Closing the loops

Sermon preached at St Paul's Church, Oadby
Sunday 23 July 2006
Simon Harvey



There is no audio recording of this sermon, but the text is shown below.

Jesus is more interested in you than you are in him. This stupendous fact emerges from the gospels. Yet we dismiss the idea that we have anything to offer Jesus, other than praise, thanksgiving and confession of sin. Don’t we realise that he truly is the Good Shepherd, more interested in sheep than his own prestige and comfort?

The bible readings used in this sermon are Jeremiah 23.1-6 and Mark 6.30-34, 53-56

Introduction

The following is written as a feature article or essay, to try to develop a narrative for the sermon, which I preached without notes.



“How are you doing?”
“How’s it all going?”
“Is everything okay?”
Familiar, everyday questions. I wonder who asks you those kind of questions. Many of us are asked questions like these everyday of our lives, so often that they are pretty meaningless. We’re used to answering them with a single word or something bland and broadly positive. “Fine.” “Not bad.” “Alright.” “Can’t complain.” “Pretty good.”
I don’t know what it’s like where you work, but I’ve discovered that the clergy of the Church of England are especially bad at this. It’s probably to do with the sense of insecurity and inadequacy that many leaders of churches feel. Put a group of clergy in the bar at the Swanwick conference centre during the bi-annual diocesan conference and when everyone’s settled down with a drink, the conversation goes something like this:
“Hi, I’m John. Sorry, I don’t remember your name,”
“Hi, I’m Bill.”
“Hi. Where you from, Bill?”
“Ambridge. You?”
“Emmerdale.”
“Oh. Nice place, Ambridge. How are things going?”
“Fine. And Emmerdale, what are things like there?”
“Fine.”

Fine! What Bill means is that down at Ambridge the parish treasurer has run off with half the money, the children’s worker is having an affair with the organist and the tower is about to fall down. And when John says that things are fine at Ambridge, he really means that the PCC have just given him an ultimatum that he’s got to leave by Christmas and his wife’s told him she’s going to have the curate’s baby!

Now may be after two or three drinks, John and Bill might begin to tell each other how it really is. But if the Bishop asks if he can join them, you know what’s going to happen. “How’s it going?” “Fine!”


When people ask you how things are going, how honest are you?
And let’s face it, people aren’t always interested to know how things are with you. They’ve got their own problems and concerns. They’re busy people too; they don’t really want to know the details of your life.

The irony of this is that we live in an age in which lives are more disconnected and dislocated than ever before. Just think that in all previous generations, life was lived with the same group of people to a much greater extent. There was still some mobility, but within a lifetime we have moved from a situation where it was quite common for someone to live and work in the same small settlement all their lives. People would work at the same place as some of their school friends. People would socialise several times a week with friends and acquaintances who they would see in the shops, down the pub, on the allotment, in the office or factory.
Life used to be far more socially connected, even if it was restricted in terms of mobility and opportunity. Human beings have evolved and were created for this intimacy and connectedness.

The irony of the development of our modern technology – post, transport, telephones, mobiles, email, and instant messaging services – is that more and more we can connect to everyone, but that we have less to talk about. The mobility we have, which allows us to connect across wider distances also let’s us live more separately. Because we share so little of our lives, it’s hard to answer the question, “how’s it going?” without having to give a long and complicated answer, setting things in context. We say, “keep in touch” but deep down we know that there will be little to say when we do.

Churches which have a thriving fellowship, in which people meet and talk after the service, catching up with each other are deeply counter-cultural. It’s wonderful to see people of all ages and from different backgrounds enjoying each other after church.

But even here we are restricted. Who do you share the joys and sorrows of daily living with?

Our work used to offer us a staff canteen for a shared lunch, or at least somewhere to sit for a while. Now people are munching a sandwich over a keyboard. We used to have tea-breaks, or a drink after work. Now it’s only smokers who spend a few minutes away from their desk.

