to go to changed not only his perception of God but the direction of his ministry. We sing of it: “ See how great a flame aspires, kindled by a spark of grace.” So, where’s our spark today? Here’s another Wesley quote: “Light yourself on fire with passion and people will come from miles to watch you burn.” 

The good news is this. When we meet God in his vastness and find ourselves before him our priorities change and we find a new purpose. “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord”, says Isaiah.  King Uzziah died in 740BC. He reigned for fifty-two years and his reign was blessed with material prosperity but he became arrogant and proud and tried to manipulate religion away from the worship of God to worship of him. It’s almost that in the Temple here God reasserts his authority. It is in the Temple that, for Isaiah, heaven and earth meet and as they do, the prophet gains a fresh understanding of God’s awesomeness. In the light of what his eyes behold, he becomes acutely aware of the breadth and depth of his own shortcomings and insignificance.

The effect is cataclysmic.

His whole world is shaken to its very core but the gap between the individual and his God is bridged dramatically (and painfully!) by a burning coal. In this moment, Isaiah also discovers that the God he has glimpsed in such an overwhelming way is a God who wants to reach out to his people – and it is that realisation that moves Isaiah to do something quite radical. While other prophets are called by God, often by name, to speak and act on God’s behalf, here Isaiah volunteers. The young prophet hears God’s question, ‘Whom shall I  send, and who will go for us’? Perhaps Isaiah hears too, the longing in God’s voice and he sticks his hand up in the air, asking God to choose him.

This holy, holy, holy God is asking who, in an often broken and unjust world,

who will speak... and listen... and ‘be’, for God?

I had lunch with one of our Supernumerary ministers this week and we both recalled our ministerial training. I shared with him my memory of my college principal at Hartley Victoria College, one Rev Graham Slater. Graham loved philosophy of religion and told us we would understand it by Easter. He didn’t say which Easter. So it got to exam time. The passmark was 40 per cent. I got 41. He said to me “there young man, I knew you understood it!” I didn’t understand it, I did enough to pass the exam. There was much I didn’t get. But maybe with God that’s okay. Maybe we aren’t meant to know everything. Maybe God is not to be explained but encountered. There are those who’ve domesticated God to fit their own script. There are churches who’ve made their church the god while the living God has left the building and is at work down the road...

For John Wesley, the encounter with God led to a radical movement being born which shared Jesus with ordinary people. People and society were changed. 

For Isaiah, the encounter with God led to a sense of his inadequacy but a compulsion to serve.

And what of us? If we’ve met the living God what’s our response? Worrying about the church or placing ourselves in his hands? 

Pentecost 2021

Passage for reflection: Acts 2: 1 - 21 

There’s a prayer from the Iona Community that always challenges me on the day of Pentecost. 

“Take us shake us remake us no longer is what we have been important it is what with you we can be...”

God is always calling us to a new place. 

The Church is called to live a new reality: the reign of God. Sometimes we begin an act of worship with these words: The Lord is here, his Spirit is with us. If his Spirit is with us,well, that’s a bit exciting, a bit scary,  a bit dangerous, because you never know where we might be led next. 

Imagine the disciples writing their autobiography. They might have called it “just when we thought we were comfortable...” 

By a lakeside some of them were content to catch fish. Another had a good job collecting taxes. Their life changed when Jesus walked by and said “Follow me!” 

They went with this Jesus. As they watched him minister, they believed they were caught up in something amazing as people were healed, changed and religious and political big wigs were cut down to size. It was exciting. So they said to Jesus “we will follow you wherever you go.” 

But then it got really serious. And when the one they had followed was condemned to die, and left to rot on a cross, they thought that was the end. Most of them abandoned him. And after hiding away they went back to where they began, fishing. I’m not sure if Matthew went back to tax collecting but how foolish they’d all been to act on what they thought was the best offer they’d ever had. 

But of course it wasn’t the end. Resurrection, ascension and the promise of his presence for ever showed them God is never ever finished with us. We are a people for who the story is never finished. There is always more. Even on days when death seems to win, there is always more, and on days when we think how it is is it, there is always more. An empty tomb, a call to look to Jesus, an outpouring of the Holy Spirit enabling us and compelling us to be a Church that believes God has so much more to say, and which lives knowing his presence is all sufficient. John Wesley, whose conversion we remember on Monday, called this the “optimism of grace.” 

