Minister’s Message – April 28, 2024

Bible reading: John 20:19-23.

It was late that Sunday evening, and the disciples were gathered together behind locked doors, because they were afraid of the Jewish authorities. Then Jesus came and stood among them. “Peace be with you,” he said. After saying this, he showed them his hands and his side. The disciples were filled with joy at seeing the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father sent me, so I send you.” Then he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive people’s sins, they are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.”

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Minister’s Message – April 21, 2024

Bible reading: John 20:19-27.

“Do as I say, not as I do”: that’s a phrase we’ve all heard, and probably used ourselves. It is of course a light-hearted acknowledgement that we’re all hypocrites, that none of us live up to the standards we set for ourselves or (more importantly) ask of others.

The first recorded instance of this phrase came in a book called “Table Talk”, written about 350 years ago by John Selden. I’d never heard of him so I decided to find out. I discovered that Selden was a scholarly man from West Sussex who lived in the late 1500s and early 1600s. He was a historian with particular interests in the British constitution and ancient Jewish law, he was a Member of Parliament for Lancaster, he took part in the Westminster Assembly which produced its famous Confession of the Protestant faith, he was appointed to be Keeper of the Records at the Tower of London, he assembled a notable library which was donated to Oxford University after his death, and he was chosen to be the Master of Trinity Hall, one of the colleges of Cambridge University – a position which he turned down. The poet John Milton called Selden “the chief of learned men reputed in this land”.

As a keen Christian, Selden had quite a lot to say about preachers. He wrote, “Nothing is more mistaken than that speech ‘Preach the Gospel’; for ’tis not to make long harangues, as they do now-a-days but to tell the news of Christ’s coming into the world”. He also stated, “Preaching by the spirit, as they call it, is most esteemed by the common people, because they cannot abide art or learning, which they have not been bred up in … They say to the preachers, ‘You come with your school-learning: here’s such a one who has the spirit’.” Hmm …! And Selden was dead against people who insisted that they needed to hear two sermons on a Sunday because their souls, just like their bodies, required two good meals: “I may as well argue, I ought to have two noses because I have two eyes, or two mouths because I have two ears. What have meals and sermons to do one with another?”

Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed Selden’s pithy comments! For they are the context in which he used the phrase I started with: “Preachers say, ‘Do as I say, not as I do. But if the physician had the same disease upon him that I have, and he should bid me do one thing, and he do quite another, could I believe him?’” I think he’s got a point!

Jesus would never have said, “Do as I say, not as I do”! For he didn’t merely say, “Follow me” (which I think implies rather more than just putting our feet in his footprints); he also encouraged people to check that were no discrepancies between what he said and what he did. Jesus was keenly aware that God had sent him to be his incarnation or representative on earth, a task which meant perfect obedience to his Father. And, before he left the world, Jesus gave his disciples their marching orders: “As the Father has sent me, so I send you”. God the Father sent Jesus into the world; in precisely the same way, it seems, Jesus sends his disciples. The Canadian theologian Michael Goheen dresses this up in fancier language: “The ‘as’ in this text tells us that the mission of Jesus to Israel is to serve as a paradigm for the mission of his followers to the nations”. Jesus is our model, not just for day-to-day behaviour but for mission. Indeed, God’s mission ought to be (but rarely is) the primary aim in our lives.

As Jesus told his disciples that they were being sent as he had been, he was picking up a theme of obedient submission to his Father which threads itself throughout John’s gospel. For instance, in ch.4 Jesus says, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work”; and in ch.5 he says, “I seek to do not my own will but the will of him who sent me”. The pattern continues in ch.6: “I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me”; in ch.7: “‘My teaching is not mine but his who sent me”; and in ch.8: “I declare to the world what I have heard from the one who sent me”. Jesus is very aware that God has sent him to represent him on earth by his words and actions.

As the Passion nears, a new slant on this theme emerges: Jesus begins to talk about sending the disciples into the world to represent himself and, by proxy, God. In his great prayer for unity in ch.17 he says to the Father: “As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world … so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me”. And he takes this up in today’s reading: we may have only moved on a few days, but we’ve passed both the darkness of Good Friday and the glory of Easter Day. It’s now that Jesus charges the disciples to go into the world, just as he had been sent into it by the Father. The words are quieter and less vivid than the so-called “Great Commission” we find in Matthew’s Gospel, but they are just as authoritative.

