sermon

Experiencing God through good and bad

Sermon preached on 17th August 2014. There was one Bible reading (Genesis 1:1-9 and 26-31) and another reading from the Guardian newspaper about recent events in Gaza.

I’ve had a fabulous holiday this year and the two parts of my sermon are going to reflect on different aspects of my experience of God during that time.

For the last week my wife, daughter and I stayed in a self-catering cottage in Pembrokeshire. We are into “wild swimming” particularly in lakes and rivers and had found some wonderful places to do this. On the way back we drove over to the Irfon valley in central Wales to a place called Wolf’s Leap which was highly recommended in our guidebook.

It was absolutely incredible. The valley itself is remote and beautiful but the river in its base runs through an extremely narrow gorge down to about shoulder width at times and several metres high. The gorge links a number of broader pools and includes several small waterfalls. It’s possible to swim up sections of the gorge linking these pools and scramble over those waterfalls. It felt like swimming through a sequence of caves. If you are into that sort of think it was absolute heaven – and it was all ours, there was no-one else there.

The first swim was the best because it was all so new. The three of us swam up one part of the gorge, had a natural jacuzzi sitting under one particularly exhilarating waterfall and then came back down to where our bags were. The three of us got out bubbling with delight and shivering with the cold and just couldn’t stop giggling as we huddled together to get warm and eat our lunch. It felt as if that particular moment in that particular place had been created by God just for us.

Except, of course, there are other explanations. The rock of the gorge, so the geologists tell us, was laid down in the Silurian period between 440 and 420 million years ago when the part of the earth’s crust that we now call Europe was south of the equator and beneath the sea. Over time the sediments in that sea settled on the bottom in layers of silt so deep that the lower level got compressed under the immense pressure to form rock. Great convection currents in the molten rock in the earth’s mantle carried the whole tectonic plate to its current position and lifted it out of the ocean. The immense stresses acted on small imperfections within the rock and caused it to crack. Sheets of ice formed on several occasions and scoured the valley we know today and, over an unimaginably long time, the river that formed in the bottom found one of those cracks and scoured it out to form the gorge we can swim in to today. It is quite possible to tell the whole story as a consequence of random and chaotic processes within a framework of physical laws which govern everything in the Universe. There’s no need to mention God at all.

Modern Christians have to balance these two different stories – one written by priests and poets in the Middle East perhaps 4,000 years ago and the other by scientists over the last 100 years or so. There is no consensus within the church as to how these stories should be balanced. Some of you will regard the biblical version as sacrosanct, others will be convinced by the scientists. Many will fall somewhere in between exclusive belief in either. Some perhaps will find it all too much and not think about it at all.

I’m not going to add in my view this morning. This is partly because it is just one opinion where there are too many already but more importantly because I think it is a colossal distraction. Every minute we spend haggling over how we should interpret our experiences theologically is a minute lost to us to simply immerse ourselves in that experience God and to respond to it.

It simply isn’t important to worry about how I came to experience God so clearly at that particular time and that particular place. What is important is to acknowledge that experience and to celebrate and respond to it.

I emphasize the response because I think this is at least as important as the experience. The response to that day in mid-Wales, and many more throughout our lives, is gratitude – simple thanks. We need moments like this to remind us that all we have needed our god has provided. It’s important for us but it is also important for the whole world. Our world is in a mess now largely because we don’t give thanks for the gifts with which we have already been blessed. We are always striving for more –for new clothes, a better holiday a new i-phone. We are striving for these things so hard that we have little time to care for our neighbours. We produce plenty of food to feed the whole planet but don’t because those of us in the rich world demand more than we need.

If only everyone in the world could recognise the presence of God within their lives and be immersed in thankfulness for that experience and satisfaction with the gifts with which they have already been blessed. It is this, surely, for which we pray when we say “thy Kingdom come”.

We’re going to sing our prayers of thanks. I’ve chosen one of those hymn that has particular resonance to me through memory of previous occasions when I’ve sung it. We chose this hymn for our wedding, we sung it at my grandfather’s funeral and, I hope, others will sing some day at my own funeral. All I have needed thy hand has provided – great is thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me.

 Break to sing Great is thy faithfulness

The other experience of God I want to talk about is quite different. I’ve had one of these little boxes (smartphone) for the last two years. I now effectively carry around several national newspapers wherever I go and can read them whenever I want. The day before our trip to the Irfon valley I sat on a Pembrokeshire beach and read the article we’ve just heard.  We’ve heard a lot of reports from the Middle East over the last decade and particularly from Gaza. I’m not sure why this one affected me so much but it left a really empty feeling in the pit of my stomach. Perhaps it was that the acts it reports were so unnecessary whatever the military objectives of Israeli incursions into Gaza. I felt sick and powerless –but this too, I believe, is an experience of God in my life.

Gaza is just as much a part of creation as that valley in mid-Wales. How on earth can we explain that?

Again there are two stories. One is that God is all-knowing and all powerful and that he is in control of the destiny of the world. It may be difficult to see what his or her purposes are in the events we hear reported in the News but that is because we as humans can never see the mind of God. Now we see darkly as in a mirror, then we shall know face to face. I suspect many of us struggle with this much more than the question of how God is present in the experiences of our life but these are really too sides of the same coin.

There is, of course, an alternative explanation which doesn’t involve God at all. We can pick it up with the Jews winning the Palestinian civil war in 1948 and establishing Israel as an independent state. Many Arabs who had been living in the region felt they had to flee to surrounding areas and some have been living as refuges for over 60 years. There are now estimated to be over 4 million of them. Many fled to the Gaza strip a small enclave of Egyptian territory between Israel and the Mediterranean Sea. In the six days war in 1967 Israel invaded Gaza but Egypt closed the border to the south and the refugees have been trapped there ever since. The poverty and desperation led the people of Gaza to rebel politically and militarily. Israel and Egypt have both felt threatened and applied economic sanctions to suppress that threat. This has set up a vicious cycle of growing repression and growing  resentment. The Isreali’s have been so threatened by this that they have felt it necessary to invade three times within the last six years each time bringing even greater devastation to an already desperately poor region of the world.

So again there are two stories. One developed by priests and poets over 4,000 years ago and seeing God as the central player. The other told by historians and sociologists without any reference to God. Again we, as individual, Christians have to balance these two stories because there is no consensus within the wider church as to how they should be balanced.

But again I am not sure that the theological niceties are all that important. Every minute we spend arguing about God’s role in all this is a minute when we are distracted from what is important – our experience of God and our response to it.

I suspect our experience of God is clear and common to us all. It involves experiences of grief, sorrow, anger, desperation and powerlessness, but what about response? What can we do?