“Just when we think we are comfortable, there is God.”

How would the second part of the disciple’s autobiography go? Surely it would have some words to describe the change in them once the Spirit Jesus promised them came. Remember they had been a shambles, afraid, not prepared to stand up for what they said they believed. They’d been frightened in case anyone from the world found them. They’d locked the door. Now God was leading them to share with those they had tried to avoid. A new courage and a conviction they could do no other than share the good news of Jesus. In my letter I write for the two churches in Ripon each week, I suggested this week people might read the Acts of the Apostles in one go. The early Church grew really fast, people through this small group of people, heard of God’s love in a new and fresh way, and they wanted more of it. This small group also rocked the world. There’s a verse somewhere in Acts where the authorities want to stop what is basically a spiritual revolution. “These men who have turned the world upside down have come here! Help!” 

And so we celebrate Pentecost 2021. For some of our churches it’s the day we’ve chosen to reopen our doors and have worship in our building together again. It’s the beginning of us sighing with relief that we might be able soon to get back to normal. 

But here’s the thing. Do we really want normal? What if God has been using these past fourteen months to prepare us for a new chapter in our story? What if he is wanting to pour out his Spirit in us, no matter how many of us there are, and say to us, “come on, this isn’t over yet.” A man called Conzelmann calls where we are in the Christian story “the era of the Church” and he says we are meant to be here until Jesus returns again. Well, he’s not coming yet is he? Perhaps he’ll surprise us but until that day we keep working, we keep faith alive, we keep believing, we keep challenging injustice, we keep caring for people. 

I suggest to us that Pentecost 2021 might challenge us to remember two things.

One, that we hold on to hope. The world has changed even since last we were in our church buildings. We will have to face hard questions about what we can do and what we can no longer do or need not do, but let’s remember when those disciples thought it was all over, God acted. The Bible tells us hope does not disappoint us. We are not numerically the number we were, we are all a bit older and a bit wearier, but hey, let’s ask God to breathe on us and show us what we are called to be again. Remember the promise given to Ezekiel in the Old Testament: “I will put my Spirit in you and you will live.”

Then, let’s not beat ourselves up. Let’s not have Church make us stressed and ill. Let’s ask what we are good at it, and do more of it, let’s spend time together working out what being Church in the places God has placed us means today. Let’s try as those disciples did to be brave enough to look outwards and be in the middle of the people who live beside us. Let’s get talked about again! Let’s make ourselves relevant again. It can be through a cup of coffee, being there for people in need, having the church open for people to find peace, and talking about things people are actually talking about. I write sermons on a Saturday so they are fresh. A lady in the Fens Circuit when I led worship in her church for the first time said to me afterwards “well, that weren’t boring!” 

I began with a prayer about allowing God to take us and shake us. Here’s another one which sums up I think our task as Pentecost people. We rely on the Spirit, we look out to the world and we are certain God is still at work. It’s written by Rachel Poolman, the URC minister on Holy Island: Lift your hearts to heaven and receive the eternal gift of peace. Keep your feet on the ground and walk with those who need God's love.This day you are loved by God. You are held by God. You are blessed by God now and for evermore.

May the Spirit who hovered over the waters when the world was created, breathe into us the life He gives.

May the Spirit, who overshadowed the Virgin when the eternal Son came among us, make us joyful in the service of the Lord.

May the Spirit, who set the Church on fire upon the Day of Pentecost, bring the world alive with the love of the risen Christ. Amen. 

Jesus prayer for us

When life is hard I always turn to this prayer of Thomas Merton. Maybe it will help you today too.

 

My Lord God,
I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.
But I believe that the desire to please you
does in fact please you.
And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.

I will not fear, for you are ever with me,
and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

Over the past few months, some of our churches have had banners up outside them with a message consisting of two words: “Try Praying.” The idea behind the banner and the booklet people could pick up was to say actually praying isn’t as hard as you think.

 

We will have had people say to us “will you say a prayer for me on Sunday?” They want us as part of our spiritual practice to intercede for them. They think we are closer to God than they are, which of course is not true. 

