What the Whole World is Waiting For…

Preached at Holmfirth Methodist Church
20th July 2014: 5th Sunday after Trinity
Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43; Romans 8:12-25

“The creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God.” (Romans 8:19)

No pressure, but the hopes of a changed, transformed and restored universe are pinned on you, on God’s plan for creating new people out of us by the interior operation of his Spirit. The entire cosmos, Paul says, is crying out for the emergence and empowerment of people who will take responsibility for its renewal. The whole world is waiting. It’s waiting for us. It’s waiting for the appearance of children of God who will be agents for the divine revitalisation of all things. I told you there was no pressure. But do you know what? Actually, there isn’t any pressure really, because it’s not down to us; it’s down to the Spirit working in us, it’s down to God renewing us so that he might renew the world through us.

The entire fabric of the created order is crying out, squinting, straining its eyes to see what is coming next; it’s desperately hoping for humans who have been returned to the height of their true humanity, humans who will govern the world under God as they were always meant to from the very beginning. The good of the world, Paul seems to say, is tied up with the good of its rulers—us. We might think we’re small, insignificant, and unimportant; but we’re not. Our lives have cosmic consequences. We are people of infinite influence. Scientists call this the Butterfly Effect—the idea that the disturbance equivalent of a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil could set off a tornado in Texas a few weeks later.

The fractured, broken, unredeemed world in which we live and of which we are a part is after true children of God. This is what the whole world is waiting for. And since the whole world is waiting for the true children of God to be made known, it’s worth asking ourselves the question: are we one of them? Are we now and are we becoming more every day true children of God? Are we part of God’s response to a world in need of healing and wholeness? To help us answer that, I suggest we look together at three things which Paul says are marks or characteristic of true children of God:
1. That they know God as Father;
2. That they are led by God’s Spirit;
3. That they suffer with Christ, God’s Son.

In the previous chapter of his letter to the church in Rome, Paul writes about our being torn in two directions—our inability to do what we know is right on the one hand, and our natural inclination to do what we know is wrong on the other. The solution, he says in this chapter, is life in the Spirit. We can’t be who we’re meant to be by ourselves. We can try to be ever so ever so good, but we will fail. We can struggle and wrestle against the sins which beset us, but still the will entangle us and still we will keep falling short. Whether willingly or otherwise, the fact is that we can’t live as God wants us to live in our own strength. We need God’s help. We need God’s power to fill us and take control of our lives. What we need is what Paul calls the Spirit of adoption—the Spirit whose very work is making us children of God.

It may seem obvious, but the first mark of true children of God is that they cry out, they call on God as ‘Abba, Father’ (the Aramaic equivalent of ‘Daddy’). True children of God, those who have the Spirit of adoption living and active inside of them, enjoy an intimate relationship with God, such as Christ has. Now, of course, on one level it’s completely possible for us to say the words, ‘Abba, Father’ and not have that kind of relationship with God. In the same way as it’s possible for me to say that I am actually moving from here, not to go into ministerial training as you think, but to be Arsenal’s new multi-million pound goalkeeper. It’s not the words themselves which matter; it’s the reality which stands behind it. If a couple doesn’t love each other and are separated in all but name, there’s no point them sending each other a Valentine’s Day card—it’s just empty words, hollow sentiment. In the same way, the work of the Spirit isn’t just allowing us to name God ‘Father’, it is to truly know, experience, and love God as Father.

The true children of God know God intimately. They love God. But even before that, they know that they are loved by God. John Wesley in a sermon on this passage called ‘The Witness of the Spirit’ writes: “We cannot love God, till we know He loves us. ‘We love Him, because He first loved us.’ And we cannot know His pardoning love to us, till His Spirit witness it to our Spirit.” In children of God, the Holy Spirit works to assure them of God’s fatherly love. The Holy Spirit gives children of God a sure sense of God being for them, of God’s love made plain in the life, death, resurrection and exaltation of Jesus Christ, His Son. A true child of God, Paul implies, can no more doubt his adoption—his God-given identity in Christ—than we can doubt the shining of the sun while stood in its beams.

While we know God’s love for us as a powerful present reality, we can know that we are children of God. What’s more, for children of God, his fatherly love is intensely personal. Because they know God’s love as it has been made known in Jesus (and especially in his sacrificial self-giving on the Cross)—they know that Jesus loves them, that Jesus gave himself willingly for them, that Jesus died for their sins. To be a child of God means to know God, to know God’s love for us personally. It isn’t some intellectual theory or abstract generalisation. It isn’t even about knowing that God himself is love. It’s about experiencing God’s love for ourselves as a powerful, present reality. It means to have a personal relationship with him.

One of the worst things we can do in churches is to give the impression that God is some vague, distant, airy-fairy, impersonal and ultimately unknowable life-force floating around the universe. God is supremely personal. That’s why he came to us in the flesh of a man! That’s why he insists on being known as Immanuel—God with us. God wants to be known. The children of God are those who relate to God as Father, who have begun to enjoy this kind of intimate, personal knowledge of the Creator which only comes through spending time with one another. The question, therefore, is: Do we spend time in one another’s company? Do we pray? Do we seek to come into the ever greater knowledge, understanding and love of God, which only comes through prolonged exposure and experience? Do we take time to talk with God, to listen to God, to observe God, to meditate on who God is? A child of God will.