I don’t often cite conservative peers in my sermons but Baroness Warsi responded. It’s clear to me that, despite being a Muslim, her experience of God through these terrible stories was the same as ours. As a member of the government she clearly argued passionately that something must be done and when the rest of the government decided otherwise she resigned. If we remonstrate too strongly with our friends in Israel we will lose what influence we have, they argued. If that influence is too weak to prevent the massacre of 1,500 innocent people then can it be worth having?, she replied.

But of course most of us have no place in the government and can’t respond in this way. What can we do? Zoe was asked to read this morning because she did something. She wrote an e-mail to the stewards last Monday expressing her horror in what was going on in Gaza and Iraq and suggesting a retiring collection for the people of that region after the service today. Many of you may already have responded to the news stories through giving through a variety of channels already and we give thanks for that.

I also feel that we can respond by praying for the poor and oppressed and broadcasting those prayers to the whole of society. So often the political authorities focus on the agenda of the rich and powerful. They can look after themselves, what we really need is an agenda focussing on the needs of the poor and impotent. Every morning as I climb the stairs at work I am confronted by a poster with the words of an Auschwitz survivor:

We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. (Elie Weissel).

It is through prayer that Christians can break that silence.

Short term 12

Not really a sermon but I used this in place of a sermon on 29th June 2014. The reading I chose was John 14:1-13.

The kids were away on Friday night so my wife and I could choose the film we wanted to watch. Freed of the kids desire for action/adventure or romantic comedy we could choose something a little more quirky, maybe something a little more challenging. It was difficult to fond anything just flicking through the films BlinkBox suggested so I visited a list of the best 50 films of last year and my eye was caught by an entry for Short Term 12.

This is a low budget independent film which only had a very limited release in UK. It’s set in a home for troubled teenagers in Los Angeles. The main characters is Grace one of the care workers and the story focusses on her relationship with her boyfriend and three of the kids.

In the opening scene Grace and her co-workers are having a conversation outside the front door of the facility. Sammy, clearly having distressed, bursts out of the house and starts running for the boundary. The policy is that staff can restrain the kids within the grounds but can do nothing if outside so Grace and her boyfriend Mason set off in pursuit. They catch Sammy who is distressed and violent and they just hold him safely and securely while his anger passes. Once this has happened Sammy reverts to a sad and introverted young boy who meekly allows himself to his room where he just lies motionless on the bed. No-one knows what thoughts are passing through his mind.

Marcus is one of the older residents who is approaching his 18th birthday and the time when he will have to return to his physically abusive mother. His emotions are focussed by the death of the goldfish that he has nurtured. It is grace who finds him slumped on the floor after he has attempted to commit suicide and reacts quickly to save his life and get him to hospital.

Finally a Jayden comes as a new resident. She’s quite hostile to the other kids believing that she’ll be returning to her father before long and that there’s just no point building relationship for the short time while she’s there. Grace discovers that they share a common love of drawing and through this starts to build a relationship. Jayden opens up enough to tell Grace a children’s story she has written. Grace interprets this of evidence that Jayden has been abused by her father and is able to support her to come to terms with this.

Throughout this we see Grace as the central person in the small team of care workers within the facility. Her position comes from her personal qualities. It is quite clear that her position within the staff hierarchy is quite a junior one.  It is her that is bonding most powerfully and constructively with the kid though. For several of them she is the only person that can communicate effectively with them. The only person who they can see cares for them. She is … Grace – a gift of God which, when people experience it, allows them to make sense of their lives and gives them reassurance.

But this story of Grace as a provider of comfort and a giver of life is only one side of her character. As the plot progresses we come to realise that Grace is mixed up and vulnerable herself. We are shown glimpses of the intimacy of her relationship with her boyfriend but also of these unravelling for no apparent reason. It emerges that she herself was been abused by her father who was imprisoned for what he had done and is shortly to be released. In one scene when Jayden has been cutting herself Grace shows her the scars on her legs where she cut herself as a child.

Grace is who she is, and can offer what she does, because of the experiences she herself had been through and has survived. We begin to realise that the strong relationships she is able to develop are born of empathy and understanding. Out of her brokenness she is able to create wholeness.  Her brokenness is not just a thing of the past. It is a thing of the present. She is still broken, she still needs to come to terms with her own experience, but in the depths of this turmoil in her own life she can still bring wholeness to the lives of others.

The final scene mirrors the first one. Grace and her co-workers are chatting outside the front door. Once again Sammy bursts through the door and starts running for the entrance. Grace and the others aren’t quite so quick off the mark this time and it looks as if Sammy is going to make it to the entrance and to freedom. At the last minute, however, just as he’s going to get there, he veers off course and allows himself to be caught. We realise that he’s not been running to break free. He’s running to be captured. Captured and held in the arms of the one person who understands him and  loves him. Captured and held in the arms of Grace.

Same sex marriage act

This is a sermon preached on Sunday 1st June the week before a circuit level “open meeting” on human sexuality and same sex marriage. The readings I chose were Matthew 15:21-28 and Acts 15:1-19.

Introduction to theme

This morning I’d like to suggest we talk about same sex marriage. Such a topic is not every Christian’s cup of tea but our church has asked us to prayerfully consider the matter so let’s give it a go. It’s probably worth starting off with a bit of background before we get to the sermon proper.

The Marriage (same sex couples) Act came into force in 2013 and first same sex marriages took place on 29th March 2014. The Church of England is prevented by the law for constitutional reasons from holding same sex marriages but the other churches have the choice to opt in or opt out. The Quakers have already announced that they will welcome same sex marriages.

The Methodist response has been quite legalistic and technical. Our standing orders currently state that “marriage is a gift of God and that it is God’s intention that a marriage should be a life-long union in body, mind and spirit of one man and one woman”. This is the tradition of the church which was reinforced after the last substantial debate on the topic in 1993. The official pronouncements have really just hidden behind this. Our formal definition of marriage explicitly states that it is between a man and a woman then clearly we cannot acknowledge marriage between two men or two women. At that Conference in 1993 however the Methodist Church also resolved that it:

recognises, affirms and celebrates the participation and ministry of lesbians and gay men in the church. Conference calls on the Methodist people to begin a pilgrimage of faith to combat repression and discrimination, to work for justice and human rights and to give dignity and worth to people whatever their sexuality.

Things are thus not quite as clear cut as the pronouncements suggest. How can  we “recognise, affirm and celebrate” what lesbians and gay men have to offer and then deny them the opportunity to form relationships and have these recognised and celebrated in church? At last year’s Conference our church thus asked a working group to “consider whether the Methodist Church’s position on marriage needs revising in the light of changes in society“. The meeting next week is a part of that process.