I have laboured this point; that’s because I want to show you how Jesus’ saw his sending of the disciples to minister in the world as nothing less than the continuation of his own ministry. He came as his Father’s envoy or representative; and he’s asking his disciples, then and always, to continue in a similar vein – remember how, many years later, Paul wrote, “We are ambassadors for Christ, God is speaking to you through us”. What we have here isn’t a high-powered command, instead it’s the natural assumption which says, “Of course this is the way that things will be”. Jesus puts what’s been called a “mission imperative” at the heart of our faith. Mission isn’t a “bolt-on extra” for enthusiastic believers; it is fundamental to our faith. As John Stott wrote, “Mission’ is an activity of God which arises out of the very nature of God. The living God of the Bible is a sending God, which is what ‘mission’ means. He sent the prophets to Israel. He sent his Son into the world. His Son sent out the apostles, the seventy and the Church”.

Last week I mentioned a detail in the original Greek text of our Bible passage which gave us an insight we might not have thought of. I’m going to do the same today, and (bear with me!) it comes from the fact that ancient Greek verbs work in a subtly different way to English ones. In particular they make a distinction between an act which is once-and-for-all and finished, and one which started in the past but continues on into the present. Our verse contains the second of these versions for, when Jesus said that he had been “sent” by the Father he didn’t not mean that he’d been given his instructions and told to “get on with it”. Rather, there was a sense in which his “being sent” was an ongoing process which lasted for the entire time that he was on earth. He “was” sent initially (that’s the Christmas story) but he continued to “be sent” over the years; his commission was ongoing, he had to maintain contact with his Father and keep on obeying him.

The same is apparently true with Jesus’ sending of his disciples. He was not giving them a one-off order which they had to memorise and obey: again there was a sense in which their “sentness” was a daily process. And, by inference, the same is true for us: we aren’t like soldiers who open a set of sealed orders, discover what we have to do, and then begin our task without further ado; we are in fact aware of being constantly sent, prodded or recommissioned (whichever you prefer!) by Jesus. Christ gives – and never rescinds – his command to carry out the job for which God has sent, and is still sending, us.

But what is this task? I haven’t told you yet; but it’s one which Jesus outlined at the beginning of his ministry when he went to the Nazareth synagogue and read a passage from Isaiah: to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim liberty to the captives and sight for the blind, to set free the oppressed and to announce that the time has come when the Lord will save his people. He gave further details at the end of his ministry when he told his followers to make disciples of all people, baptizing and teaching. And he gave a catch-all – if highly challenging – definition of his ministry when he said, “The Son of Man did not come to be served; he came to serve and to give his life to redeem many people”. Christians have often argued over whether our mission is to proclaim Jesus’ message or whether it is practical service to the community. Evangelicals have often stressed the former, more liberal Christians have stressed the latter. But Jesus taught and showed us that these two types of service are complementary: “holistic mission” must surely be the name of the game. And that’s something in which we all, with our different gifts, should be engaging.

This task of effectively being “little Jesuses” in the world is both an awesome privilege and a huge responsibility! How on earth can we go about it? Indeed, how dare we even try? Fortunately it’s not a task that we have to carry out alone as, in the rest of this verse, Jesus tells us about the tools or the help he offers us to do his work. But that’s all for this morning; our thinking is “To Be Continued” in Episode 2 – which, God willing, will be next Sunday. Can you stand the suspense?

Minister’s Message – April 14, 2024

Sam was a Minister who had charge of a number of small chapels in rural Suffolk. Obviously she couldn’t be in every chapel every Sunday, so many services were led by lay preachers who were, I have to say, of varied quality and diligence! Arriving at one chapel three or four weeks after Easter, she was confronted by a group of members who asked, “Are you going to preach about the Road to Emmaus?” “No”, she replied. “Thank goodness for that”, said the chapel people, “The preachers every Sunday since Easter have spoken about that Road to Emmaus, and we’re heartily sick of it”. Well, the story is a bit of a “hardy perennial” at this time of year, isn’t it!

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Minister’s Message – April 7, 2024

Bible reading: 1 Corinthians 15:1-11.

