Trying not to break the world

Someone last week went to revisit the home of Anne Frank. He writes “It was an honour to sign the guest book in the home of Anne Frank.

I was here as a younger man and thought about her life as a dark chapter of history.

Today, I can’t help but think of her story as one of caution. Our world is fragile, and it’s incumbent on us not to break it.

I think I told some of you last Sunday I write my sermon on a Saturday. I think to be fresh! But now I’m almost having to write on Sunday morning as the world changes minute by minute. While we are here for an hour or so one word might be very dramatic or very dangerous. We live, as the visitor to Anne Frank’s house said in a very fragile world this morning.

 

What is the preachers task? It could be to pretend we live in a fluffy bunny world and we shouldn’t talk about the horrible things. But that would be to lessen the power of the hermeneutical word. We need to listen for God speaking into this world. So I think we need a bit of prophetic preaching at the moment. What is God saying to us and what can we do to make things better?

 

In the passages the lectionary is throwing up in these weeks before Lent we are confronted by Jesus suggesting to counter the world and it’s controversial people, we need to live distinctively.

 

In the United Nations Building in New York there is a large mosaic by Norman Rockwell that depicts people of all ages, of different genders, and many nationalities, and embedded within the tiles are the words of "The Golden Rule" –

"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

The story is told of a small liquor store in America.. On the side of its building are the words we hear from Jesus in today’s Gospel reading with two wonderful additions: “Love Your Enemies,” and “It will drive them crazy,” and “And cold beer!” Maybe that’s what Jesus imagines as he ponders the divisions and polarisation that surrounds him, and all of Israel, on all sides: Sadducees, Pharisees, Temple priests, and Essenes all each insisting that only they know the way to be a faithful Jew, and that only they knew how to rid the region of the intense military and economic control of Caesar’s Rome. This Caesar, who fancied himself a god. Try to imagine, Jesus seems to be saying, all of the infighting parties sitting down together with Herod and Pilate to enjoy a beverage of their choosing, and all of them working out their differences and moving on to possibly embrace his vision of the kingdom of God, his Father. A kingdom in which people really truly love their neighbours and love one another! Just try to imagine that!

Love your enemies, be good to those who hate you he says.

In the Biblical traditions he embraces with his whole heart, mind, and soul, this meant something more like, “When you come upon your enemy’s ox or donkey going astray, you shall bring it back. When you see the donkey of one who hates you struggling under its burden… you must help to set it free” (Exodus 23:4-5). Or perhaps this, from Proverbs: “If your enemies are hungry, give them bread to eat, and if they are thirsty, give them water to drink” (Proverbs 25:21).

Too hard? Or is the future of the world dependent on it? It’s much easier to want our enemy or that different person dealt with, or trampled on or their spirit destroyed. It’s much easier to lash out than work for peace. Peace isn’t about doing a deal and not even having the country who has been invaded at the table to talk. Remember Ukraine tomorrow please on the third anniversary of hostilities there. I’m having a prayer time in the centre hall at 6pm if you’d like to join me or maybe you can just take a moment to pray for real just lasting peace at home. Also remember Germany as she has an election and we watch that result closely and keep praying that President Trump might just well… you can end that sentence how you like!

 

It’s easier Jesus to hold on to our position because we are right. They started it! I think I’ve told you about a Church Council I once had where two of the characters in the church despised each other and meetings could be fraught. In one they disagreed violently and one said to the other “ shall we take this outside?” Two days later I caught them having a brawl in the car park. I summoned both of them to my office. Both accused the other of starting it. Neither would budge and I couldn’t solve it. It took one of them to leave the church in the end for it to stop and it was horrible that the one left acted like he’d won a war. It all began at a property committee where one of them wanted to spend some money!

 

How do we live as distinctive people of faith today? Well Jesus suggests in his sermon to people living in as confused times as we are these holy habits:

 

·       Love your enemies, do good to them

·       Bless those who curse you

·       Give to everyone who asks you

·       Do not judge

·       Do not condemn

·       Forgive

·       Give

God’s justice has a different rule book.

God who forgives us invites us to forgive, love, accept. We can’t do much about Ukraine and Russia and Presidents Trump and Putin nor Israel and Gaza and other hot spots of misunderstanding apart from prayer but we can here in our communities live in the light of God’s amazing love for us. To forgive is not to forget but to say let’s walk together and discover our shared humanity again.

 

Last November I went to a school reunion forty years after leaving. I’d not seen my friends and a few enemies before that weekend. In the hotel at breakfast a man sat down who I didn’t remember. He looked at me and said “I think I owe you an apology!” I asked what for. He said “ I don’t know but I’m sure I bashed your head against a wall.” I think he wondered what I’d say next. I told him what I do these days for a job. “Jesus!” he cried. I think he then thought we’d have a confessional over the eggs and bacon!