The other issue that the meeting will address is how to deal with the consequences of any such decision. It is very clear that there is a wide diversity of opinion within the Methodist church on this issue with some people at both ends of the spectrum holding very deeply rooted an opposing views. However the decision goes, a substantial part of the church are likely to be quite unhappy. They will feel the church has turned away form the will of God. Are there actions we can take now, before we know the outcome of the debate, that might make it easier for the church to address the consequences whichever way the decision goes. In my sermon this morning I’d like to address the issue of whether we should revise our understanding of marriage and afterwards I hope we might have time  for a little discussion on how the church can accommodate people of opposing views.

Before I do so I just want to finish off the “information session” by pointing out that whatever happens it is not going to happen quickly. If the working party proposes that we should consider revising our definition of marriage then there will be a period of consultation before that decision is made. If that decision is to broaden the definition to include same sex marriage then there will need to be further consultation and debate for Conference to allow such ceremonies on Methodist church premises. Our rules will then require each Church Council individual to decide whether to host such ceremonies or not and the Minister will also be allowed to take a personal decision as to whether they feel able to officiate at the ceremony or not. There are a lot of ifs in what I’ve just said and the different levels of decision making are going to take a considerable period of time.

Sermon

In thinking about how to preach on this subject I was struck by the  phrasing of the resolution of Conference last year: “to consider whether the Methodist Church’s position on marriage needs revising in the light of changes in society“. I want to focus on the last seven words: “in the light of changes in society“. This isn’t the way that many of us think about our theology is it. We tend to think of our understanding of God and God’s will as being the same in the beginning, now and forever more, Amen. In a rapidly changing and bewildering world many of us take considerable strength from our faith as something the is steadfast and unchanging. We want to believe that there are certain truths that simply do not change.

But our church’s governing body is saying something different. It is saying that our beliefs may need revising, not only that they may need revising but they may need revising in the light of changes in society. Is our understanding of God to be dictated to us by society?  I suspect there are many within the church who would be horrified by this thought once they hear it expressed in this way.

But there are clear precedents in our communal history. The early church’s attitude to non-Jews is, I would suggest, such an example. There is no real doubt that the historical Jesus saw his mission as to the Jews. He was raised in a part of Palestine were he probably never met anyone who didn’t consider themselves Jewish. He clearly saw his teaching as a fulfilment of the Jewish religion and the teaching of the prophets. We catch a glimpse of this in the reading we’ve had from Matthew this morning. When approached with a request from a non-Jewish woman he replies quite harshly, “I was sent here only for the lost sheep of Israel“. This was his teaching to his disciples who after his death continued in the assumption that early Christianity was a movement within Judaism which required Christians to accept the requirements of Judaism including circumcision and adherence to food laws.

The first Council of Jerusalem, which was probably held in about 50 CE and is recorded in the passage we heard form Acts changed that. From that point onwards the official church position was that Christianity was open to all and there was no specific requirements for Christians to adhere to Jewish customs and practices. What changes? The scriptures certainly didn’t – they’d been formalised a couple of centuries earlier. Jesus’ teaching didn’t – he’d been dead for 20 years. What I’d like to suggest had changed was the society in which the church was operating. The church had moved away from Galilee which was overwhelmingly Jewish to Jerusalem which was a cosmopolitan city embracing individuals from many backgrounds. More than that, particularly through Paul’s ministry, Christianity was being proclaimed across the eastern Mediterranean in cities where the Jewish community were a very small minority. It was not scripture or Jesus teaching that had changed – it was the society in which Christianity was being lived out that had changed. In a very real sense the First Council of Jerusalem had revised its teaching in the light of changes in society.

Another slightly more recent example might be the church’s position on slavery. For nearly the first 1800 years of its existence the church had just assumed that slavery was part of the economic order – the way in which God had created the world. Despite spending long periods in slavery as a nation the Jewish people clearly didn’t see anything wrong in the concept. Solomon built the first temple with slaves. Paul’s letter to Philemon is written to accompany a runaway slave, Onesimus, who Paul is returning to his master without the slightest suggestion that Paul sees anything wrong with slavery. Yet we all know the story of Hannah More and William Wilberforce to convince the Church (and the nation) that slavery was wrong and should be abolished.

What changed? Clearly the scriptures hadn’t changed. Again what I believed had changed was society. It is interesting that the debate over slavery in England really only started after the Revolution in France. It was a time at which the concepts of  liberté, egalité and fraternité where starting to spread beyond France (and inspiring American independence of course). In a very real sense the fight against slavery was a consequence of the philosophy of the Enlightenment which was largely secular, if not atheist, rather than religion. The church, through Wilberforce and others, adopted those views and allowed their theology to be fashioned by them. A theological understanding of slavery was transformed in the light of changes in society.

So what can we learn from these two episodes that might help us in considering the issues that face the church today? The first thing is that decisions look very clear and obvious with the respect of hindsight. No-one in today’s church has the faintest belief that Christians need to be circumcised or obey Jewich food laws. No-one int today’s church has the faintest belief that slavery is anything but totally abhorrent. But those truths which we now accept universally where far from obvious to the Christians involved in debating the issues at the time. There was considerable resistance within the church to opening up the early church to gentiles and, even more remarkably to modern Christians, there was considerable resistance within the church to the abolitionist cause.  When we consider how the church should be interpretting God’s will for today I think we should use the imagination that God has given us to consider how the decisions we make today will be looked back on from the future. How do you think the church will look back on the current debate on same sex marriage in fifty years, in a hundred years, in a thousand years?

If you want  more recent examples think about the church’s attitudes to women in the ministry or to the re-marriage of divorced couples when you were growing up. What were your attitudes at the time? Have those attitudes changed with the passage of time? Is the church a better place for the decisions it took, in the midst of considerable internal discord, all those years ago.

I want to conclude with another angle, and that is that our understanding of God’s will is not just affected by our experiences of society as an abstract entity. They are affected by our direct experience of the individuals that comprise that society. During Jesus Galilean ministry his disciples probably never met anyone who didn’t consider themselves Jewish. In Jerusalem they would have started to meet gentiles as individuals and Paul’s ministry led him to strike up many personal relationships with gentiles. It was almost certainly the strength of those relationships and the growing appreciation of what gentiles had to offer the growing church, and of what the church had to offer the gentiles that led to the decisions of that First Council. The theology of the early church was forged through experience of personal relationships.

Similarly with  the anti-slavery movement. One of the things that characterised England in the late 18th century was the growing number of black people within society, many of whom would have been those who had escaped from slavery by some means or other. Black people were becoming very common in London with a  fashion amongst the upper classes to employ them as servants. An important part of the anti-slavery movement was that people were meeting with ex-slaves on a more and more regular basis and assumptions that blacks were different and naturally inferior were being eroded away. Through personal relationships people were able to see that slaves were human just like you or me. The theology of the anti-slavery campaign was forged, in part, through the experience of personal relationships.

