The kingdom of God is come near...

This is the text of Sunday's sermon.

Sermon in a sentence: Lent is a time when we open ourselves to the activity of God so that our faith, and the faith of others, can be deepened.

Word order is important. (mirror signal manoeuvre )

Listen to what Jesus says, and the order in which he says them: The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news.

Jesus first words in Mark’s gospel describe a process-experience God, reorientate your life, accept the truth as being a something worth sharing.

The kingdom of God is near

Obviously when Jesus said this there was God stood in the room with people, and signs of his kingdom became more and more evident wherever he went-people who had been excluded from society became included, people who were sick or afflicted were set free from their burdens, people without hope were given a future.

How have you experienced God in the past? What have you seen of his kingdom? How did it affect you?

What might it look like if the kingdom of God came near in this area? How would people know who aren’t church-goers?

Repent

Not saying sorry, Greek work means literally to be ‘other minded’-it evokes an image of heading in a different direction-repenting is turning, it’s the pivot point. One of the most significant moments in anyone’s life is when they first turn towards Christ, even if they have yet to take a step in His direction or to make any sort of decision. Because by turning towards him they can see more of him.

• repentance is an ongoing process. Ancient Greek has slightly different tenses to English. It has something called a present continuous. We are transformed and we go on being transformed. Repentance is something that is best understood as a present continuous-we turn to Christ and we go on turning to Christ. Lent offers us the opportunity to focus on which way we are facing in aspects of our lives that we may not have really thought about before. So although on Ash Wednesday we are marked with ashes, a symbol of sorrow and mourning, as I said during the service, our focus as we begin Lent is not so much on all we have to be sorry for but on how amazing God is in his acceptance of us, and from a place of gratitude we identify what more we can do to bring our lives further into line with His will for us. On Ash Wednesday I made it explicit that today is the day, here and now, that we are offered the opportunity to step into the forgiveness already won for us by the cross of Christ. It’s not a new batch of forgiveness that we are asking for by saying an extra sorry-we are simply opening ourselves up to accept what has already been given. That’s why I offered people the opportunity to perhaps open up something to God that they have never done before, some old wound or sorrow, something they may have said or done that they would actually rather bury. Repentance is turning away from a way of living, of thinking, of being in stages, but we don’t just bury our pasts or pretend they didn’t exist. We offer them to God to receive his blessing and his pardon. And it is an amazing thing to do. It liberates us. It literally sets us free. Lent is a great time to step into that, but actually it can happen any day of the week, month or year.

• evangelism might seem less scary if we saw it in terms of helping people to turn towards Christ rather than in terms of telling them about him or trying to win disciples.

Believe the good news

Believe the good news. During Lent we ask ourselves ‘do I believe it?’ and ‘do I believe that it really is good news’? Because if we do we won’t be able to stop ourselves from sharing it.

This years lent course is about being mission-shaped. Traditionally Lent courses are introspective affairs, helping us to delve deeper into our inner beings as we seek those places of repentance to offer to God. Which is all good. But just as important is the fact that our experience of God and our reorientation of our lives leads us to a deeper understanding of the gospel, the “good news”. And as we reflect on the fact that our faith is built upon something that we know to be good news, so our realisation grows that it isn’t just good news for us. Our faith is not just about our personal salvation, but about good news for the whole world.

During the course on Thursday we reflected a bit on the fact that there is often a tension in churches between worship (the ‘me and God’ bit) and mission (the ‘change the world’ bit). Such a tension is not necessary because if the kingdom of God is come near and we have reorientated our lives then the ‘me and God’ and the ‘change the world’ become so intertwined that we they can’t actually be separated. As we repent, changing how we think and how we interact with others, we will see more and more of God’s activity in the community around us as it is transformed, giving us more to be thankful for and deepening our sense of wonder and awe.

Ali and I are so excited to be here with you at SAaAS because, though you may be feeling tired and burdened in some aspects of life, and though you may be lacking in confidence in other aspects of life, (and what congregation isn’t?) what is abundantly clear here is that you are people who know that the gospel of Christ, of God become man who took our sins to the cross and rose again and reigns in heaven, is good news, good news to be celebrated and to be shared.

So as we journey together through Lent, let us take the opportunity to reflect on what the kingdom of God coming near might look like in our lives and in this community, let us continue to orientate ourselves to Christ, repenting of what was in order to become who God wants us to be, and let us build each other up in our belief of the good news, the good news that we are set free and so is this community in which we are set and called to serve through bringing God’s transformative love.