 

In the Gospel passage for the seventh Sunday of Easter, the Sunday after Ascension, we again return to what is known as the farewell discourse of Jesus. Jesus is preparing his disciples that he was leaving them. Before leaving them, he wants to give them as much help as he can. The best help he give is to pray for them. 

 

What is prayer? Prayer is the exercise of drawing on the grace of God. Prayer is bringing the concerns of humanity into the infinite care of God. Prayer is to focus on God rather than our own worries. So Jesus lifts the disciples to God. 

Jesus’ prayer in John’s Gospel is a heartfelt plea that his friends will be alright. The thought of leaving them is almost too much. And so He cries out to His Father to ‘Protect them, look after them, keep them safe!’

Imagine Jesus praying that prayer over you and yours. What wonderful comfort is to be found in that thought. In Jesus, we have a friend and Saviour who ‘lives to intercede for us.’

How fabulous is it that here Jesus prays FOR his friends. This isn’t us asking for prayer, this is purely his own initiative. He so wants those he is leaving to be okay, he commends them to his Father to look after them. 

When ministers leave an appointment we are meant to read the “charter for incoming ministers” in the book of rules. It’s very interesting what you find when you arrive in a new place.

You are meant when you arrive in a new placeto be able to pick up things without any bother, one example is an up to date membership list with correct addresses. I spend ages preparing good handover notes because while I leave people in my profession, I want them to be okay after I’ve gone even if they are glad I have gone! I inherited a membership and adherents list once and I went through it with my stewards. Several people were on the list who I didn’t know. “Oh,” said one steward “she hasn’t been to church for ages!” “Um,” replied the other, “she died in 2009!” To which I said “why didn’t you remove her from the list?” To which I was told “we didn’t like to.” 

Here we have a Jesus who doesn’t simply leave, he finds leaving hard and he wants life without him physically present to go as smoothly as possible. For his friends (and we) are to carry on his work. 

The divine intention for us if we take time to receive it, Jesus’ prayer for us is to flourish, and live life in all its fullness, to know we are never abandoned. The first letter of John says this: “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life.”

Jesus’ call for the disciples (and us) to be safe isn’t about that happening one day. He’s wanting them (and us) to know God’s protection every day. Why? 

Well, remember this line in his prayer: “I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I am asking you to protect them from the evil one.” We celebrate the feast of Pentecost next Sunday, the day when the Holy Spirit comes on those disciples, the day the Church is born, the day the call to be in the world is understood by Jesus’ people. That call is tough and it still is and we need to be constantly reminded we don’t live in our own strength. We need to know over and over we are remembered.

In a frantic and complicated world, we need to know someone is caring enough for us to think about us. 

When we are rushing about, meeting deadlines, even preparing to leave somewhere - we don’t want to think about others but our own stress about how much there is to do. But God’s grace in Jesus isn’t like this. God is there. “Be still and know that I am God.” And then there’s Hebrews chapter 7 which says about Jesus “he is able to save completely those who come to him, because he always lives to pray for them.” 

I’ve just started reading a new book about choral evensong because there’s a lot of Anglican in me. We both love choral evensong. It says you know what - anyone coming to evensong in a cathedral or large church can be confident that they will not be quizzed about their motives and beliefs or asked to leave their contact details. We are all there to meet God, to join in the worship story of his people and to centre ourselves on his love.

We’re hopeless at just letting people be quietly immersed in prayer. 

After the benediction in our service we pounce on people we don’t know, ask their life story and pray they will fill all our vacant jobs, especially if they are under the age of sixty! 

But maybe this little gem of a book called “Lighten Our Darkness” suggests people just need to be allowed to be, and to know as Jesus says they are interceded for.  

Merton who I began with says in another piece of writing that prayer “requires us to stand in God’s presence with open hands, naked and vulnerable, proclaiming to ourselves and to others that without God we can do nothing.”

Perhaps as we ask what we use our church buildings for, as we think about our mission over the next few years, maybe having our church open for people to come and be comforted in prayer and peace is vital. The good news of knowing we are held, enfolded, encompassed, looked after, is part of what we need to offer to a hurting and confused people. Isn’t it great Jesus is concerned, even when he’s about to leave for our well-being? 