I think in many ways the biggest weakness we have with the current debate about the theology of same sex marriage is that many of us within local church congregations don’t actually know that many gay or lesbian people. It’s difficult to get reliable statistics on just how many people who are homosexual  there are in Britain, but the background reading I’ve done over this week suggests that they probably comprise somewhere in the region of  5% of the population. Within this is quite an age difference so friends of our age are much less likely to be open about their homosexuality than younger people. Then of course there is the fact that traditional attitudes to homosexuality mean that many homosexuals choose to avoid the church. All in all, most of us have very little contact with people who are homosexual. This is sad because it may mean that we don’t have those experiences of personal relationships that might have the potential to influence our views. Its interesting that the Archbishop of Canterbury himself has made it clear that one of the most important influences on his thinking in this area is the quality of the relationships he has with people who are homosexual and what he has observed of the quality of the relationships that they have with their partners.

So I’d like to conclude by suggesting that, in considering the issues that our church is placing before us, our main concern in our thoughts and in our prayers should be for the people that it affects most directly. If you do know people who are openly homosexual then think and pray about them. Talk to them. What do they need, how can we best express God’s love for them – the god who created all people in his own image. If you don’t know anyone who is openly homosexual then ask yourselves how your views might be altered if you did. Use your imagination, pray for them, ask how we can make God’s love as open as possible to everyone in the modern world.

We should all ask ourselves if our personal beliefs do need to change in the light of changes in our society.

Amen

Afterwards we sang the hymn Come all who look to Christ today which seemed to resonate with the theme of my sermon even more than I’d recognised when choosing it two days earlier.

Resurrection and The Resurrection

This is a sermon I felt called to preach on 25th May 2014 in which I explore what I mean and believe about resurrection. It refers to 1 Corinthians 15:35-44 which was read earlier in the service.

This is the last but one Sunday in the Easter season and I’d like to use it to talk about resurrection. For some reason I’ve spent much more time thinking about resurrection this Easter than I’ve done for some time. I think the main stimulus for this has been reading Graeme Smith’s book “Was the tomb empty”. I’ve become a bit of a Graeme Smith groupie, I went to his book launch, I’ve read his book in a couple of days and I made a special effort to get to the evening worship he contributed to here a couple of weeks ago. I’d like to publicly thank him for stirring my thought processes and I really would encourage everyone to read the book. You might not believe it for a book on biblical scholarship but it is a remarkable good read.

So why six weeks after Easter do I want to re-visit the concept of resurrection? Well I think it’s in reaction to those events earlier this year. In parts of his book, and particularly in the evening worship he led, Graeme assumed that belief in the physical resurrection of Jesus must be a cornerstone of any Christian’s faith. It isn’t a cornerstone of my faith, and I’d like to explain why.

Why do I want to provide this explanation? Well I want to provide it for three different reasons for three different groups of people.

I know, from conversation that I’ve had in the past, that several people in the congregation fall into the first group and I suspect that there may be others. They are people who have difficulty accepting the more supernatural aspects of the Christian story. The resurrection of Jesus is perhaps the most supernatural aspect of that story and the most difficult for them to believe. In some cases they can have a real struggle to reconcile their personal world view with the viewpoint that the church often appears to demand. I’m preaching to them to give reassurance that there are a multitude of ways of coming into a relationship with Jesus as saviour and that there is a place for them, as for me, in today’s church. In my house are many rooms.

I also know from previous conversations, that there are many people within the congregation, and I suspect there are others, that fall into a second group. I have no doubt that Graeme is one of them. They are people for whom the supernatural aspects of the Christian story are essential for their faith. For most of them a belief in the physical resurrection of Jesus is what makes a Christian a Christian. I’m not trying to undermine their faith. Nothing I say this morning is intended in any way to suggest that they are wrong. What I am hoping is that, by the end of this morning, they will have a deeper understanding of, and respect for, the views of some others who are sitting among them this morning. Whenever I listen to others talk about their faith, my faith grows. Generally speaking, the more different is the faith I hear talked of, the deeper my personal growth. I hope I can offer you that opportunity this morning. In my house are many rooms.

The third group who I want to preach to are not here at all. They are the large section of British public who have been educated to respect the laws of science and be extremely dubious of any talk of the supernatural. My children are part of this group, yours maybe as well, or your grand-children, or your spouse. In a very real sense they cannot believe in the physical resurrection of Jesus. If we insist that this is a pre-requisite to being a Christian then they will never be one. They will never be able to make even the first step towards a personal relationship with Jesus as saviour. They will be excluded from the love of God. If we want the church to grow in the modern western world then we need to preach a gospel that makes sense to the people who live in that world. It is to them that I really want to preach this morning – unfortunately they have already left.

So what is the problem? It’s the level of evidence. Graeme lays this out very well in his book. In essence this is what the book is, a presentation of the evidence. He claims, on the cover, that he is doing this objectively and dispassionately as a judge would. How good a job he does of this you’ll have to decide for yourself after reading and it. I find the level of evidence really interesting. If you are already a Christian and accept the gospel accounts as essentially, even if not literally, true, then the evidence is convincing. If, however, you are a non-Christian who sees no particular reason to accept the Bible as any more likely to be true than any other book written at the time, or if you are a Christian who accepts the questions raised by the last two hundred years of biblical scholarship, then the evidence is very far from convincing. For these two groups it is just not possible to take a belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus as a starting point. If we want to encourage members of these latter tow groups into a deeper relationship with Jesus then we need a differnt approach.

The book I’ve found most helpful in this regard is called “True Resurrection“. It was written by an Anglican priest called Harry Williams who was the chaplain of one of the Cambridge colleges for many years but later moved to a secluded religious community. In his book he makes a distinction between Resurrection and The Resurrection. The Resurrection is whatever happened to Jesus – the historical event. Resurrection is the religious truth at the heart of Christianity. It is the belief that life triumphs over death. Most importantly it is a truth that is not confied to a remote period in history but something that we experience in our lives today on an ongoing basis. He sees Resurrection and The Resurrection  as separate but linked, it’s a viewpoint that I find really helpful. Rather than trying too hard to talk about this theologically let me give you some examples.

Two weeks ago Christan told us about the work of the Message Trust. They work with young ex-offenders. Young people, often from difficult backgrounds, who have got caught in a cycle of hopelessness, done something reckless and ended up in trouble with the police. The Message is offering them hope. It’s inviting them to a new faith, new experiences of worship, new opportunities for training and employment. Several of you have been to the Mess, their cafe, to see what they are up to. They are doing what their slogan says transforming lives. That to me, is resurrection.