And let us keep a holy Lent.

Amen.

Some thought before Lent

I hope you have had an enjoyable half-term week with the various ways that it may have changed your week; perhaps for you it involved more work, less work, more time with loved ones, different routines, more rest, less rest…I could go on!
This morning was a bit of a first for me as I was interviewed on the radio on the subject of Lent. I actually found it really difficult and quite nerve-wracking being on live radio, only managing to calm myself by believing that no one would be listening to the radio at that time of the day. And then I got to church and the first person I saw said “I heard you on the radio…” If you fancy a listen it is just after the 8am news, 1 hour and 3 minutes into this clip

Lent is special time of preparation for us, characterised by fasting, by self-examination, by doing good deeds, and by praying. How will you mark lent this year? At church you can come to the Ash Wednesday service which will now start at 7.30pm, not 8pm as advertised, for an opportunity to stop and reflect on the forgiveness of God. Or you could join in the Lent course which begins on Thursday at the Vicarage at 7.30pm. If you can’t come for some reason but would like to read along with what we are studying then please ask me for a copy of the course and I will get one to you.

I pray that you will have a holy Lent, and will be drawn ever deeper into the presence of the One from whom all good things derive, God Almighty, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Incarnation?

Sermon in a sentence: "God came to be with us. We are called to go to the broken world. Church helps us do this."

In our gospel reading we heard that "The word became flesh and made his dwelling among us". But why would this ‘Word’ that we had just heard was with God and was God, why would this Word wish to become a human being?

It is a good question. Why would God become a human being in Jesus? Why would God enter into this world and live among us ordinary people? Why would God not stay outside of human reality ... away from the muck, the suffering and confusion?

Where we live says something about us. Some of us live in palaces, some in shacks, some in residential homes, some in flats. Some live in the countryside, some on a housing estate, some in England, or Cameroon, or Palestine. Some in the district of St Anne and All Saints, and some outside it. And wherever it is we live, we tend to identify with those who live around us.
What we’ve just heard is that the creative power of God, the wisdom of God, the Holy One became a human being and dwelt among us. God chose to move into our neighbourhood and to identify with us, funny bunch that we are.

So "The word became flesh and made his dwelling among us" is pretty much the good news of the whole Bible summed up in one sentence. That is the central message of Christ ... the core mystery of Christianity ... what we Christians call, the "Incarnation" ... God with us, Emmanuel.
God came to us because he loves us. He came to us. Some of us know that to be true even if we don’t get all the details. That’s us in church. We are children of God, and as such we try to live as we believe God would have us live. We are the chosen ones.

Some others have a pretty good idea about it but might have got some of the details a bit muddled. That’s how I understand our brothers and sisters who practice other faiths, who like us strive to come close to God and to live as he would have them live but miss the point of the incarnation.

And yet many, many more have no idea that God came to be with them, that he loves them and wants them to live in relationship with him. So what does that mean to us here in church? He chose some of us to get it, to work it out, to live in the truth, and yet we know that he came for the whole world.

I believe it means that we need to stop thinking in terms of the church being about Sunday mornings. Now you may have noticed that I’ve been tinkering around the edges a bit with regard to what we do when we gather together to worship.

Things a little bit different-move things, use a different projector, maybe sing some new songs. What you need to understand is that I’m not fiddling with things in order to be awkward or to upset people, and nor am I fiddling with things because I am trying to mould the Sunday service to be just the way I like it, putting my territorial mark on it. Remember, God came to us. He came to where we live in order to make himself accessible to us. Which means that we, too need to think about how we can make God’s message accessible, and so to go to where God isn’t, to go to the whole world.
All changes so far have been about making what we do here more accessible to those who are gathered, those who don't hear or see so well, those who aren't sure what happens next.

The primary business of the church, the reason we gather to share together and to learn, is not just to worship, which we could just as easily do at home, but to build each other up and to train ourselves for the task at hand. The Greek word that we usually translate as disciple actually means learner, or student. A disciple is someone who is in training, who is absorbing the wisdom of the master. And the wisdom of our master existed before the world began. We are in the business of absorbing the timeless wisdom of the universe, which is no mean feat. The whole way that we organise our church services is designed to help us to do this. We make ourselves right with God through repentance, we hear scripture read and then made accessible in the sermon, we greet each other in the middle of the service (and hopefully again at the end when we share coffee and stories with each other, we participate in salvation story through bread and wine shared, and finally we are sent back out, hopefully better equipped to go to the places of darkness.

