Category: 2014 Lectionary Ramblings

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2014 Lectionary Ramblings Lectionary Ramblings

September 16th 2014: Acts 11:1-18

Read Acts 11:1-18 here 

Continuing the story of the coming of the Gospel to non-Jewish believers which we began yesterday, I am again struck by the short-sightedness of the disciples. According to the NIV, they praised God for His goodness only once their objections to the action He had decided to take had been exhausted. Here we have to respect Peter as having been able to speak well enough to answer all of their many concerns and gripes. It is important, too, to realise that part of the concern of the believers might have very easily been for their own safety. The more people welcomed in to their inner circle, the more chance there would be for persecution and all that came with it. Most likely though is a theological mis-understanding of what God sought to do in the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus. In effect, the believers limited the scope of what they thought God’s purpose could be or what Jesus could achieve.

How often do we do this? We ask God for things we can imagine, or things which are just beyond the reach or scope of our hoping, but that we can just about dare to dream for. How small our faith is! God has done more than we can ever dream of, and will continue to do so. Our faith exists merely to be blown out of the water and enlarged day by day. Every single time we put a limit on what God is allowed to do, who He is allowed to welcome in to His kingdom, He will prove us wrong, selfish, sinful, unworthy ourselves. The task of the Christian is to love, it is not to mediate or referee salvation. God does this. Rest in His presence and your security, and love other people so that they might know Him too.

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September 15th 2014: Acts 10;34-48

Read Acts 10:34-48 here

One of the greatest days in the history of the Christian faith is chronicled in today’s reading. Here we find that God, shwoing no partiality, makes it abundantly clear that there is no limit to the offer of His love. You don’t have to be born in to the right race, the right lineage, to have done the right “pure” things or to think only lofty thoughts. If anything, it is better if you’re not, and you haven’t. The gift of the good news of God is that God is good, and that we are made ever more good, through the grace of God, His decision to love and bless us, and that alone. Anything else puffs us up and makes us think that we have agency, control, authority and power. We don’t. We are blessedly impotent, apart from, and until, the Holy Spirit comes upon us, and then we receive power, and we are able to become witnesses to the goodness, grace, mercy and wonder of God, to the ends of the Earth. We don’t have power for the sake of power. We have power for the sake of God and His glory. Any time we use it for anything other than His glory, we dishonour Him.

Peter and the Jewish believers thought that they knew that the faith of Christ was limited to them, but following on from Peter’s vision in which God made it clear that no foods were unclean, today’s act of God blows the good news of the Kingdom wide open for all. Let’s not be people who limit or close the opening to freedom that God has made.

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September 12th 2014: Acts 10:1-16 and September 13th 2014: Acts 10:17-33

Read Acts 10:1-33 here

The story of Peter and Cornelius is punctuated with “and the Spirit said” as God talks to both of them conversationally, and through angels. I wonder how the disciples responded when they heard such stories. Like us, were some of them excited and seeking such things for themselves while others were cynical? How did they decide on when a hearer had heard the true voice of God? These are problems the Church continues to have no real answer to today.

Only God can make things pure. Nothing can be impure if God has made it pure. This is a revelation to Peter, shocking indeed. The vision he has in this story will change the whole course of faith history for followers of Jesus, marking a key shift away from Judaism. If we truly believe that only God makes things pure or impure, it is not for us to spend the whole of our lives worrying about the impurity of others and what they choose to do. Wouldn’t we be better served thanking God for the undeserved gift of grace, freedom and purity that is offered to all? We should all check ourselves and discern whether we prefer being declared pure by God, or if we’d rather use our faith and our Scriptures to declare others impure, and to denote our supposed superiority. We’re all prone to this. It does us no God, and fails to honour God in any conceivable way.

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September 11th 2014: Acts 9:32-43

Read Acts 9:32-43 here

As the good news of Jesus Christ the miracle worker is spread far and wide, this passage today recounts several healings of Peter, the Rock on which Jesus said His Church would be built. The healing miracles show Peter in a good light as the one who follows Jesus’s lead as the head of the Church. They also clearly result in many people coming to belief, baptism and living faith, as the fledgling Church grows. We can get excited about the drama of people being healed. It is exciting. We can run the risk of seeking merely to emulate the faith of the early Church in seeing the dramatic. It can be intoxicating to see God at work.