Those of us who went along to John’s film night earlier in this month watched Freedom Writers. It is a based on the true story of a group of young people who attended school in Long Beach, California. They locality was, and still is, riven with gang culture, gun violence and death. The young people are part of this, their lives are conditioned by their locality and there seems no escape. A visionary young teacher, Erin, comes to the school and refuses to admit the inevitablility of death, both real and metaphorical, for her class.  The whole film is a record of the new life she brings. That, to me, is resurrection.

Williams goes further however. Resurrection isn’t merely about restoring life as it was. If we beleive that Jesus resurrection was merely a resuscitation of a dead body then we’ve missed the point. Jesus life was not just restored by the resurrection it was transformed. Williams quotes the passage we’ve heard this morning from Corinthians. Paul says different things about the resurrection but in this, probabliest his earliest mention of the subject, his focus is on a transformative process not just a restorative one:

So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable;  it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power.

Williams explores the consequences of this. If we are to be transformed then we have to let that part of us that is going to be transformed die. You cannot have new life without first experiencing death. Resurrection isn’t just a belief that life triumphs over death it is a belief that it is sometimes essential to die in order to experience life in all its fullness. Just as Jesus’ death was something he had to go through to experience resurrection, so throughout life we often need to allow things to die in order to discover new life.

We can see this in a sub-plot of  Freedom Writers. Erin’s success affects the relationship with her young husband, Steven who  has failed in his own earlier career aspirations and stuggles with the way that Erin’s devotion to her profession takes over her life. Erin is faced with a choice between the passion and vitality of what she is achieving with her students and the love she has for her husband. Erin realises that, in order to live the life she seems to have been born for, she will have to allow her relationship with her husband to die. Her marriage does die, she descends into the hell of this broken relationship, but that death is not the end. She emerges from the pain she has born better suited than ever to offer hope and new life to her class. That, to me, is resurrection.

When you start looking, you can see resurrection all around you. You can see it in the nearly trivial. How many of us have allowed a grudge to die and found an old relationship has been re-born. You can see it in the sorts of situations I’ve already talked about. You can see it in the great stories of our time. What is the story of Nelson Mandela if it is not a story of resurrection? What about the Malala Yousafzai the Afghan girl who was shot by the Taliban and spent her 16th birthday addressing the Secretary General of the United Nations last year? What about Stephen Sutton the 19 year old boy who raised 4 million pounds to enhance the care of other teenagers with cancer before his death? What about Sally’s place? All of this, to me, is resurrection.

The proof of resurrection is all around us. It gives my life hope and purpose. My faith isn’t grounded in the experiences of other people   shouded in the mists of time, it is founded in my lived experience today. So it is that, without sharing Graeme’s conviction that the Biblical evidence for the resurrection is sufficient to satisfy a court of law,  I can still join with him, and with all of you, whatever your beliefs, and proclaim this morning – Christ is risen. He is risen indeed.

 

 

Thy Kingdom come?

This is based on a sermon preached on Advent Sunday 2013 based on readings from Genesis (1:1-5), Isaiah (2:1-5), Matthew (24:36-44) and Romans (13-11-14). Try an Australian paraphrase of the lectionary readings if you want. 

Looking beyond Christmas

With candle lighting ceremony and lectionary reading this week we’ve had more Bible readings than we’d normally have. These have taken us an immense journey across all of time from the Creation myths in Genesis to three different visions of the final state of our planet, one from Isaiah, one from Paul and one from Matthew. We normally see Advent as a preparation for Christmas but this morning’s readings put this in a wider context. At Christmas we celebrate the birth of the Messiah who will lead us into God’s Kingdom. In preparing for the minutiae of Christmas we must be carefully that we don’t lose track of the bigger picture of preparing for the coming of God’s kingdom.

Imminent cataclysm or long term vision for human progress?

It’s worth maybe pausing to think about what we consider God’s Kingdom to be. The New Testament readings present this as an imminent event many, including Paul, believing that it would occur within their lifetimes. They clearly got this wrong, there is no sign of that event 2,000 years later.

They also believed in some sort of cataclysmic god-driven upheaval in which God would make all things new. I’m not sure we have to take this literally either. The early Christians living in pre-scientific communities didn’t really have anything to rely on for predicting the future but their own imaginations. Through modern science we have a range of tools for predicting the future and I suspect that most modern Christians see these as more reliable. The prediction of contemporary physics is that the earth will continue to rotate around the sun getting very gradually closer as the sun gradually expands until one day it will consume the earth. In some ways this is an exceptionally bleak picture but the important thing is that that is an unbelievably slow process. For the best part of the next billion years the earth is going to be substantially as it is at the moment. For all practical human considerations the earth as a planet is going to exist pretty much as it does today for ever.

If there is to  be a coming of God’s Kingdom, and it might be worth saying at this point that this is something I do very much believe in, then it is going come about by a re-structuring of society. If you strip away the clearly mythical and poetic embellishments of any of the biblical descriptions of the coming of God’s Kingdom then this is what you are left with. Isaiah’s poetry probably gives a clearer impression of this than much of the later more apocalyptic writing but I re-iterate that this vision of a re-structuring of society is at the heart of all those visions:

The LORD will settle all disputes between nations,
……..and sort out their competing claims.
They will turn weapons into welcome signs
……..and bombs into tools and toys.
Never again will nations take up arms against one another;
……..never again will young people be trained for war.

The traditional view is that God is going to bring this about through divine intervention whether we (as the human race) like it or not but, again, I think this is an unreasonable adoption of a pre-scientific view point. I suspect that this is a vision that we have been given by God’s prophets but are going to have to work for ourselves if we ever want to see it come. We are the agents of God’s change. If we want to bring about his Kingdom then we are going to have to achieve it. We’ve been inspired by God and we’ll be empowered by his Spirit. It will be His Kingdom – but it is us, his servants, who are charged with bringing it about.

 How does that relate to our present experience?

One of the problems with this sort of theology is that the prospects for the evolution of God’s Kingdom as a product of human development seem so poor. Looking at the depressing state of the world today it looks almost impossible to believe that we are progressing towards God’s Kingdom. I can see why one sector of the church just wants to give up on this and assume that if we just wait long enough God will intervene for us and put all things right – but I suspect it’s going to be a long wait.

To a certain extent this has always been the case but until very recently there has been a general feeling that humanity if progressing. Prosperity has certainly increased, quality of life has been continuously improving and, in the developed world at least, we have escaped the tyranny of warfare as a way of resolving international disputes. Against this background a general belief that human progress is leading towards some positive outcome has seemed quite rational.

But things are changing and it becomes more and more difficult to see God’s Kingdom as an inevitable end-point. For the first time in human history, it appears that our children and grand-children are going to be less well off than we are. We are living through a period of austerity, which the politicians try to sell as temporary, but which is deeply rooted in severe economic problems, principally the unbelievable levels of personal and national debt that are not going to go away quickly, if ever. The old mechanism was to lose debt in sustained economic growth but it is becoming more obvious that economic growth cannot be sustained for ever on a finite planet. We will simply run out of resources.