Julian of Norwich was an English mystic who lived in the late Middle Ages. In 1373 she was suffering an illness so severe that thought she was about to die; however she was healed after receiving visions of Christ’s suffering and (dare I say this?) of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Julian later put her experiences into writing: “It seemed to me that I could feel the Passion of Christ strongly. How I wished I had been at the crucifixion with Mary Magdalene and with others who were Christ’s dear friends, so that I might have seen in the flesh the Passion of our Lord which he suffered for me … I wanted his pains to be my pains, with compassion, and then longing for God … I wanted to suffer with him, while living in my mortal body, as God would give me grace”.

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Minister’s Message – Good Friday 2024

Bible reading: Mark 15:25-39.

Message.

When I was eight, my parents took me to a performance of J S Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion”. It’s one of the greatest works of Western choral music, but I didn’t find it a profound experience, either musically or spiritually; in fact, it was deadly dull. The music was too advanced for me; the concert went on for ever (although there was a break for tea in the middle); to cap it all, the piece was sung in German so I didn’t understand a word! Since then, I have come to appreciate the “St. Matthew Passion” more, and I’ve enjoyed hearing and also singing its companion piece based on St. John. Both take their hearers on a spiritual journey through Good Friday. The Passion story is told in the words of the Gospel; solo arias provide reflective meditation on what is going on; and there are hymns in which the audience can join.

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Minister’s Message- March 10, 2024

Bible reading: Exodus 1:8-2:10.

There are many characters in the Bible whose names are instantly familiar: Peter and Paul, David and Bathsheba, Ruth and Naomi, Isaiah and Jeremiah, even (if you’re into stories of abuse and murder) Jael and Sisera. I’m sure that most of us can name many more. But I’m now going to mention four people that most of us would struggle to recognise: Jochebed and Amram, Shiphrah and Puah. Yet, without these four people (and one other, whose name we aren’t given), the Bible story would have come to a full stop at the end of Genesis.

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Minister’s Message – March 3, 2024

Bible reading: Exodus 20:1-18.

The Hebrews have left their slavery in Egypt and are gathered at the foot of Mount Sinai.

God spoke, and these were his words: “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, where you were slaves. Worship no god but me. Do not make for yourselves images of anything in heaven or on earth or in the water under the earth. Do not bow down to any idol or worship it, because I am the Lord your God and I tolerate no rivals. I bring punishment on those who hate me and on their descendants down to the third and fourth generation, but I show my love to thousands of generations of those who love me and obey my laws.

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Minister’s Message- February 25, 2024

Bible reading: Genesis 17:1-8, 15-17.

When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to him, and said, ‘I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless. And I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous.’

Then Abram fell on his face; and God said to him, ‘This is my covenant with you: You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. No longer shall your name be Abram, but Abraham; for I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you. I will establish my everlasting covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations. And I will give to you, and to your offspring after you, the land where you are now an alien, all the land of Canaan, for a perpetual holding; and I will be their God.’

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Minister’s Message – February 18, 2024

Bible reading: Genesis 9:8-17.

Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him: “I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you and with every living creature that was with you—the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the ark with you—every living creature on earth. I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.”

And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come: I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth.”

So God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant I have established between me and all life on the earth.”

Message.

They say that a week is a long time in politics. Well, let me take you back ten days, to Thursday of last week. That was the day when the Labour Party ditched its commitment to spend huge sums of money on environmental initiatives if it wins the next election.

I must go back to September 2021 to explain why I’m mentioning this. During Labour’s party conference that month Rachel Reeves declared that, if they won the next election, she would be Britain’s first “green chancellor”. She said that £28bn per year would be spent on battery manufacturing, hydrogen and offshore wind power, tree planting, flood defences and home insulation. Her announcement delighted environmentalists and raised a cheer among the Party faithfuls.

As time passed, the promise got watered down. Last June Reeves said that the economic climate had radically changed since Liz Truss’s mini-budget, and delayed plans for a green prosperity fund to start in the first year of a Labour government. By December some party members, knowing that their policy would mean higher Government borrowing and tax rises, were running scared as they believed that this would offer the Conservatives a way of attacking them during an election campaign. However others, including leading economists and business experts, were pushing back against any cuts to the plans, saying that amount being pledged was the “absolute minimum”.