More than both of these though, let’s ask God to use us in whatever way He chooses so that many people might be added to His family, in believing, being baptised and living in faith.

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September 10th 2014: Acts 9:19b-31

Read Acts 9:19b-31 here

Quite often in my Christian experience, I’ve found that being cautious is the de facto position. We are cautious to believe people in the veracity of their conversion experience stories, particularly if they include things we consider to be miraculous. We are cautious to allow people into positions of leadership, authority or teaching, particularly if we can’t first have sight or give ear to what they’re going to say, to ensure that it fits with our “programme” or our “platform”. Often this is for good reason. Those of us who are called to lead have a responsibility before God to lead and shepherd the flock we have had entrusted to us to the best of the abilities we have, and in the provision of God. Sometimes though, as in the case of Saul/Paul, the bubbling over of the Spirit cannot be quenched. It has to come out. Jesus has to be proclaimed.

How do we harbour this? The balance between the need for discipleship, first and foremost, followed by education and training on the one hand, and the desire to follow the leading of the Spirit in to spontaneous, unmediated opportunities for ministry on the other? I think like most things, it is a “both-and” situation rather than an “either-or”. Even in this story, the disciples are justifiably cautious – they know Saul’s reputation and it could easily have been an elaborate ruse to infiltrate the group and crush them from within. However, with the seal and mark of the Spirit comes the authenticity of faith – the proof of the pudding as it were, is the fruit of the ministry Paul undertakes in the synagogues of Damascus.

If you have a sense of vocation or calling, don’t wait, start to act on it. Be wise in seeking and gaining instruction and wisdom, but let’s be a Church of vitality and risk, rather than a stale Church marked by our caution and conservatism.

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September 9th 2014: Acts 9:1-19a

Read Acts 9:1-19a here

“why do you persecute me?”

Jesus doesn’t ask Saul why he is systematically hunting down and killing his followers. He asks why Saul is persecuting him, personally. When we face trials and troubles for “the sake of the name” it is easy for us to take them personally, to ask God to strengthen us that we may endure/succeed/overcome/be victorious. Ultimately though, Jesus’s question here is instructive and crucial. Just as we have seen earlier in Acts that the disciples were thankful for being counted worthy to suffer (something many of us find it hard to understand from the comfort of our cushy Western lifestyles) so we see here that persecution isn’t just about silencing the followers of a faith, it is about trying to stamp the faith out itself. Saul may well have thought that if enough Christians were dispatched, the fledgling faith would fizzle out. When he is faced with Jesus, however, the fruitlessness of the aim of persecution becomes obvious. This is not a man-made faith dreamed up and lived out in a fantastical fashion. This is the clearest and truest reality there has ever been. Jesus, the very God takes Saul’s persecution personally, and acts to show its futility. The future of the Church would never be the same as a result.

Many people face pressure for their faith. Even as people seek to stamp out Jesus by crushing his followers, history tells us that this will never truly work. If you find yourself facing trouble today for the sake of Jesus, rejoice (if you can, it’s hard!) in knowing that fear leads people to seek to stamp him out, and that he won’t be defeated, whatever any of us think. Know too that he has promised to be with you, right until the end. You can do this, because he has done it all.

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September 8th 2014: Acts 8:26-40

Read Acts 8:26-40 here

Theere are several elements of the story of Philip and the Ethiopian Eunuch that merit attention for me. One is the fact that the Eunuch was reading Isaiah at all. Why was he doing so? How did he come upon this prophet? How did Philip see what he was reading? Was he looking perplexed and so Philip was led to ask whether he understood what he was reading? And why did he think Philip could explain it to him? So many questions that we can never know the answers to.

I can see this passage as being a key driver for expository preaching. If a “not-yet-believer” knows, or believes, that in the explaining of Scripture life and hope might reside, how much more might those of us believe benefit from gaining greater understanding of Scripture? It was quite neat, however, for Luke in this story to write the narrative in this way. Did this really happen as Luke reports?

