St John, Burgess Hill The Bible Pre-Lent Sunday 23 Feb 2020

This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him. Matthew 17.5

There is no Word of God without power so that this place – the pulpit – and the book expounded here – this book (show) – are about energising. I want to use this sermon built from the Gospel’s invitation to listen to God to encourage us to read our Bibles in Lent.

Why is it so important we familiarise ourselves with the Bible?

Because the Bible speaks to those with open ears of God’s people, provision, promises and purpose. 

In reading the Bible we find...God’s people. The Bible is the family history of the Christian church. It is our life story. We are to see it as part of our own story since Christians see themselves in the sacred history it provides. When, for example, in the story of Cain and Abel we read God’s words to Cain, ‘where is your brother?’ they are words that remind us that God’s family find God again and again through love of other people. When we read the story of the Exodus we see ourselves going through the Red Sea – the waters of baptism – fed by manna – the heavenly bread of the eucharist – destined for Canaan – a glorious homeland. 

When we read and study Matthew’s Gospel we see a Sermon on a Mount from Jesus presented as the new Moses since Matthew’s Jewish readers knew it was Moses who first brought teaching down from Mount Sinai in the Ten Commandments. When we read in the Acts about Pentecost we see a reversal of the Tower of Babel in Genesis so that people heard the same message in their different languages. The Holy Spirit who drives the Church forward from Pentecost is the same Lord working secretly throughout the biblical story of God’s people.

We read the Bible because it tells us who we are – God’s children made so by God’s provision. This provision, the gift of Jesus, is a second motivator for bible reading so that Saint Jerome could say that ignorance of scripture is ignorance of Christ no less.

The bible reveals how God who created the world provided his Son, Jesus C hrist to redeem it from sin through a new creation. This is the year of Saint Matthew in the three year cycle of Sunday readings. When we open a Bible Matthew is on its hinge, the hinge between the Old and New Testaments.  The word Bible comes from the Greek τὰ βιβλία ta biblia "the books" whose contents and order vary between denominations. The Old Testament has 39 books of Hebrew Scripture, though some denominations including our own give authority to a series of Jewish books called the deuterocanonical or apocryphal books. The New Testament contains 27 books the first four of which form the Canonical gospels, first Matthew’s, recounting the life of Christ and central to our faith.

There is no Word of God without power because scripture points us to Jesus. Saint Tikhon, an 18th century Russian writer, says whenever you read the Gospel, Christ Himself is speaking to you. And while you read, you are praying and talking to Him. This is why we read the Bible – to seek and find God’s provision. The Bible is an instrument of divine revelation, the word of God communicated in human words. As such it has unique authority and inspiration and cannot mislead anyone as it presents the salvation truth of God in Christ.

This is what the Bible says about itself through what Paul writes to Timothy in 2 Timothy 3.15-17 where he reminds his assistant bishop, and through him, all of us, how from childhood you have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work. 

In the bible we meet God’s people, see God’s provision for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. Thirdly we find God’s promises. The bible contains what Saint Peter describes in 2 Peter 1.4 as God’s precious and very great promises for us to ‘read, mark and inwardly digest’. In his book on Matthew Lent for everyone (show) Tom Wright comments on the Gospel passage we shall hear read next Sunday about Our Lord’s temptations and how Jesus himself holds fast to God’s promises as he resists them. Once more, we are not simply spectators in this extraordinary drama. We too, are tempted to do the right things in the wrong way or for the wrong reason. Part of the discipline of Lent is about learning to recognize the flickering impulses, the whispering voices, for what they are, and to have the scripture fuelled courage to resist.

I like that phrase ‘scripture fuelled courage’. When I am tempted by anxiety it is the fuelling of my spiritual life by the biblical promises of God that defend me, such as those in today’s Gospel or these other texts. ‘My peace I give unto you’ (John 14.27) ‘You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you’ (Isaiah 26.3) ‘The peace of God which passes all understanding keep your heart and mind’ (Philippians 4.7). The point is that unless I knew these verses, and had memorised them, the Bible would have no power to help me. I would lack what Tom Wright calls ‘scripture fuelled courage’.

There is no word of God without power! The bible itself points to the power of Holy Spirit who inspired it and will inspire its readers. In particular the discipline of bible study helps us get into ourselves some of the key promises of God by the inspiration they give to heart and mind, an inspiration that evidences itself in our lives.