Things then got muddled. On February 1^st the “Guardian” newspaper revealed that the policy was to be ditched. Rachel Reeves was asked on “Sky News” that day if she backed the target; she said that she did but refused to confirm any figure, Jonathan Reynolds, the shadow business secretary, said that the amount remained an ambition but it might not be attainable. On February 6^th Keir Starmer said on “Times Radio” that the pledge is “desperately needed” and Chris Bryant, the shadow culture minister said the next day. “We are not scaling back”.

But on Thursday of last week – the 7^th – Labour confirmed that they didn’t believe they would be able to meet their commitment, blaming the Conservatives for “crashing” the economy. I can’t actually work out how much they would commit to “making Britain green”, but one definite cut would be in home insulation. This was clearly a massive political U-turn and the right-wing press predictably went to town on it. More worryingly, it has further eroded people’s trust in politicians, who are elected in the basis of their promises to us. How do we react when a party leader says one thing on one day and complete reverses it on the next? Can we – indeed should we – trust anything they say?

Christians believe that God both makes and keeps promises. He says to Abraham, “I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you”. He says to Joshua, fearful of taking on Moses’ leadership, “I As I was with Moses, so I will be with you; I will never leave you nor forsake you”. He says to David, looking forward to the time when his son Solomon will be king: “He will build a house for me, and I will establish his throne forever.  will be his father, and he will be my son. I will never take my love away from him”. He says to Isaiah, after a time of national trauma: “I will restore your leaders as in days of old, your rulers as at the beginning. Afterward you will be called the City of Righteousness, the Faithful City”. And, turning to Jesus, he not only says that he will be “delivered to the Gentiles [who] will mock, insult him and spit on him; flog him and kill him” but goes on to declare that, on the third day he will rise again. And, of course, almost Jesus’ final words to his disciples are, “I will be with you always, to the end of the age”. Perhaps the best catch-all promise is one in Hebrews, a quote from Deuteronomy: “Be content with what you have, because God has said, ‘Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you’”.

Those are just a few of God’s great promises. I must be even-handed, though, and remind you that he also makes negative ones. For instance, before the Hebrews enter the Promised Land, he explains what will happen if they turn away from him: “I myself will lay waste the land … I will scatter you among the nations and will draw out my sword and pursue you”. The terrifying judgement scene in Matthew’s Gospel has Jesus saying to those who failed to feed the hungry, help the stranger or visit prisoners, “Depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels”. Even the famous verse which says that “God so loved the world that he gave his only son” is soon followed by, “Whover does not believe stands condemned because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son”. These promises (and others) are not by any definition “nice” – you’d never find them in those boxes containing rolled-up scraps of paper printed with encouraging verses from the Bible, to be tweezered out and read if we are feeling “down”. But they are there and we can’t ignore them.

But we need to get back to Noah. And the reason I’ve spend so much time talking about God’s promises is that he makes one here to Noah – and, in fact, not just to Noah but the entire planet. You’ll know the context: Noah, his family and the animals have been saved from the Flood which, we are told, has covered the whole earth and killed every living creature (the fish presumably took care of themselves); but now, says God almost apologetically, that’s something I promise I will never do again. And he goes on to say, in a section of the passage we didn’t read, that day and night, also the seasons of the year, will continue for as long as the world exists. This is a huge promise as it’s not just being made to Noah but to the entire world. And, says God, I’ll place a rainbow in the sky: will remind not just you and all the creatures on earth of my promise but will serve as a reminder to me as well. For this promise, this covenant, is unbreakable and eternal.

Now that word “covenant” is an interesting one. It’s part of Christian language, especially when we eat and drink at Communion, yet it may not be a word we understand particularly well. I’m not going to go into any detail about it (apart from anything else, I’m no Old Testament scholar); but what is usually involved in a covenant are two sides coming together and making conditional promises. What do I mean by that is this: each person will say, “I promise to do such-and-such for you; however if you do this or that thing which goes against our terms and conditions, then the covenant is broken and the promises are null and void”. We’re all familiar with this kind of thing in, say, rental agreements where both tenant and landlord have responsibilities: the tenant agrees to pay the rent on time and not to smash the house up, while the landlord agrees to keep the property in good order. If the tenant doesn’t pay the rent trashes the house, they can be evicted; sadly, it’s difficult for a tenant to force their landlord to keep their side of the agreement. Nevertheless both sides have signed a contract.