In the pre-industrial age, people found natural opportunities to tell each other how things were going. The craftsman’s workshop would see people dropping by. The labourers in the fields would spend all day in the company of others. The homeworkers would go about their work with children, older relatives and neighbours all close by.

In the first two centuries of the industrial revolution, crowded, mechanised factories and mines were unpleasant in many ways but they did allow for the sharing of experience.

These days, the small number of people we share our homes with have to bear nearly all the burden of encouragement and support through the demands of daily life. If you want more, you’ve got to pay for a life-coach or therapist.

I don’t think that it’s incidental that when the divine community of the Holy Trinity created the heavens and earth, we read that each day God stopped, looked and said, “it is good”. There’s something real and necessary about celebrating achievements together, and then resolving together to do the next thing.
What sorrow and loneliness, what isolation and depression, could be spared if more people were able to experience this kind of relationship?

“The apostles gathered around Jesus, and told him all that they had done and taught. He said to them, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.”
From the perspective of our modern context, these are remarkable words. Perhaps previous generations of Christians found nothing unusual in the idea that the disciples returning from their unsupervised ministries, should gather around Jesus and tell him all that they had done and taught. But look from within the experience of twenty-first century discipleship and the implications are surprising.


This small community of Jesus and his followers are the proto-church, the first primitive movement of Christians. But this glimpse into their shared life feels quite alien to the assumptions we bring to church.

The gathering of the apostles around Jesus is, by definition, a re-gathering of sent ministers. (An apostle is essentially someone who has been sent out, entrusted with a responsibility to go out into the world.) So far, so good. We regularly gather in the name of Jesus and meet with him in our churches. And in our gatherings too, we are often the ones doing the speaking – rightly declaring God’s praises and expressing ourselves in worship.

But the thing that catches my attention is that Jesus is listening here to an account of the apostles’ activity. In this passage they are describing the experience of living out their vocation. They have been commissioned by Jesus, now they are giving account. And we can imagine that they have had mixed experiences. There will have been occasions of great joy to recall – times when opportunities have arisen and good, fruitful ministry has happened. There will also have been times of frustration and discouragement, where hoped-for outcomes haven’t come about.
If we use our imaginations, what kind of conversation do we think took place? How excited were those apostles, discovering what God was doing through them? How encouraging was Jesus? How inspiring and positive was it to share even times of doubt and difficulty with Jesus? To have him ask, “how did it go?” and then listen attentively to all that you did.

Why do we find it so hard to believe that this same Jesus might be interested in our experiences of discipleship, of mission and ministry, or just of everyday living? Is it because we learned at a young age that what we say to God should never be a real conversation? Are our prayers trapped in the formula of “thank-you, sorry, please”?
Could it really be true that part of discipleship is not only to know our vocation to live for Jesus but also to know the privelege of conversation about how it really is?

Jesus is more interested in you than you are in him. This stupendous fact emerges from the gospels. Yet we dismiss the idea that we have anything to offer Jesus, other than praise, thanksgiving and confession of sin. Don’t we realise that he truly is the Good Shepherd, more interested in sheep than his own prestige and comfort?

Jesus really is more interested in you than you are in him. Or do you really believe that your capacity for devotion is greater than his?



Our churches have often been describe as ‘come’ structures. That is, they emphasise gathering and welcome and passivity. There’s a lot of truth in that and in recent decades the church has rediscovered the vital role of all the baptised in ministry and living for the kingdom. We have rightly been asked to emphasise the ‘go’ of vocation, blessing and dismissal from the gathering in order to live for God, seven days a week.

But ‘come’ and ‘go’ discipleship is too individualistic and disconnected to do justice to the biblical model. Left at this, what do we do with the sense of joy or the feelings of struggle that discipleship bring? We need to be able to do the very thing that Jesus provided for his apostles – gathering with him to tell all that we have done.