If we take this kind of story the wrong way, we can put pressure on ourselves, and on God, perhaps more pertinently, to always speak powerfully for salvation, every time we open our mouths to talk about God. I might lack faith, but I can’t really see that this always happens, however much we feverishly hope and pray that it might do, or manipulate our thoughts and feelings to try and prove that it does.

What really gets me about this story comes in verse 39, in which we find Philip immediately spirited away, in a similar fashion to that which happened to Jesus on the road from Jerusalem. We’re told that the Eunuch went on his way joyfully. Who saw this? Was he not perplexed by what had just occurred? What about Philip? How did he feel?

So many questions. It might sound like I’m sceptical. Perhaps I am. The key thing for me is that God was glorified by what he called Philip to do and what transpired. The danger for us is to seek the miraculous, or the stupefying as being the only means in which God acts. This is not the caae. For me, there has to be more to the action and life of God than this. What do you think?

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September 7th 2014: Romans 13:8-14 (Talk Text)

What does it mean to love one another? Here are a few ideas. See if you like any of them…

 

  • Being nice to people
  • Being nice to people you don’t like
  • Being generous, or sharing what you have so that others don’t go short/go hungry
  • Treating everyone the same as you.
  • Expecting everyone to agree with you.

 

At different times I think most of us, if we are honest, have limited our ideas of love to one of these, or a mixture of them. It can be pretty difficult to love at times can’t it. Some of us have bad experiences of giving or receiving “love” from those who we trusted to care for us, but who instead let us down. Some of us have done that to people we cared very deeply about. It’s easy for us to spend our whole lives feeling guilty, like we don’t deserve love from anybody, or from God. One of the things that this kind of thinking does is make it very hard for us to love ourselves.

 

As we look at the reading from this morning, Paul is telling us that the whole of the law, that complex system God created for people to relate to Him, themselves, and one another, can be summed up in the phrase “love your neighbor as yourself.” Growing up in Church I was more than aware of the old phrase, “love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.” Many of us have heard this many times. We think we understand what it is to love God (although I’m not sure any of us really do), we work hard at loving other people in some of the ways I’ve described above, but we’re not very good at loving ourselves.       A few years ago, a fellow minister pulled me up short when I was saying about how much I loved God, and sought to love others, but I didn’t want to love myself, because I was always sinning, always messing up etc. He very clearly explained to me that in order to love my neighbor, those around me, I had to love myself too. To say that I love God and my neighbor without loving myself is to lie. Don’t become all about yourself though. We are to put others first. Living in a community of faith and hope like Emmanuel, my dream is that as each of us puts others first, we too will have an other who will put us first. Wouldn’t that be great?

 

Without love we cannot please God. God is love and those who live in love live in God, and God lives in them. So how are we to live in love?

 

Well, I think what our reading this morning invites us to do is “clothe ourselves in the Lord Jesus Christ”. This doesn’t mean wearing Jesus like a coat, that would be a bit too odd. What it means is, I think, get to know Jesus, get to know Him and His ways of living. Understand what He asked people to be, how He asked people to live. After all, it was him who said that the whole of the law was summed up in the command to love. If we clothe ourselves with Christ, putting Christ first rather than what the bible calls the desires of the flesh, but which means here, our own selfishness and our own desires, we will see that we are meant to live for God, to serve Him and others. Jesus came to serve us, and as we follow His way, one of the best ways we can do this is to lay down our life for our friends, our neighbours.

 

Who is our neighbor? Everyone, not just the people who live near us, or the people sitting next to us this morning.