I’ve already said that God made covenants with many people, both with individuals and the Hebrew nation; later on we have Jesus bringing in the “new covenant”, signed in his blood, no less. All of these are conditional: basically they all say, “I’ll bless you, so long as you keep to the straight and narrow. If you don’t, you’ll suffer the consequences”. They are in fact rather one-sided, as God initiates them and lays down his conditions. But the covenant with Noah is different. Here there are no conditions, just a simple promise: “No, there won’t be another flood; yes, I’ll sustain the world and everything on it for its entire lifespan – no ifs, no buts”. God is binding himself irrevocably (there’s a good word) to his promise.

Or is he? Does this promise of perpetual “seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night” in fact contain what we might call “hidden conditions”? (I’m sure we’ve all happily ticked the “accept terms and conditions” box on documents without bothering to wade through pages of dense, small print). Well, I don’t think that the earth is likely to stop spinning any time soon, so I have no doubts about the “day and night” bit. However we might do well to reflect on the words of one writer who says, “Our world tempts us to believe that the cycle of seasons and the rising and setting of the sun is due entirely to the orbit of the planet, the tilting of its axis, and its revolution around that same axis. While all these things are true, we must never forget that it is God himself who works through these means to keep his promise to Noah. Every change of season and every sunrise and sunset is proof positive that the Lord never breaks his promises”. It’s not hard for modern Christians to think of God as the Creator but we may struggle with the notion that he also sustains it.

But what about those “hidden conditions”? Well, we know that God gave the stewardship of this earth to humans; we read in Genesis 2 of him telling Adam both to cultivate the land and care for it. We have also come to realise that our world is a finely-balanced eco-system; although it probably isn’t true that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Japan eventually leads to a hurricane in the Caribbean, we do now know that the things we humans do can have an enormous effect on our climate. These two thoughts make me feel that, while God’s side in the covenant he made with Noah is 100% secure, we have power to break it. As we didn’t have to add our signature to the contract, we may feel at liberty to do whatever we wish. But that has consequences.

You may have heard of “A Rocha”, the Christian conservation charity. Its Canadian branch has written this about our Bible passage: “The story of God’s covenant with Noah has more relevance in our time than it has ever had before. In a world torn apart by injustice, oppression, wars and environmental degradation, perhaps we are the first generation to read this story with such a sober understanding of the destruction with which it begins and such a sharp awareness of the vital importance of the promise of God with which it ends”.

“A Rocha” goes on to talk about Old Testament prophets who understood that living selfishly and independently from God brings about not only human but also ecological catastrophe. It also reminds us that we live at a crucial time in our earth’s existence, with up to a quarter of known animal and plant species facing extinction in the next fifty years. They conclude, “In this terrible present predicament, the Ark becomes a potent symbol of the human role in God’s rescue effort, and the rainbow shines as a precious promise of hope for the creation itself. If we are looking for answers to the current state of the planet, and in particular the catastrophic loss of biodiversity, we must understand the story of the Flood as more than a story about the human condition, although Noah and his family stand at its heart. In Genesis 9, where God promises a future and a hope, the promise is for the whole creation”. This ancient story still challenges us.

So what thoughts should we be taking away with us this morning? I think there are two main ones. The first is to realise that we do have a responsibility to care for our earth – after all, it’s the only one we’ve got! And although God says that he won’t ever again send a universal flood, nevertheless we are increasingly aware that many so-called “natural disasters” or “acts of God” are at least partly caused by human activity. We must repent – to God, to our planet, to our fellow-people – for our actions which have brought about calamity. And we need to be serious about changing our foolish and selfish ways.

But we can also be reassured that God is a faithful promise-keeper. I appreciate that we don’t always know which of his promises apply to us and which do not; I also realise that we may have genuine doubts about God’s ability to keep his promises. We live, however, in a world where human promises can be broken in a moment and don’t seem to be worth the paper they’re written on. So God’s are the ones we must cling to.

God made a covenant with Noah and sealed it with a rainbow. God made a covenant with Moses and sealed it with two stone tablets. Now he has given the world an even more powerful, yet simple, symbol which is the promise of new life and a new creation. That, of course, is the symbol of Jesus, who is God’s eternal “yes”.

Minister’s Message – February 11, 2024

Bible reading: Mark 9:2-9.

Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves.

And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. Then Peter said to Jesus, ‘Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.’ He did not know what to say, for they were terrified.

Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!’ Suddenly, when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, only Jesus.

As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.

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