Home groups and prayer triplets are great ways to talk and listen with each other about how things are really going. Regularly meeting with someone you trust and simply telling it as it is, then taking that into prayer is priceless. If Jesus did it with his friends, what makes us think we can go without?

And in our own personal praying, we need to allow some opportunity for conversation with Jesus. Tell him regularly how things are going. It will feel really odd to begin with if you’ve never done it before, but just begin by knowing he’s interested in you. He’s asking, “how’s it going?”

I think of all this as ‘closing the loops’. It’s about closing the loop and feeding back the experience of living into our personal and shared relationship with God. It’s about regularly re-connecting with the one who’s more interested in you than you are in him. It’s about being an encouragement to one another, giving someone else the precious gift of your undivided attention. It’s about knowing the support of a community of fellowship and commitment.

Who can touch Jesus?

Sermon preached at St Paul's Church, Oadby
Sunday 2 July 2006
Simon Harvey



There is no audio recording of this sermon, but the text is shown below.

I don’t really care whether you come to church every week. I really care that you meet Jesus often. I really care that you’re getting to know Jesus more and more. I really care that you notice yourself becoming more Christ-like in your character. I really care that you feel the character of Jesus filling you more and more and enabling you to lead a flourishing and fruitful life.

The bible readings used in this sermon are Lamentations 3.22-33 and Mark 5.21-43.

Introduction

Last Sunday, I preached a sermon based on Mark 4:35-41. Jesus asked his disciples to take him away from the comfort and safety of a successful day’s ministry across the lake on a boat. When a fierce storm blew, they thought they would drown. But Jesus woke and settled the storm with a word of command.
We reflected on how the church has been compared to a boat. But boats come in all shapes and sizes; churches are vessels with a purpose – like lifeboats. Lifeboat exists to sail in stormy seas. Their whole reason for existing is to be ready for action, available for mission to others in need as soon as they are called upon. Likewise, the church primarily exists for mission to the world, not for the comfort of those who belong.
This week, we’ll explore further just how Jesus worked with his early followers. They were close enough to him to discover his character and purpose. If we are challenged to do the same, can we draw inspiration and hope from the example of Jesus?

Sermon:




Have you ever set out on a journey not really know where it would lead?
Last week, I preached a sermon about the disciples response to Jesus’ call to set sail across the lake. And I told you that I feel that God may be calling us to ‘slip the moorings’, and set sail with him in a more deliberate and purposeful way. I had a lot of positive reaction to the sermon. It encourages me that God is saying the same things to many of you as he is to me. Vicars don’t have a monopoly on access to God’s vision for a church, so it’s a great help to me as your vicar, to learn what God is saying to you as well.
One person came to me at the end of the service last week and told me that they felt just as strongly that God was calling us to push the boat out, so to speak. But they wanted to challenge me. Where to? Where are we sailing towards? What direction is God calling our church to sail in?
They’ve got a point. I don’t believe that God reveals exact destinations for every mission. Sometimes he wants to just set a general direction. But there is always a direction. The early church and the apostles didn’t wander aimlessly, they sensed God calling them to something more specific than just ‘mission by hanging around’. This week, I’ve spent more time listening and reflecting on all of this and I believe I can offer us some general headings about the direction in which God might want us to travel.
Happily, today’s gospel reading takes us into exactly the area that I want us to explore. I want us to look carefully at the passage from Mark’s gospel this morning, in a sermon that I’ve called “Who can touch Jesus?”
Remember that the disciples following Jesus had committed themselves to walk with him – they’d left their jobs as fishermen, tax-collectors and so on. But they were still discovering who Jesus was and is. And Mark’s gospel was written for the whole Jesus Movement – the great tide of Jesus’ later followers that became the Church. It’s for us too, helping us to trace the direction in which God wants us to set sail as a local church community, and to make ourselves available for the mission God has for us at St Paul’s.
Coming to church or meeting Jesus?
I don’t want people to come to church! I really want people to meet Jesus. I want them to become like Jesus.
One of the slightly odd things about being a vicar is that people see you as representing the church. Wearing a ‘dog-collar’ gives people opportunity to tell you all sorts of things. But these things are mainly about church.
I get people coming up to me and explaining why they’ve not been to church lately. Or quite often, people will tell me that they’re going to come to church. Do you know what? I’m not that interested in excuses or promises about coming to church. I don’t really care whether you come to church or not!
Listen carefully… I don’t really care whether you come to church every week. I really care that you meet Jesus often. I really care that you’re getting to know Jesus more and more. I really care that you notice yourself becoming more Christ-like in your character. I really care that you feel the character of Jesus filling you more and more and enabling you to lead a flourishing and fruitful life.
Yes, I want you to come to church, because in church we give each other the best chance of meeting Jesus, getting to know Jesus, growing more Christ-like in character. But it’s not my ‘bottom line’. To use last week’s analogy – the mission matters more than the vessel. If we put the vessel (our church) first, we build a ship for ourselves and compromise its mission. If we put the mission first, we focus on making everything serve God’s primary purpose.
This brings me to the crucial ‘why’ question: Why do I care so much that we should get to meet Jesus, to know Jesus, to become like Jesus? Answer: Because that’s what Jesus wants.
Jesus told his disciples that he would build his church. But he asked his followers to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that he commanded.” They were to focus on the mission. As they faithfully fulfilled this commission, Jesus’ built his church.
But at the time of our gospel reading, all that was a long way in the future. In Mark chapter 5, Jesus and his disciples have returned back across the lake again and they immediately find themselves in the mission field. Here we have a picture of the small community of Jesus going about its business. The mission seems to be going really well today; there are crowds everywhere.
A woman’s touch
And as the crowds press in on Jesus, so close that he’s being squashed on every side, a woman pushes herself through. We don’t know her name. We just know how desperate she is to meet Jesus. For over twelve years, she’s been bleeding. Her monthly period had become a permanent and painful haemmorhage. She’d spent everything she’d had on doctors but with no cure. They’d just preyed on her vulnerability and her desperation and ripped her off. We can glimspe just how bad things were for this woman when we remember that in Jewish teaching, she was considered permanently impure and anyone and anything she touched would be considered defiled. At this time, the strict purity code of Leviticus, which was later abolished in the new church of Jesus, was still in effect:
“If a woman has a discharge of blood for many days, not at the time of her period, or if she has a discharge beyond the time of her period, all the days of the discharge she shall continue in impurity.”
Can you imagine how ostracised this poor woman felt? Not only was she seriously unwell, but she was also effectively excluded from society. She wasn’t allowed to touch anyone, or to sit where someone else may sit.
But today she breaks all the rules, pushing herself through the crowds. If she can only touch Jesus, or even the hem of his robe, she knows she will be healed. And in that moment, with noise and commotion and everything else, she manages to touch Jesus. Mark tells us that immediately the bleeding stopped. Immediately, she felt in her body, in the very depths of herself that she was well. We can dress this up in spiritual language, but here is a woman who knows the inner healing touch of Jesus in the most intimate and physical way.
And it’s not only the woman feels the power of that touch…
Mark tells us Jesus stopped still and looked for the person who touched him. I can imagine Jesus stopping, his eyes wide open, holding his breath. Who has touched him with such desperate longing? Who has been seeking him so sincerely? And in a remarkable moment which discloses the character of Jesus, we have this Christ and Saviour- we have God, asking a question. “Who has touched me? Who is it that seeks me? Who wants me that much?”
And the woman falls to her knees trembling and tells him everything- the ‘whole truth’. Did she expect to get told off? The crowd must have been outraged to hear that she, a ritually-unclean woman, dared to touch Jesus. Yet Jesus calls her ‘daughter’, the tenderest of names. “Daughter, your faith has made you well. Go in peace. You are saved and healed.”
Seeking the seekers
It matters so much to Jesus, to know who seeks him. Do you know, in our day many people are seeking? They may not even know they want Jesus, but they know their lives need something. On two or three Sundays in the year, Parklands Leisure Centre is the venue for a Mind Body and Spirit Fair. In our Oadby pubs, there are Psychic Evenings. Our bookshops are full of self-help and lifestyle titles, many aimed at giving people a life worth living. A lot of people in our world are satisfied and fairly comfortable with their lives. But a few are looking, searching for a way to a more significant life, for acceptance, for an answer to haunting loneliness, for healing, or for hope. I think we can get better at ‘seeking the seekers’. And I think if Jesus were with us as physically as he was with his first disciples, he’d want us to help find the people who are trying to find him. He’d be with them, talking to them, listening to them, getting to know them, so that they can get to know him. Being sensitive to them, without compromising his mission.
I have a hunch that if Jesus came to visit us this week, what sort of guided tour would he want? I reckon he’d be less interested in our buildings or in our bookshelves or in all our paperwork. He’d ask us where he could find the people who are seeking him in these streets.
To use last week’s lifelboat analogy, it’s about how well we keep look-out. Do we look in life’s stormy seas for those who are longing for Jesus? And how do we respond?
I think there’s a huge agenda for us here. Which people in our church fellowship are the really good look-outs? Where do we find people seeking Jesus – in church on Sunday? in Coffee Pot? in our street? where we work? in our neighbourhood?
A really key lesson for us to learn here is the importance of the individual person. Time and again, Jesus interrupts his ministry for just one person. He did it on the day Mark wrote about. It makes me wonder - how willing am I to stop what I’m doing to meet the one person who wants to get close to Jesus on their own terms? How willing are we?
I think we must change some of our thinking. Most of the administration and management issues in our church come from the events and activities that we run. And they’re good. But we can easily slide into the habit of planning and providing events and activities and overlooking people. I think we need to make some adjustment here. To be person-centred in our evangelism, in our childrens’ work, in our home groups, in our social gatherings.
I want us to be doing a new evangelism course this autumn – providing opportunities for people to meet Jesus and get to know him a little. But I’ll want us to change the way we do it – being much more responsive to people’s needs and questions. To do mission Jesus’ way.
That’s my first response to the question about the direction where I think God is calling us to go. To adopt the people-centred mission approach of Jesus and to seek the seekers around us.