 

Friends, it’s tough out there. But there is hope. The people of God are called to work for peace, beginning where we are. And all will be well. It will!  We are the church until the Kingdom of God comes…

 

We lay our broken world
In sorrow at your feet,
Haunted by hunger, war and fear,
Oppressed by power and hate.

Where human life seems less
That profit, might and pride,
Though to unite us all in you
You lived and loved and died.

We bring our broken towns,
Our neighbours hurt and bruised;
You show us how old pain and wounds
For new life can be used.

We bring our broken hopes
For lives of dignity;
Workless and overworked you love
And call us to be free.

We bring our broken loves,
Friends parted, families torn;
Then in your life and death we see
That love must be reborn.

We bring our broken selves,
Confused and closed and tired;
Then through your gift of healing grace
New purpose is inspired.

O Spirit, on us breathe,
With life and strength anew;
Find in us love, and hope and trust,
And lift us up to you.

Returning to a church I was minister of…

I shared this sermon yesterday with my former church at Bishop Monkton. We began exploring a refurbishment in my time and now it’s beginning to happen. I had a rare visit back yesterday and I shared these words…

Friends, isn’t it amazing and fun that God has called you to be the community called Methodist in Bishop Monkton? Today I want you to know that you have a huge opportunity and a huge call to be God’s church in this village serving this generation and those who come after it. Isn’t that exciting? I love this quote from the spiritual writer Philip Yancey: “ As I look around on Sunday morning at the people populating the pews, I see the risk that God has assumed. For whatever reason, God now reveals himself in the world not through a pillar of smoke and fire, not even through the physical body of his Son in Galilee, but through the mongrel collection that comprises my local church and every other such gathering in God’s name.”

I want to share with you my thoughts thinking about what I was going to share with you today. I think God is saying three things to you as you watch at last your building being transformed for your mission here.

First, God says “think big.” People want the church to be the church. They might not come to it very often but they expect it to be what it is meant to be. I watched John Betjeman’s 1974 film called “A Passion for Churches” where he went round and watched C of E churches at work in Norfolk. One church visited had the vicar in it saying morning prayer on his own, no one else there. 

And Betjeman commented “the village needs to know its parson prays for it.” People want the church to be there and do what it says it will do. Rather like Donald Trump. Let’s be honest – all the executive orders written in those thick felt pens, all the threats of deportations and tariffs and Gaza being the riviera of the Middle East presumably with one or two of his golf courses on it – these things are exactly what he said he would do. We knew what we would be getting. When things aren’t as we expect we complain. Rather like an Indian restaurant not far away who served sheep in the curry when they thought it was ostrich. And when the church goes wrong people jump on it. We remember the Church of England at the moment and some terrible stories at leadership level where safeguarding has gone awry.

I also think people expect we think God might do something. He might answer prayer, he might care for us, he might be about still. Sadly the church has in some places forgotten the power of God and it plods on with little joy and little vision, just comfortable and cosy, for a small group. My mother used to describe Sunday morning at church as good when her 11am service finished at ten to twelve and the preacher only had four hymns! And yet God invites us to get again that he is bigger and mightier than our comfort and if we were only open to him again he would have new things to show us. I found a cartoon of God trying to get into a cardboard box of comfortable theology. We want to fit God into our plans whereas God would have us be blown away by a new encounter with him. 

Peter sees an overwhelming amount of fish in the boat after Jesus madly suggests that they go out onto the lake again after an unsuccessful day. Yet his first reaction is not wonder but terror. His experience echoes that of Isaiah seven hundred years earlier. ‘In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and lifted up…. And I said, “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell among a people of unclean lips”’. Peter’s sense of his sinfulness becomes terrifyingly clear in the presence of Jesus. Yet Jesus’ response is not to condemn him but to say ‘do not be afraid’. He offers him a way forward which leaves his sin and dread behind. And Isaiah is given a commission and he says “here am I, send me.” 

God invites us into God’s plans. Sometimes they are laughable! Thirty two years after feeling I might be called to do what I do I still find it hilarious! Think back to your vision to do something different with your chapel. There will have been some who maybe couldn’t see the future. I think about the churches I serve. Had I four years ago told Allhallowgate they’d have chairs in their sanctuary, told Boroughbridge they’d have a thriving community larder and a footfall of over 12,000 people in their building in a year, told Dallowgill we’d be spending money on their premises, told Sawley they’d have a fabulous centenary year and have new people regularly coming to church after it, told Grewelthorpe we’d have a major refurbishment of the church happening and told Kirkby we’d come out of the chapel and plant café worship in the village hall there would have been incredulous laughter! Yet God calls us to dream dreams and see visions and God’s mercy is wise and his grace is boundless. So let’s think big again. And in the words of Charles Wesley let’s “laugh at impossibilities and cry, it shall be done.”