So in order to ensure that we are properly equipped we need to keep re-evaluating what we do when we gather. Why are we here? Is it helping us to be as God wants us to be? What did we come here for today?

Did we perhaps come reluctantly, or might we come out of habit or out of duty because we think it is the right thing to do, and might we leave having had our day made either marginally better or marginally worse depending on how things went? Or are we arriving expectant, desiring to learn and to be fed, to meet with God, and then leaving inspired, ready to live differently?

So my tinkering around the edges is my way of drawing us in to that process of evaluation. How do we know what is important to us? How do we decide what we do and don’t do? Why do we do what we do? What does it say about us and about what we believe or what we prioritise? How does it equip us? How often should we do it? And that process of evaluation is inextricably linked with change. And we all know that change is hard. We’re creatures of habit. It’s how we’re made. Ali and I and the kids have had to endure all sorts of changes as I embarked on a journey from Mental health nurse to vicar via three house moves so I really do know how hard change is.

But the good old C of E, with its solid foundation through history, is catching up to the fact that we cannot stay the same. This is not the only small church in the country.
But what we have that not everyone does is LIFE-we are seeing signs of how God wants us to grow as we welcome new people as they join us and we hear our Sunday Club report towards the end of the service and we meet together for Bible study and for prayer and for fellowship. This is a congregation that has already started down the road of reshaping for growth. It was clear in the parish profile and it’s been clear as I’ve been meeting with you over the last few weeks. But we’re not there yet. There’s more to be done.

One of the things that the DCC are considering at the moment and which they will make a decision about at the next meeting on the 4th March is whether there might be a place for a slightly different type of Sunday service here once a month, a service that offers a different sort of opportunity for us to learn and grow, to go about the business of being disciples by spending more time discovering that ancient wisdom that was and is beyond time and space in order to be equipped. In order to do this, to do more of something, we will necessarily have to create the space to do it if we are still intending to get home in time for lunch.

To provide a space that could perhaps resource us and equip us in new ways, opening us up to God’s plan for our lives, to the possibilities of all that he would have us do and be, would mean that we might have to miss out that day on something that we enjoy and prioritise, that is the very special time we have when we share communion, or we might have to take it at different time of day. Now I love communion. It is a very special time, and it has been such a privilege to be able to celebrate it since being ordained priest and a true pleasure to celebrate it here with you all. But it isn’t the only way that God wants to resource us, and it also isn’t a way that all of us can be resourced. It rather depends on where we are on our Christian journey. Some of us here today are not at the place of feeling able to come and participate, so it isn’t something that we can ALL do. But remember that God also wants us to pray together, which we can all do. He wants us to praise together, he wants us to socialise together, he wants us to feed on his written word together. If we are really desiring to grow in our faith and in our relationship with God, and we are wanting to do that all together, then I believe that we should create that space to go deeper once a month. Please do think and pray about this and discuss it among yourselves so that the DCC members know what all of you think.

Call me an idealist, but I long for the time when every time we leave our Sunday gathering we all automatically do as we say in our final blessing, and we go to the darkness around us with the light of God, wherever that may be, and whether or not the people we find there are even aware how lacking in light things are in their lives as they may have become used to the dimness, like eyes adjusted to the twilight. We go to where there is poverty and pain and emptiness and loneliness. And we make the world a better place. We bring heaven to earth by embodying kingdom values.

This is like our refuelling station, and from here we go to engage in the mission of God. The DCC have recently adopted the phrase “bringing communities together” as being what we are about. We go to get alongside and to identify with people, not to isolate ourselves in a holy huddle with our own ways of talking and behaving, or to go to people in order to preach down to them, to issue judgements and criticisms-God stopped all that Old Testament style telling off, that living under law business, by being incarnate, by coming and showing. We need to do the same. We need to train together to live incarnational lives.

My prayer for us all here at St Anne and All saints is that by spending time together we will be inspired to try to live his risen life wherever we are, particularly when we’re not in church. We will go to be with those who need God’s love. We will show them how to have a relationship with God. We will show them how to live in peace and harmony with each other. We will show them the power of forgiveness. We will bring communities together. We will make our dwelling among them.
Amen