We are exposed to pressures from international labour markets which are cheaper than ours and as international education levels increase we will no longer be protected by our previous advantages in the knowledge economy. As affluence increases in other parts of the world we will find competition for food and other products that we have always had the freedom to buy (or steal) in the past. It seems unlikely to me that things are going to get better before they get a lot worse (at least for us in the developed world who have had a privileged status for so long). From this perspective it is easy to hanker after the halcyon days that Isaiah was speaking from.

Except that the world that Isaiah was speaking from was no more positive than the world we live in today. Isaiah lived between 800 and 700BCE at a time when Assyria was the emerging power. Israel lived in fear of invasion. These fears were quite rational, it was invaded three times over this period. Being invaded by a world super-power was not a pleasant prospect in those days. Men would have been killed, women raped and children pressed into slavery. Isaiah was not writing from a comfortable world.

The optimistic view of God’s kingdom he proclaimed has been extracted from its context. If you read the passages on either side you’ll see that Isaiah had just as depressing view of the world around him as many of us have today. Not only was he depressed at what he saw but he blamed Israel for letting things get this way. This glorious vision of God’s Kingdom is embedded in rant about how miserable the human world is.

Confidence through bleakness.

I think there is a sense in this of where Isaiah’s confidence in the inevitability of God’s Kingdom is coming from. He understands that the current situation cannot lead to prosperity and peace. Radical change is required. This could come through humanity changing and adopting a different way, God’s way.  Failing this it will come through a failure of the socioeconomic order and people learning through the consequent pain and anguish. (In many ways similar to the experience of two world wars resulting in peace and stability in Europe)  .

I feel very much the same about the current world. It seems obvious to me that the current way we do things cannot succeed. A world in which competition reigns, in which we exploit the environment and in which we feel free to exploit others cannot succeed. It is destined to fail. The only way that the human race will ever to be able to live in peace and prosperity is if we cooperate. If we respect and love each other. If we recognise that the path to satisfaction is to be thankful for what we have rather than greedy for what we lack. I have absolutely no doubt that the end-point of human development will be a society in which we recognise the truth of God’s message because any other society is going to fail.

Time-scale.

Of course this isn’t a short-term view. Where the early church saw the coming of God’s Kingdom as imminent I tend to the opposite viewpoint that the fulfillment of God’s Kingdom still lies an immeasurably far distance in the future – far beyond any timescale that I am likely to see. It is quite possible that the world is going to have to pass through a period of climate catastrophe and terrible wars over food and other resources. Nowhere in the Bible are we promised a peaceful transition to God’s Kingdom and it seems unlikely to me that we are going to get it. But don’t let that blind us to the inevitability of God’s Kingdom emerging eventually.

Our role.

So what is our role within this vision. Paul might have got his timescales wrong but I believe he got his theology right:

let’s make sure that we get rid of any old ways of living that belong to the darkness of our past. Let us live our lives in such a way that we’ll be able to hold our heads high when the broad light of day shows up everything for what it really is.

Our role is to try and live in this world now as if we were already living in God’s Kingdom. This is incredibly difficult. How do we share our resources equitably with all of God’s people in world economic system driven by the desire to accumulate personal wealth? How do we love other people in a system based on competition and exploitation? How do we preserve the gift of our planet in system that assumes continued economic growth?

This is a huge challenge. I’ve just been reading Marcus Borg and Dominic Crossan’s book on the first Christmas and they point out that early Christianity was a counter-cultural movement. It realised that it wasn’t possible to live out God’s calling within society as it was then structured and proposed a different way of living. This is why it was dangerous, this is why it was persecuted. This is why it was important. This is what we have lost. When was the last time that the Church was perceived as a serious threat to society? Most of us have been so fully indoctrinated with society’s values that we don’t even recognise the radical nature of Isaiah’s vision when it is read out to us.

There can be no better metaphor for this than our preparations for Christmas. Think about your plans for Christmas. Think about how many of those preparations are essentially reinforcing our current culture. How much money are we going to lavish on ourselves at a time when many in our own culture, let alone throughout the world, are in such desperate need? How much food are we going to be bloated with at a time when so many people in the world starve? How many of us celebrate with close family behind locked doors when God’s vision is of a banquet that we share with all people?

At the start of Advent, as we start to prepare to celebrate Christmas, let us remind ourselves of the wider challenge to prepare for God’s Kingdom. Let’s try to use this next four weeks to imagine a world as Isaiah first imagined it. Let us keep that vision of God’s mountain at the forefront of our thinking:

Come, let’s go and climb the LORD’s mountain;
…………….let us worship in the temple of the God of Jacob.
……..There the LORD will teach us how to live right
…………….so that we can get our lives on track.”

Is there a religious case for assisted dying?

This article is adapted from a sermon preached on Sunday 22nd September 2013. Bible readings were Deuteronomy 34:1-6, Luke 2:22-32 and Philippians 1:18b-26.

Over the last year or so there has been an ongoing debate about assisted dying. This article is my contribution to that debate. I want to widen my focus from the debate as it has been formulated so far in one way and close it down in another. In broadening the focus  I want to consider what we think about death and dying generally and not just in the context of very specific medical circumstances. I don’t see how we can attempt the latter until we have a clear perspective on the former. The area I’d like to close down is that about the practicalities of implementing any proposal. This is an extremely important part of the wider debate but I think it would help us to consider a theological perspective first and only then move onto the question of how we work to fulfill it.

It’s an area of debate where the church really should have something to offer. For most of the last millennium the church has had a monopoly on providing support to the dying and the bereaved. It’s an area of life we should understand and  where we have wisdom to offer to the world. I find it really disappointing, therefore, that the voices we tend to hear in the public debate are from non-Christians like Terry Pratchett and Steven Hawking. Hawking actually made the news last week with an announcement that he has changed his mind and is now in favour of the legalising of assisted suicide. A bill is currently passing through parliament sponsored by Lord Falconer who I don’t think has any particular religious affiliation either. A YouGov poll conducted earlier this year suggested that 75% of people are in favour of a change in the law to permit  assisted dying and only 14% oppose this (the other 12% don’t know).

It’s an argument we are going to have to face more and more as modern medicine progresses. Put bluntly we are getting better and better at keeping people alive and at some stage we are going to need a theological, moral or ethical framework to decide on when to stop. The number of centenarians in the developed world is increasing at over 5% a year at the moment. There is little doubt that this is going to continue. Think where medicine was 100 years ago, think what it can achieve today, imagine what it will be like in 100 years time when a baby born today reaches his or her hundredth birthday. I’ve little doubt that by then we’ll be able to keep that person living indefinitely if hooked up to the correct machines – but is this what we want?