 

If we’re going to lay down our lives for our friends, we might give time, money, food, prayer to them, just as we were talking about last week, but there’s something else we can give to them too. As I said earlier, everything we’re asked to do is summed up in the command to love our neighbours as ourselves. And again, as I said earlier, without God there is no love. God didn’t just invent love, He is love. It is His character, His personality, His essence. It defines Him even more clearly than my beard, my wheelchair or my dog collar define me. Jesus lived, died, rose and ascended to heaven to express in the most complete and powerful way possible that God loves us, so that we might have life and have it to the full. Most of us here this morning are here because we know Jesus, or about Jesus, in some way. Most of us are here because we were invited, or welcomed, or felt the need or desire, to respond to Jesus and His love, and to follow after Him. If you don’t know Jesus this morning, or you’re skeptical about Him and what I’m saying about Him, then come and talk to me afterwards. If you know Jesus though, I hope you’d agree that the message of life we’ve been given is the best news we could ever have.

 

So, one of the best ways we can have as Christians to love one another is to tell the story of our lives, as far as we can to tell people about what we believe and why we do. We don’t all have to eloquent, or preach standing on tables. I’ll never manage that. What we can be is open and honest. Do we really believe that God loves us? Do we really want to love others? Then let’s be a community that loves ourselves, loves God, loves one another, and invites people to join with us and share in the joy and hope that we’ve been welcomed in to.

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2014 Lectionary Ramblings Lectionary Ramblings

September 6th 2014: Acts 8:4-25

Read Acts 8:4-25 here

It’s easy for us to be seduced by the trappings of success, or to chase after it. This is what seems to happen to Simon the Sorcerer here. Having seen what has happened in Samaaria, believed and been baptised. He fundamentally misunderstands the gift of the Spirit, offering to pay to receive them. As is normal, Peter reacts gruffly, abruptly and without much grace at all. It’s easy for us to identify with him. A lot of us have known, or even been ourselves, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, someone who wants the glory but doesn’t want to make the heart commitment, or sacrifice, or suffer. We can judge them. Most of us can probably think of “celebrity pastors”. A lot of them end up falling or failing publicly. Often, I have caught myself enjoying this failure. What a terrible thing to have to admit.

Peter’s retort to Simon is that his heart isn’t in the right place, and so he has no place in the inheritance of the kingdom. How Peter is able to make such a statement with impunity I’m not sure. I don’t quite understand how his heart was in the right place and Simon’s wasn’t, but that’s probably a debate for another day. We must fight against taking the moral high ground in issues of faith, morality and ethics. Our task is to love God, love our neighbours and love ourselves, not judge or decry the lives of others.

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September 3rd 2014: Acts 7:17-43, September 4th 2014: Acts 7:44-53 and September 5th 2014: Acts 7:54-8:3

Read Acts 7:17-8:3 here

Things move tremendously quickly in the story of the fledgling Church through the end of Acts 7 and the start of Chapter 8. Stephen’s compelling history of the people of God and the failings of the current Jewish leadership to acknowledge the Lordship of God in Christ lead to his own murder, and the eruption of a great persecution against the Church. Jesus had warned that persecution would come because of following Him, and we have already read recently of the disciples rejoicing about being deemed worthy of suffering “for the name”. Personally I wonder if persecution was inevitable, whether the authorities were merely waiting for an excuse, or whether Stephen’s blasphemous speech brought it about. I wonder if Stephen knew what he was doing when he saw Christ in heaven. Did the disciples welcome the persecution as a sign of the imminent return of Jesus?

Do we see it as a privilege to suffer? I’m not sure I do. Do we see suffering as an aspect of the Christian life to rejoice in? I’m not sure I do.

Clearly, to align ourselves with Jesus invites the potential for suffering, as well as life, hope and a future. The evident confidence and conviction of the early followers of Jesus in the truth of their cause is something we would all benefit from. How do we gain it? As far removed historically as we are from these events it can be difficult. Cultivate relationship with God. Prayer is a conversation. Scripture is there for us to dialogue with, so as to gain an insight in to the character of our God, and the character and actions desired of us. Build fellowship and community with other believers. Disagree well. Ask for wisdom to see and know God in the everyday, as well as experiencing His love and grace in the miraculous. Most of all, have faith and hope. We have a tendency to see both of these as tentative, and head-knowledge-based. Rather these are decisions of the heart. Choose to trust. Choose to hope. Whatever might come to us, whether we think it is good or bad, it is this hope that will point us towards God, who ultimately is the only sustainer.