Fourthly if the Bible brings us the family history of God’s people, God’s provision for us in Jesus and his promises to fuel our courage it brings us hope for the future. It outlines to us God’s purpose. The bible contains God’s plan. It sets human history in the perspective revealed by Christ’s resurrection, his gathering of God’s people, building of the kingdom and promised return. 

In his commentary on Matthew Chapter 13 Bishop Tom speaks on the importance of the bible in opening up God’s future to us and of the kingdom of God in Matthew’s Gospel:

Jesus is looking for people to sign on, people who are prepared to take his kingdom-movement forward in their own day. In telling us the old, old story the Bible invites us to sign up to having faith for the future. As its last book affirms the kingdom of the world (is to become) the kingdom of our God and of his Christ (Revelation 11:15) 

This is what we sign up to at every eucharist since this sacred meal anticipates the heavenly banquet. So too our pondering of the Word of God energises our thinking and acting. It builds our conviction that if this is the day the Lord has made so is tomorrow.

The Bible – a way into being God’s people, knowing his provision, his promises and his purpose for our lives and that of the cosmos. The Lord deepen our hunger for God’s Word as he makes us hungry now for the table of the eucharist.

Christ the King 24th November 2013

If Christ is King how can he more fully be my king?

A good question as the church year ends and we go into purple next week for a new start in Advent season.

How many more church years will I follow as I prepare for eternity, you could ask, how much time is there left me here on earth to prepare for the dominion of love in heaven?

I don't know about you, but I find it far easier to sing to Christ as King in church on Sunday than to submit to him in my circumstances on Monday - or Tuesday even, Monday being my day off!

I want Christ not just to be one sphere of my life, but the ruler of my whole life, which means my every circumstance.

If I am living close to Christ the difficult conundrum is well solved, the challenging relationship has the love it needs invested in it, there is patience to live with unresolved situations and cheerfulness to overcome contingencies.

How do you keep close to Christ, since without it life gets flat or pear shaped!

Four things to consider as our service books turn back once more to Advent - prayer, bible reading, eucharist and Christian fellowship.

PRAYER  'Seven days without prayer makes one week'. How's your personal prayer? We did some training last month that a lot couldn't come to. During the prayer fortnight I talked one Sunday about how the Jesus Prayer helps me - 'Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner'. At the start of the church's year, before Christmas crowds my diary, could I refresh the resolve to spend 5 min in prayer with Jesus every day? Just look at him, and let him look at me? Maybe a walk up to Church, always open daytime, where the Blessed Sacrament is reserved, so we're reminded always of the intimacy of Holy Communion by the Reservation light? Or thinking corporate prayer, why not join occasionally in Saturday's 8am prayer for St Giles which lasts half an hour

BIBLE READING 'Without God's Word as a lens, the world warps' If you want to come close to Jesus, for him to be Lord of your life, you can hardly do so without attending to his words. 'Lord to whom shall we go’ Peter said to Jesus, ‘you have the words of eternal life'.Yes, you will need a guide, for those words aren't always so clear. This is why to mark the new church year I've got everyone one of these: 'A gift for you'. Show It’s an Advent freeby, four weeks bible reading notes, a week each of Day by Day with God, Guidelines, New Daylight and The Upper Room, all four varieties produced by Bible Reading Fellowship. You could see which you prefer and order a full set in January. Incidentally I've started as a BRF writer from 2014 for their New Daylight notes. You may lack a bible in accessible language. That can easily be remedied if you so decide - we use the NRSV, New Revised Standard Version, in services here.

EUCHARIST  If Christ is King how can he be more fully king of my life? Through more frequent Holy Communion. When the Holy Spirit came on John Wesley he started attending the Eucharist every day and they drove him out of the Church of England! We wouldn't today! Maybe Jesus is wanting you to meet him in his Sacrament on a Tuesday or Friday as well as on a Sunday, especially in Advent. There are few things Jesus gives us as powerful as his body and blood in bread and wine. Do I hunger for that gift? Does it empower me? Does the sacrificial demand of it, offering my soul and body in union with Christ, excite me or disturb me? Seek him more at the altar and you will certainly find him. There is no place you can be more certain of coming close to him, and bringing those on your heart close to him.

CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP From time to time St Giles organises fellowship meetings around a speaker or bible study or healing ministry.  Thursdays in term time we have Life and Faith from about quarter to 2 til 3pm and it’s generally bible based. There's tonight's informal Five o''clock service which has more interaction with one another at and before and after worship than in Church. There's next Sunday's 4pm healing service here in St Giles. Do you hunger for God? Or hunger to hunger for God? Come and receive prayer then to do so! Lack of hunger for God’s a spiritual sickness many of us suffer from. Then your priest's always available for fellowship if you want to book to meet with him and there are also special confession times before Christmas.