Ascension thoughts from holiday

Malcolm Guite has written a helpful sonnet for Ascension Day this year: 

We saw his light break through the cloud of glory
Whilst we were rooted still in time and place
As earth became a part of Heaven’s story
And heaven opened to his human face.
We saw him go and yet we were not parted
He took us with him to the heart of things
The heart that broke for all the broken-hearted
Is whole and Heaven-centred now, and sings,
Sings in the strength that rises out of weakness,
Sings through the clouds that veil him from our sight,
Whilst we our selves become his clouds of witness
And sing the waning darkness into light,
His light in us, and ours in him concealed,
Which all creation waits to see revealed.

I bang on a lot about doing all the parts of the story of how God deals with his people through the Church year. We are not good at marking Ascension Day. But to go straight from the Easter season to Pentecost without standing at the foot of a mountain with the disciples and experiencing an amazing, confusing yet soon to be life changing theophany, is as horrific as missing out Good Friday before Easter. Imagine reading a long novel you’ve got out of the library and you discover the pages of a crucial chapter have been ripped out. The rest of the plot doesn’t make sense. 

Ascension Day invites us to look up. 

Have you ever tried to walk along a street in a busy city in rush hour? It’s a dangerous thing to do. Why? Because people don’t look where they are going because they are looking at a mobile phone as they walk along, so they are looking at vital stuff they need to know now. They aren’t aware of what’s around them at all, so they walk into the road not noticing the lights are on red, and they bump into people coming the other way. 

I was watching a programme for teenagers about improving your mental health, this being mental health awareness week. Three teenagers were invited to not use social media for three days and to hand over all their devices. They struggled initially, but after a time, they began to appreciate things around them, some even began to have conversations with their family! 

We are on holiday this week and before anyone says my writing this is work, it isn’t, writing is part of my daily spiritual discipline and I am marking this day by writing because I have no wish to go to a service today in a face covering. And I will not apart from to lead one because I can only wear one for a short while before struggling. Anyway... Part of our time this week is being used to explore our local area a bit more. I’m very blessed to live in such a beautiful part of the country. It’s good to look up and see amazing vistas. It’s good to look up and notice what we easily miss. On Tuesday, we did a little tour down the North Yorkshire coast starting at Saltburn and ending at Scarborough. A change of scene and a change of pace can be sources of healing. The theme for this mental health awareness week is connecting with nature. I love the sea and I miss living near it, so the occasional trip across the moors will be a regular treat.  I do my best sermon preparation while walking outside. It clears my head, and gives me space, especially at the moment when I’m doing most of my work from home in the same room day after day. To look up is healthy. 

It’s so easy to get bogged down with the worries of the world. I look at the situation today in Israel and Gaza and shudder that that part of the world is alight again with bombs and hatred going backwards and forwards. I see people anxious as Covid restrictions ease but now there is concern about a new Indian variant out there. I watch people facing hard stuff who need help who cannot find the help they urgently need because the resources aren’t there. I look at the church worrying about how to keep going with falling numbers and an ageing demographic with little energy to do any more. Maybe we need to look up more else we will get shuffle along the ground and eventually we will fall over. 

Luke has two versions of the Ascension. In Acts, the disciples stand staring at the sky, perplexed. An angel comes and tells them to stop staring. He points them to the hope of the parousia, and tells them to go back to Jerusalem and wait for the power from on high. His Gospel only has a few verses about Ascension. Jesus blesses the disciples, and as he blesses them, he is taken up into heaven. What’s the disciples reaction? Not sadness or panic he has gone, but they return home with great joy and they spend a lot of time in praise and worship in the Temple. 

My Anglican colleague, Ian Kitchen, has this helpful paragraph on his benefice Facebook page: 

“The disciples’ final image of the risen Jesus’ time on earth would have been one of receiving his blessing and during that blessing, of seeing him return to his Father in heaven.  What an amazing final picture that must have left in their minds. What a blessing after all their very human doubts, their failure to understand and their loss of hope and courage along the way. Jesus had never given up on them and had promised that they would not be left alone, but that he would send ‘what my Father promised’ – the ‘power from on high’ - his Holy Spirit to empower them for the mission that he had entrusted to them.  In the times that lay ahead of them, how the disciples must have needed to remember this moment of ‘great joy’ when Jesus blessed them and moved into the reality of heaven.”