So where does the church stand? If you go to the Methodist church web-site you’ll find that the church is “very strongly opposed to euthanasia”. There was a session at this year’s Conference, however, entitled “Is there a religious case for assisted dying?” which I’ve chosen for the title of this article and suggests things are not quite as clear cut. Finally that YouGov poll I referred to earlier included 121 individuals who identified themselves as Methodists. Nearly three time as many of them were in favour of assisted dying as opposed it. The certainty proclaimed on the web-site is clearly not reflecting the opinions of those sitting in our pews.

I think one of the problems that the church has is that it isn’t equipped theologically to adapt to the pace of development in the modern world. Many of us think that our theology is something fixed and is the same now as it was at the time of the early church. It isn’t. Think of how our understanding of women in the ministry has changed over our lifetime. As Methodists we pride ourselves on our strong female leadership both lay and ordained but it’s not that long since we ordained our first female minister (1974). Before then there was a widespread belief that this was theologically inappropriate.  Theology is a living discussion that we should expect to develop over time. Most importantly it needs to be worked out in the context in which we live. It needs to involve a conversation between the academics who help formulate theology and those of us in the pews who have to live it out. Pope Francis, of all people, this week,  warned of the dangers when theological thinking loses contact with the lives of those it concerns.

The reason why our theology needs to change is that the context in which we live and die has changed. For almost all of the two millennia since Jesus lived the major challenge has been that people haven’t lived long enough. Disease, hunger, war and persecution have historically led to people dying too early. Over this period a theology based very heavily on an understanding that life is sacred and that everything should be done to revere and protect life has served us very well. But in the developed world (note the emphasis on the “developed world” here) at the beginning of the twenty-first century the challenge is changing. We have largely eliminated hunger, war and persecution as a cause of death throughout much of Europe, and modern medicine is making great advances both in protecting us from disease. This is leading to a situation in which a larger and larger proportion of the population feel they are living too long. Some of the headline cases are people with rare diseases and disabilities that have interrupted them relatively early in life but an increasing number of people are starting to feel this as a consequence of what we now see as the natural ageing process. As the context in which we live changes our theology must change to reflect this.

It’s interesting that the statement on the Methodist web-site refers to debates at conference in 1974 and 1994. In this world we need to update our theology more often than that. It also uses the language of a past time. It only ever uses the word euthanasia whereas almost everywhere else in the current debate the term is assisted dying. These two phrases have very different connotations. Euthanasia implies that someone else is taking the decision to end a person’s life. Advocates of assisted dying are very clear that they are asserting an individual’s right to make a decision for themselves.

Before looking at three Bible passages which I feel can usefully inform this debate, I want to reflect on one traditional argument against assisted dying; the argument that God wills when we die and that it is wrong to interfere with this. Many of us nowadays would question whether this is an appropriate way to describe how God acts, but even if it is, it is something we don’t accept when we use modern medicine to extend a person’s life. If someone develops pneumonia in the modern world we don’t accept that their time has come (as would almost certainly have been the case a century ago). We prescribe antibiotics and unless the person is particularly frail we expect the person to recover. We do not accept God’s judgement that that this is the time for that person to die. It is completely illogical to use modern medicines to extend a person’s life and then argue that we are doing something against God’s will if we use modern medicines to move the time of death in the other direction.

Let’s turn to three passages in the Bible. Simeon, was an old man, we don’t know how old, given life expectancies at the time he may only have been in his sixties or seventies to be perceived as old. He was looking forward to a great event, the salvation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit had assured him that he would live to see this. When he saw the infant Jesus presented in the temple he realised that that time had come. The song he sang, the Nunc Dimitis, is a prayer for release, “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace” as it was translated in the book of common prayer. This has struck a chord with Christians throughout the centuries and inspired some great music (I’m still haunted by the version that was sung during the credits of the BBC adaptation of Tinker, Tailor Soldier, Spy in 1979). It is how many of us would like to see death coming. We live for a purpose, we achieve that purpose, and then we pray to be released. Can this story be used to reflect upon how we would like to die? How does it square with the approach of modern medicine which simply appears to be to want to keep us alive as long as possible?

But of course life is messy. Not many of us have a single purpose in life that can be completed as easily as Simeon’s. Many of us want to live for a multitude of different reasons, to complete a task, to care for a relative, to see the birth of grandchild or great- grandchild. There is no single time when life feels complete. This is why I’ve chosen the story of the death of Moses. Moses strove all his life to guide his people out of Egypt and to lead them to the promised land. He nearly made it. At the furthest point to which he was to travel God led him to the peak of a high mountain and showed him what the future held for the Jewish people but having given him that vision, he took Moses life from him. We aren’t told how Moses died but I think the assumption is that he accepted God’s decision and departed as peacefully as Simeon. We will not always be granted the opportunity to live to see the things that we really want to see, on occasions we will not even  live to see the things that we have worked hard for all our lives. Many of us have a succession of things we would like to live for and it is virtually certain that we won’t live for all of them. We need to accept this, as Moses did, and develop a feel for the time when our lives are complete.

And then we come to the words of Paul writing to the Philippians, “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.” He reminds us that whatever Christians believe (and we should be open in admitting that we don’t all believe the same things on a range of issues) we believe that the value of life lies not in its quantity but in its quality. Paul actually looks forward to death. He developed an incredibly deep relationship with God. The way he expressed this was by saying that he lived in Christ. His relationship with God was so intense that whilst he was prepared to stay alive if it suited God’s purpose, he would prefer to be with God in death. We need to be careful here that we don’t buy into the first century mind-set uncritically here (in the light of a modern scientific understanding of the human brain many of us will have a different view of death to that which Paul held) but we do need to take on board a belief that, at a certain time in life, death is not something to be feared but something to be welcomed. Jesus was not afraid to give up his life at an early age, Paul gave up his life later in life. Many generations of Christians have given up their lives when the appropriate time came. They were able to do this because they had developed an understanding of life, founded on the depth of their relationship with God, that removed the fear of death. It’s something we’ve lost in the modern age and I’m convinced that if the church could recapture it and offer it to the wider world then that world would be a better place.

I talk here in terms of the depth of our relationship with God. Others, with different faiths or none, may use different words to describe the same phenomenon. The most important thing that we can all acknowledge is that the quality of our lives is far more important than the quantity.

I’m fifty next year. In terms of the current composition of the Methodist church that still makes me a relatively young person. I don’t want to die yet. I don’t know how my thinking about death will change as I age, as my death becomes more likely. What I pray at the moment is that my relationship with my God will grow even deeper. It may deepen as I live through natural healthy ageing or it might deepen as I learn to cope with some, as yet unknown, disease or disability. I pray that as the quality of that relationship deepens I will be less and less concerned with how long I live. I pray that one day it will have deepened to such an extent that I am ready for release. If modern medical technology and ethics has developed to such an extent to grant me that release, then I suspect that I will count that as a blessing.