PRAYER, BIBLE READING, EUCHARIST, CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP - these are four ways of building love and loyalty to Christ our King worthy of consideration as we enter a new church year. I would add the church library. Reading a book about the faith, or a faith story, can be a very great help, and in another medium there’s the electronic discipleship page of the church website. It’s just been refreshed and there are links there to useful resources, as well as the Rector's page with the Firmly I Believe listen again audio. From next week there’ll be the Premier Radio Advent series based in Horsted Keynes which some of you are contributing to.

Come close to God and God will come close - give and it will be given to you.

See yourself this next month as a fresh water pool both receiving and giving out with and from Jesus our King, to whom with the Father and the Holy Spirit be glory now and ever and to the ages of ages. Amen.

The Letters of Saint Paul (1) Paul’s view of human nature First of four sermons – Sunday 2nd June 2013

When did you last pick up your Bible?

I don’t know if you have purple passages you go back to again and again. Mine are very often to be found in the New Testament within the letters of St Paul.

To encourage us to pick up our Bibles more, I thought I’d invite you to look with me this summer at the letters of St Paul and what he teaches there about man, God, the Church and the future.

Here goes then, we start a four part series that’ll run on until the end of next month as we have to work round all age Sundays.

What does Paul have to say about human nature? About the good and bad in us? About how we get our nature into its right mind?

One of the great advantages in reading Paul is there’s enough of him – 13 letters – to make his character evident. Because his style is partly autobiographical we know more about him than we know about Our Lord.  We see his humanity full square!

Take this week’s passage from the start of Galatians. Look at all that emotion: I am astonished…there are some who want to pervert the gospel…let (them) be accursed. All pretty engaging stuff! Paul’s upset and rushes to the point in anguish and anger. He’s heard how Asian churches he’s planted in Galatia, modern day Turkey, are losing the plot with Jewish Christians forcing non-Jewish converts to be circumcised, a development that’s totally against the good news of a love that embraces without condition.

We’ll be reading more of Galatians week by week this month but first a little background on Paul.

He was born in what is now south central Turkey, a Roman citizen of Tarsus and a devout Jew (Acts 22:3). His double names, Paul, a Roman name and Saul, his Jewish name, express this dual allegiance. Paul’s date of birth is around ten years later than that of Jesus Christ.

Besides his letters we get a really good picture of his life in the Acts of the Apostles where we learn he was a zealous student of the great rabbi Gamaliel (Acts 22:3). Zeal was Paul all over, as a member of the Jewish Pharisee party when he persecuted Christians, and then, after seeing a vision of Jesus on the Damascus road, changed zeal in his new passion to share Jesus.

Paul’s Christian mission began around 40AD when after his conversion and 3 years preaching he gets driven out of Damascus. Off he goes to Jerusalem to meet St Peter, then home to Tarsus, from there to Antioch in north Syria and then with St Barnabas he embarks on the first of three missionary journeys that take the good news of Jesus to Asia minor, Macedonia, Greece, Crete and Italy.

The Roman Empire’s his mission field and there’s no doubt God’s choice of a communicator like Paul of Roman citizenship was second to sending his Son to earth in strategic importance to get news of Jesus taken from Jerusalem to the ends of the world.

The 13 New Testament letters we’re thinking about over the next four weeks were written to a number of Christian communities about their joys, needs and concerns. They became part of the canon of holy scripture by the end of the second century. As such they are privileged writings the Holy Spirit opens up to people in every age.

My purpose this month and next is to give you a taster of them with the hope you might pick up your Bible and read them yourself.

They run as follows: After Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Acts we’ve got Paul’s letter to Rome, his greatest work on God. Then we have the first and second letters to Corinth where Paul founded a church situated on the very bridge between Asia and Europe. The next four I remember using the vowel alphabet – a, e, i, o – Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians. These are short and sweet compared to Romans and Corinthians, but Galatians is probably least sweet of them as we’ve already heard.

Two letters to Thessalonica in Greece follow, then two to Paul’s assistant Timothy, one to his assistant Titus and then a very short one to someone called Philemon about a runaway slave. The letter to the Hebrews was once thought to be from Paul but that is now disputed.

Thirteen letters then, and four subjects over four sermons: Paul on man, on God, on the Church and on the future.

In five minutes what does Paul have to say about human nature?