Then Jesus says “follow me.”

‘At once … they followed him’ - leaving behind who they have been in order to discover God’s new and richer call.

Douglas Hare in the Interpretation series of commentaries, writes: ‘Jesus summons with irresistible authority, and the men respond with radical obedience … There is no hint of their future importance. Instead they seem to represent all future believers whom Jesus irresistibly summons to follow him. It may not be necessary for all to leave professions and possessions behind, but … all must leave their world behind and enter the new world into which Jesus invites them.’

What does your ‘at once’ look like? 

The first disciples had no idea what the future held. Neither do we. Our call is to keep following faithfully.

What is God saying to you as you get new facilities about going out into the village? Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great Christian martyr of the last century thought deeply about what the Church is for. He wrote “the Church is the Church only when it exists for others, not dominating but serving and helping.”

Lis was watching Cold Comfort Farm on the i player the other day and I was in and out of the room. I caught Ian McKellen playing a fire and brimstone preacher preaching hell and shouting “fornicators” at a congregation that shook in fear. Those days are gone but there are times when we need as a Church to speak out, to challenge the world, to name injustice, like the dear Bishop in Washington did the other week. But primarily we are about to serve and help. People need to know why you are refurbishing.

People need to know you care about them. People need to know Jesus is your motivation. So follow him and see where he takes you.

 Then God says “go out together and see what’s there.”

There’s a lovely piece of writing called “everything I learnt about life I learnt in kindergarten.” And one sentence of it says “Take a nap every afternoon. When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic,
hold hands, and stick together.” And how about this – not thinking about the American President at all - Think what a better world it would be if – the whole world – had cookies and milk aboutthree o’clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap. Or if all governments had a basic policy to always put things back where
they found them and to clean up their own mess.

Going out is the way we do mission. We are here to serve the village and get involved. We need to be noticed. While our building will be lovely it must be a place while yes people will come into it to worship and pray and have coffee and eat spuds and pud, we must be equipped by what we do in it to go out. That can be scary. 

It’s easier to be church in church. But we can do it. I like this from the sermon for today from the episcopal Church in America:

“There are times when the important ways in which you can exhibit God’s love is simply to smile and to look into the eyes of your neighbour. In an age when people mindlessly walk down the street fully engaged with their cell phones, it is often difficult to get anyone’s attention. But everyone wants to be seen. Even in the midst of advanced technology – like a phone that is used for everything except talking to one another – people still need each other. The next time you are at the grocery store or waiting to be seated at a restaurant, intentionally smile or say hello to someone in your orbit. It is likely that both of you will be enriched by that activity. You may even connect with someone who will eventually join you in being a fisher of people. There is no special person assigned to this work. We are all up for the task whether we consider ourselves introverts or extroverts.

In our Old Testament lesson, Isaiah’s sin is blotted out as he becomes a messenger for God. When God says, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Isaiah says, “Here am I; send me!” That is the commitment that God seeks from us today. 

We are being asked to go out and invite people in to hear the Word of God and to be nourished and fed. If the first answer is not “Yes,” that is not a signal to give up and to retreat back into the church. Keep going. Keep talking and remember the love of God that you feel in your heart and allow that to be the catalyst to move you forward.”

There are fish waiting to be caught. Right here. In our locality. And when we know our village and our people we can be the Church appropriate for them. I was in Birdwell near Barnsley on Monday at my friend Louise’s funeral in the local Methodist Church. The area looked quite impoverished and after the service I noticed their notice board.

They have a community drop in and a film club and they offer both with no charge. And I loved this bit “it’s a wee thing. If you get caught short, you can use our toilet when we’re open.” And the poster has “compassionate Sheffield, small things, big difference.” I ask you what will you do here to really change lives in the village? Small things, big difference. 

 

I’ve visited two of my folk in Borrage House the other day. My brain always stops working when I try and leave such places. I always get lost and I can’t find the way out and when I get to the door out I can’t work out how to open it!! 

Talk to some of my former members in Bexhill on Sea and they will tell you about the day Ian ended up in a cupboard trying to find a way out of a home!

Sometimes we have become so used to being in a church we’ve forgotten how to get out - i.e interact with the world outside. We have to spend too much time concentrating our heads on keeping things going we have no energy for mission or community engagement. Don’t make the mistake you burn out and there’s no time to make a difference.

What Jesus announces to Simon is not a wish, but a declaration: "You will be catching people." Is that statement also addressed to us -- both as individuals and congregations? If so, what's keeping us from "filling up our nets so that they are about to break"? What's keeping us from having so many new people that we are required to seek extra staff to "haul in" all these people?

Dear friends, I seriously don’t know when I will take a service here again. My prayers are with you. Where you are is really exciting. Let the big God lead you, be brave enough to follow Jesus and go out and be where you need to be. Watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together. And one day your nets will be full.