O love that will not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in thee:
I give the back the life I owe,
that in thine ocean depths it’s flow
my richer fuller be.                                                            George Matheson

Malala’s Magnificat

Earlier this work Malala Yousafzai, the young girl who had been shot in the head by the Taliban as a result of campaining for an education for herself and other young Afghan women, celebrated her 16th birthday by addressing the Youth Assembly of the United Nations in the presence of the Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. A video and transcript of  the speech is available at this link.

Whilst listening to it I was struck by the similarity between this speech and the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55) which was also a speech by a young woman from the Middle East. The result was this sermon delivered on 21st July 2013.

What can this speech tell the church today?

Message for the world

One of the first insights can be explored by the way I’ve phrased this question “what can this speech tell the church today? Malala’s message clearly isn’t for the church. It’s not for the Mosque of Islam either though, or the town of Swat where she grew up, or for Pakistan. It’s a message for the world. This is a difference with the Magnificat which is essentially a Jewish psalm for Jewish people. We as a church spend far too much time thinking about our message for the church or for Christians. How often do we see our message is one for the world?

If you listen to most of the sermons preached form this pulpit they will be about our god, our theology, our way of viewing the world. We often preach a very small god, confined to a particularly range of activities. We seek our inspiration from a narrow range of people, assuming that god can only act through Christians. We expect our god to work in a rather petty way within our personal and congregational lives. We take a magnificent and universal God that is beyond comprehension and try and squeeze him (and it almost always “him” when we act in this way) into a box that suits our existing prejudices and limited understanding.

Malala’s speech transcends all that. It doesn’t close our vision down by erecting barriers and screens. She doesn’t stake out a claim that her way is different and only those like her will be able to see this. She broadens her horizons by assuming that we can learn from people of all traditions. She learnt compassion not only from Muhhamed the Prophet of Mercy but also from Jesus Christ and the Buddha. She demands change not only as did Muhammad Ali Jinnah but also Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King. She has seen the power of non-violent protest not only from Bacha Khan but from Mahatma Gandi, and Mother Theresa. How often are we, as Christians, as expansive and inclusive as this in proclaiming our message?

Explained in a language the world can understand

Malala also speaks in a language the world can understand. She is a sixteen year old girl speaking a language that any sixteen year old anywhere in the world can understand. The speech was delivered to other teenagers at the United Nations Youth Assembly. Neither she nor her audience are yet old enough to have learnt the political, diplomatic or theological jargon that obscures truth. She speaks simply and directly from experience. She wanted to be educated, she spoke out when she was deprived of education, she was shot by those who didn’t like what they heard, she has recovered and has a more powerful voice now than her assassins could ever have imagined.

Malala’s is probably one of the most powerful stories of death and resurrection that we have in the modern world. It is certainly a story of Kings being brought down from their thrones and the lowly raised up. We could invest this story with layers of theological significance – you’ll see that even in a sermon reacting against this way of doing things I can’t resist it – but every layer of theology that we wrap it up in risk’s concealing its importance from those who don’t understand or accept that theology. By telling her story simply and directly Malala speaks to everyone.

Jesus spoke simply and directly. I have no doubt about that. He told stories which enshrined universal truths – the prodigal son, the good shepherd, the Good Samaritan. He didn’t have to explain those stories. He didn’t need to wrap them up in complex theology. They spoke for themselves to the people he addressed directly and they have continued to speak directly to the generations that have read them since.

Yet this isn’t the church’s model today is it. We actual invest considerable resources in training our ministers and preachers to think theologically. Our adoption of the lectionary implies that it is more important to have an annual cycle of preaching which addresses the full range of biblical stories and theological topics rather than one that takes its inspiration from the events of our personal lives or the stories we see on the news or the Internet. Let’s do what Jesus did let’s tell simple stories and start to experience God directly rather than learning about him from others.

I believe that there is a world out there waiting to hear God’s message. Unfortunately we in the church are preaching that message in a language they can’t understand. The response to Malala’s speech exemplifies this. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t felt touched and inspired by it. We are inspired because we can be. The message is a young girl’s vision of what the world can be, expressed in her own words, it’s not a vision viewed through a glass darkly, it’s a vision of someone who has seen God face to face and simply wants to tell people about it. If only the churches preaching could have such simplicity and clarity.

“One child, one teacher, one pen, one book can change the world”. How can anyone fail to understand?

Seeking to inspire

The final point I want to make is that Malala is only intending to inspire people. “Only” is often regarded as a limiting word with an implication that there is more that we are missing, but here I see it as a very strong word that defines a characteristic of Malala’s speech. By only seeking to inspire, Malala empowers herself to do just that.

I was certainly tearful when I heard it the first time and still feel a lump rising in my throat this morning when I hear it again. There have been various newspaper, television and Internet interviews this week with people who have had similar responses, particularly from teenage girls. They are enthused, they are inspired, they want to know more. When I asked Liz, as a steward, if there was a teenage girl within the congregation that could read the Magnificat this morning I was told there wasn’t. We as a church are clearly not enthusing and inspiring young women (or men for that matter), we are not drawing them in wanting to know more.

I think one of the reasons is that we try to do too much. The official church’s response to government policy or world events is often to set up technical working parties to explore and critique the detail. It gets drawn into concerns about balancing its response to be fair to different political parties. It can get out of its depth because there are now a wide range of specialist non-religious pressure groups who are far better equipped to develop this technical critique than we are.

If we limited ourselves to a role of inspiring people we might liberate ourselves to perform a far more useful role for society. Like Malala we could highlight areas where the world could be different and inspire people with a vision of a world that can be better. Malala’s speech doesn’t make any attempt to suggest how that change can be brought about. The assumption is that people need to be inspired with the need for change first and that once they have got this then the change will come. This is a model that the church already adopts in preaching within its walls, maybe it is a model that it needs to adopt in its pronouncements to the wider world.

I’ve spoken for long enough. I’m in danger of not listening to what I am saying myself. Let me finish using the words of two teenage, middle-eastern, women.

I do not even hate the Talib who shot me. Even if there is a gun in my hand and he stands in front of me. I would not shoot him. This is the compassion that I have learnt from Muhammad-the prophet of mercy, Jesus Christ and Lord Buddha. This is the legacy of change that I have inherited from Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Muhammad Ali Jinnah. This is the philosophy of non-violence that I have learnt from Gandhi Jee, Bacha Khan and Mother Teresa. And this is the forgiveness that I have learnt from my mother and father. This is what my soul is telling me, be peaceful and love everyone.

My soul doth magnify the Lord and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.

Amen