After a rollercoaster of emotions, I sense those disciples finally realise who they’ve been with for the last few years and overwhelmed with being enfolded with a presence of the divine they now know they will never be alone. It takes looking up in order to be in the world. The problems are still there, but it’s almost like they are scooped up into a huge Christ offered eternal hug - even if for now it’s a socially distanced sideways one! 

I encourage us today to take time to look up. Where is God? Where’s your thin place? Can you even with a huge lost of problems, know there is a greater power about and can you as a result of that find that great joy those disciples found? 

Barbara Brown Taylor in Gospel Medicine writes that Ascension Day, one of the most forgotten feast days of the church year, is the day that eleven people, with nothing but a promise and a prayer, consented to become the church.

For while they still stood with their necks cranked up, gobsmacked, wondering what the heck was going on. They were given the message: stop looking up, better to look around instead, at each other, at the world, at the ordinary people in their lives, because that was where they were most likely to find Christ, not the way they used to know him, but the new way, not in his own body, but in their bodies, the risen, the ascended Lord who was no longer anywhere on earth so that he could be everywhere instead.

Good endings

When you have a new book to read, do you go to the back page to see how it ends before you start to read it? How something is going to end fascinates us. Some endings are predictable, others are disappointing and others are a surprise, the ending isn’t as we expected it to be. 

Tonight over 11 million people won’t move for an hour. It’s the ending of Line of Duty. After six series of unanswered questions we are promised  an ending. It might shock us, we have no idea. The writer tells us we must watch right until the end. For those of you who’ve never watched it it doesn’t matter, but for those of us who’ve tried to follow the various plots, the ending matters. I don’t want to yell at the set at 10pm “you can’t end it like that!”

How does the story of Jesus end? 

How does the Gospel of Mark end? We think this bit is an appendix. For the early church the women running off in fear was a bit abrupt.

Eusebius in the 4th century remarked that “accurate” copies of Mark’s gospel ended at verse 8adding that verses 9 to 20 were missing from “almost all manuscripts”.

A number of copies that DO have verses 9 to 20 have the verses marked by asterisks which were conventional signs used by scribes to mark off questionable additions to the text. All the extra bits are in the other Gospels.

I’ll look at verse 8b in a bit, but from verse 9, we get brief mentions of Jesus appearing to Mary Magdalene, about men not believing them, of him appearing to two travellers walking into the country and again the rest not believing them, and then him appearing to the eleven, upbraiding them for their lack of faith and their stubbornness and then there’s a commission. 

“Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to all creation.” The work of Jesus is a sandwich between the beginning of the Gospel and the end. Marks first words are “the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ the Son of God” and his last words are “they went out and proclaimed the good news everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the message by the signs that accompanied it.” The earthly story of Jesus ends with a commission: it ends with the Church being born. And what’s the Church? A people raised up to tell good news…

That’s the longer end of the Gospel. There’s a shorter ending. 

“And afterward, Jesus himself sent out through them, from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation.” Again the end involves us. How do we feel about that?

Here’s the thing. Whatever is now, our faith is that the end will be different. Remember what the evangelist Billy Graham once said: “I’ve read the last page of the Bible. It's all going to turn out all right.”

 

How does it end? My late beloved college principal at Hartley Victoria in Manchester, Rev Graham Slater used to come and assess our services on Sundays but you’d never know when he’d pop up. We’d be planned miles away in the wilds of Lancashire in exotic places like Bacup, and we’d think he’ll never have driven all this way and you’d come out of the vestry and there he’d be sitting. He used to sit with his eyes shut all of the service.

He was taking every word in and when we met to hear his verdict he’d say “where was your clincher young man?” He liked a proper ending. What are we going to do because of what we’ve just heard? 

 

In “Living His Story” Hannah Steele talks about the Church and how we’ve been in this pandemic. She reminds us that in previous pandemics wealthy pagans would run to the hills for safety, whereas the Church would stay, caring for the sick, witnessing through terrible times, sometimes even at the cost of their own lives. The Church was shown to be reliable, compassionate, unafraid to run to the crisis rather than away. The Church was determined to be “out there” as a witness. 

Maybe then when we work with people where they are today, we point them to another possibility. We lead them from fear to faith, from despair to hope, from worry to confidence in certainty. Maybe the end is up to us. If this is the era of the Church, then what we share matters.