St. Paul strongly affirms in 1 Timothy 4:4 belief that everything created by God is good. At the same time, he insists elsewhere there’s a power of disobedience at work that makes for talk of creation as being fallen away from goodness. This disobedience is there in the devil, a fallen spirit, and in us as fallen human beings. In spite of the fact that all things created by God are good, the devil has temporarily become ‘god of this age’. Evil exists, at least temporarily, as a parasite inside what God created originally good. In his autobiographical details Paul speaks of the war between God’s dominion and the dominion of evil as a conflict that’s there in his own heart as in Romans 7:19-20: For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.  He goes on to ponder who’ll rescue him from this wretched condition and announces it is Jesus who has rescued, is rescuing and will finally rescue him as a believer.

Paul’s view of humanity is a ‘yes, but’ view – yes we’re made good but left to ourselves we’re without hope for no way can we save ourselves from the sin that’s within us. We need a Saviour and there’s no doubt Paul’s discovery of Jesus as the Saviour colours his whole view of human nature.

There’s humility in Paul, humble awareness that for God to touch his life in any way at all is an exceptional miracle. I received mercy he writes in 1 Timothy 1:16 so that in me, as the foremost Jesus Christ might display the utmost patience. He saw himself as the least of Christians because he’d been a leading persecutor of Christians. By the grace of God I am what I am he wrote in 1 Corinthians 15:10.

For Paul and for us our humanity is flawed. We have God’s likeness, God is within us - yet so is sin. The wonder of Christianity is the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ accepting us as we are and making us more fully what we should be. All of us, he writes to Corinth seeing the glory of the Lord are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit. (2 Corinthians 3:19) It’s a matter of where we’re looking. Inasmuch as our gaze is fixed on Jesus we’re being transformed into right minded humanity. When our gaze slips, so do our thoughts, words and deeds. 

You need more than five minutes to get into Paul’s wisdom on humanity but times up – though I would encourage you to put in extra time at home when you hopefully pick up your bible and let Paul himself speak to you.

Trinity 15 Mark’s Gospel 16th September 2012

Today we return to Mark, Year B’s Gospel source back from a few weeks of John and today’s Gospel from 8.27-38 is the hinge of Mark.

First 7 chapters show us who Jesus is. Now we move into why God sent him and what it means to us. Time on all three headings.

Why I like Mark:

• Short to read
• Action packed
• Earliest Gospel 40 years after resurrection copied by Matthew and Luke. Only Paul’s letters are earlier. Papias 130 AD: Mark being the interpreter of Peter, whatsoever he recorded he wrote with great accuracy
• Mystery of uneven ending - the original may have got lost from the end of the scroll to be replaced by other texts in Chapter 16
• Clear purpose set forth in Chapter 8 to show us who Jesus is, why God sent him and what it means to us.

Who Jesus is

27 Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, ‘Who do people say that I am?’ 28 And they answered him, ‘John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.’ 29 He asked them, ‘But who do you say that I am?’ Peter answered him, ‘You are the Messiah.’ 30 And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.
• A crucial paragraph. In Mark 1-7 we’ve followed how Jesus’ identity emerges through miracles, healings and teachings. In February I preached on the miracles of Ch 2, and two weeks ago on his attack on lip service in Ch 7. Today’s the hinge: ‘Who do people say that I am?’
• Variations in how people see Jesus – then and now
• ‘You are the Messiah (Saviour).’ Peter’s role (Papias) of voicing what was the truly the case. Wisdom given Peter by God (Cf Matthew 16)

Why God sent him

31 Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. 32 He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. 33 But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, ‘Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’
• As Messiah Jesus didn’t and still doesn’t fulfil Jewish expectations
• A suffering Saviour sent to rescue us from sin.
• The world isn’t as it should be because we’re not as we should be. The heart of the human problem is the problem of the human heart.
• God’s Son was sent to earth to show us our sin and to show us his own heart and bring us, in Victor Hugo’s phrase, to ‘life’s greatest happiness’ which is ‘to be convinced we are loved’
• God made us for friendship. Sin made a barrier to this. Jesus died to destroy the barrier so restoring friendship with God.

What it means to us

34 He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 35 For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. 36 For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? 37 Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? 38 Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.’
• A church member in hospital offering their pain for all who’re there is focussed outside of themselves with Jesus for all
• Faith is ongoing choice for God and his provision in Jesus
• In baptism Jesus’ principle of losing life to gain it is impressed on us
• v38 Jesus is alpha and omega