(There was too much for me to prepare for a Sunday sermon, so I’ve continued my thoughts below in ‘Part Two’).
Part Two (the bit that didn’t get preached)
The crushing power of negative expectations
When I read the gospels, I can’t help noticing the mistakes the disciples make. Spotting other people’s mistakes isn’t a very nice habit, but I guess that God wants us to notice how often the disciples mess things up, so that we can learn from their mistakes.
And what I notice about the disciples in today’s reading is just how negative their expectations are!
I get the impression that the disciples think they should be a bit like bouncers, trying to keep people at arms length from Jesus. I just get the impression that they saw problems where Jesus saw opportunities.
Take our story for example. When the miraculous healing occurs and Jesus looks around and asks who touched him, the disciples think he’s being stupid. “Can’t you see the crowd, Jesus? They’re pressing in on every side, and you say, ‘who touched me?’”. Now you’d think by now the disciples would be just a little prepared to allow for the fact that this Jesus is no ordinary person. He’s just silenced a storm with a word, for goodness’s sake!
Yet the disciples still seem to have low expectations. Their whole contribution to this wonderful episode in Jesus’ ministry is to doubt him. What brilliant assistants they are!
Now we wouldn’t be half as bad as that, would we? Well, I’d like to think not. But I confess that sometimes, a little negativity creeps in to my expectations.
After all, this is the Church of England. I love our Church of England, I really do. But boy do we make life hard! It’s easy to get a little fed up on occasions, if not a little skeptical. And it’s also possible to get a little impatient with the seemingly scarce opportunities for mission. It sometimes looks quite hard to think of ways of encouraging new faith in new people. “People here are quite happy.” “My neighbours believe in a different God.” “We don’t know where to begin.” “We’re just too busy.” “We don’t have the resources.”
Take comfort – this is just the sort of way the disciples thought. But I don’t think this is the way that God looks at us and our situation. God wants to lift us and encourage us about all the possibilities – so that we can see that today is one of the most exciting times to be a Christian.
I’m intrigued. Exactly how did Jesus transform his unhelpful disciples into powerful apostles, who did amazing things for him and became like him in their very character?
Before we go on to that, I want to acknowledge the wonderful witness to Christian living that I’ve found here at St Paul’s. Just this last week, I’ve been talking with members of our church who are desperately overworked in their employment. With people who are anxious for elderly relatives who are getting to unwell to look after themselves. With people who are facing redundancy. And yet in these difficulties, they know the sustaining power of God.
We can recognise three key ways that Jesus transformed his disciples, which are just as relevant for us at St Paul’s:
1. The first is through discipleship. Those months of walking the dusty roads of Galilee and Judea with Jesus were literally about discipleship – being followers. Through exciting and successful times, through hardship and through quiet times, just being with Jesus enabled the disciples to glimpse the character of God.
We too are called to be disciples. And for us too, one of the most important ways of knowing the transforming power of God is to spend time with Jesus. Read the bible – especially read the gospels. What would your knowledge of Jesus’ character look like if you spent ten minutes a day reading a gospel passage? We have daily prayer in our parish if you want to read and pray with others. But this is something you can do on your own. Pray often. The bible tells us that when we pray, Jesus intercedes for us. That means Jesus acts as the go-between between us and God the Father. When you pray, you can’t help getting close to Jesus.
2. The second way the disciples were transformed was through making a great commitment to Jesus’ great commission. When Jesus called his disciples, he wasn’t just asking them for an hour-on-a-Sunday hobby. He set before them a demanding task, something that would require courage and commitment and faithfulness.
I suspect that we’re a little too nervous of asking for commitment in our day. We live in such an easy, convernient, on-demand society that the concept of asking people to make a costly, sacrificial commitment of themselves feels a little too pushy. But pretending the gospel doesn’t make demands isn’t helpful. We’re not here to help people enjoy the hobby of church-going. We’re here to help people find the true purpose for their lives and to live out that purpose. We’re hear to know and respond to the needs of the poor in this world.
I feel nervous about asking people for commitment but I feel God is calling us to be a little bolder about doing so.
3. The third way that Jesus’ disciples were transformed from frail followers to powerful apostles was through the gift of God’s Holy Spirit. After Pentecost, everything changed. The book of Acts races is a breathless tour of the early church. From Jerusalem to the edges of the known world, God was doing amazing things through very ordinary people like you and me. It was the positive power and energy and inspiration of the Holy Spirit that made all the difference.
Some people feel nervous about the idea of the Holy Spirit. Previous experiences of ‘charismatic worship’ have left a number of our church members feeling a little wary. We should remember that not all of us experience the supernatural spiritual gifts and the bible stresses that the work of the Spirit is the edification or up-building of the whole church, not a minority interest.
But experiencing the touch of God during public worship and in private prayer is not just for a few Christians. It’s for all of us. I believe we should expect more of our worship together and pray for richer encounters with God.
So to a few practical thoughts. I wonder how we can grow our home-groups, so that they can be even more effective in encouraging growth in our personal discipleship. Perhaps we should think of them as growth-groups. Perhaps we should link our Sunday services and sermons with the material used in small groups. I hope many of our church will want to enrol on the new Certificate in Christian Discipleship course which begins in September. I hope more people will feel enabled and equipped to commit to tasks that God has called them to.

So my second response to the question about the direction where I think God is calling us to go is related to our growth in maturity as God’s people. It’s about our transformation to Christ-likeness through getting close to Jesus in study and prayer, through making big commitments to the tasks God gives us and through rich encounters with God in worship.