So that’s the first characteristic of true children of God. And the second is this: that they are led by God’s Spirit. “All who are led by the Spirit of God,” Paul says, “are children of God” (v. 14). What does that mean? What does that look like? The questions we need to ask ourselves are these: Who/what do we take our directions from for the way we live our lives? Who/what is calling the shots in the courses of action we take? Who/what do we obey when we’re deciding what to do? So often, even in churches, the answer is that we’re paying more attention to the pounds and pence than to the purposes of the Almighty. To be led by the Spirit is to surrender our own agenda and submit to going God’s way—wherever that way may take us.

Let me share with you the story of Elizabeth Masilela. Elizabeth is just an ordinary South African woman. One day, she was walking across the road to a field where a group of kids regularly played football; she went there to collect old, discarded bricks in an attempt to try and build onto her little house in the township. On this particular day, however, the boys playing football in the field ran over to her and told her to come quickly. She did. A new-born baby had been abandoned and left in a cardboard box where it was now crying and covered head to toe in ants. Elizabeth brushed off the ants as quickly as she could and took the baby to the nearest health centre around. When she got there, the people there said they couldn’t help and that she’d have to go to the police station. So she went to the police station. They also said they couldn’t do anything with a new-born baby, but they’d send a social worker out to her soon; but in the meantime it was best if she kept him. So she did.

Elizabeth took the little baby boy home with her and he cried all night. He must be hungry, she thought, and she gave him all that she had in the house: some water. But it was to no avail. She went out to look for some milk—not so easy to do in the middle of a township at night; but eventually she found somewhere to buy milk and tried feeding it to the baby as best she could. The little boy cried all night long and there was nothing she seemed to be able to do about it. The next day, a social worker sent by the police came by to talk to Elizabeth and told her that the best thing would really be if she kept the baby for as long as possible, but if she couldn’t then to call and they would talk more later. That was 14 years ago. Since then rumours of what Elizabeth had done began to spread and more abandoned babies started turning up on her doorstep. Now she runs an orphanage and has 15 unwanted children staying with her in her little three-room house along with 4 daughters of her own.

This, I suspect, is a fairly accurate picture of what it means to be led by the Spirit. It is to be ambushed by God. To have our lives hijacked, seized, commandeered for God’s purpose and plans. Being led by the Spirit means living life on God’s terms. It means being less concerned with what we want than with what God wants. People filled with the Spirit of adoption are God-focussed. True children of God want to please God. They want to do right by God. They have their lives composed, directed and orchestrated by God. A child of God doesn’t see their freedom in Christ as an opportunity to do what they want; they see it as an opportunity to hand themselves over more fully to doing what God wants. The lives of the children of God are lives marked by obedience, even when that obedience is decidedly costly or inconvenient. Does that describe us? Does that describe the people we are and are becoming?

The third characteristic of a child of God, which Paul describes in this passage, follows closely from what we’ve just been talking about is this: true children of God are ready to suffer with Christ. This isn’t, I’m afraid to say, an optional extra. To be a true child of God in the Christian sense is to take up one’s cross. Not only is this a suffering of self-denial; it is a suffering which is inseparable from faithfulness to Christ in a world which doesn’t know him as Lord, which doesn’t share the same values as we do, which doesn’t belong to the same story, the same narrative as we do. Walking too close to Christ will get us into trouble. It is inevitable if we walk with Jesus that we will be lead into tension and into conflict with the values and the cultures of the world around us which does not know Jesus takes for granted.

Take the famous example of Eric Liddell, whose story was so wonderfully told in the film ‘Chariots of Fire’. His refusal to race on a Sunday for the sake of Jesus put him at odds with his teammates, his coaches, even the royal family and ultimately cost him the opportunity to compete in the event he had trained so hard to enter. Or take my friend Ben, who walked away from a lucrative and well-paying job in a big company because he was being put under pressure to collude in some rather shady business practices. Or again, take my friend Peter, who works for a big London law firm and who finds it more difficult than most to join in office banter because he doesn’t have any wild nights out or sexual conquest to brag about.

Following a crucified Lord is difficult. Being made children of God involves a complete and comprehensive overhaul of the kind of people we are. Such rejection of what we were will also unsurprisingly lead those who are not being similarly transformed to take offence. This is where hope comes in. Faced with the prospect of suffering, being a child of God might not sound an entirely appealing prospect. But, Paul says, “the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. … For in hope we were saved” (vv. 18, 24). We suffer the death of our old lives, in order to be made alive with Christ in a new, more glorious way. We endure hardship for the sake of something so much better. We put up with the pain of following Jesus because the payoff of participating in his glory and becoming like him as fellow sons and daughters of God is more than worth it.

Paul says that those with the Spirit inside them groan inwardly for that future, for their being completely and utterly swept up into the mystery of God in Jesus Christ. A life characterised by the indwelling of the Spirit is a life characterised by this hope, this yearning for something we don’t yet see. And it’s a yearning shared by all creation. The whole world is desperately waiting for the advent of new people, renewed in the likeness of Christ, made by the Spirit children of God. The entire created order is groaning for people who know God intimately and pray; people who allow their lives to be taken over by God for his purposes in the world; people who are prepared to suffer with Christ for the surpassing hope of something even greater to come. Can you see the Spirit of adoption at work in your life? If not, then ask until you can. And if you can, then praise God and ask him for patience to wait until you see it in every part of your life.

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Mother Church

Preached at Trinity Methodist/URC, Honley
30th March 2014: Mothering Sunday (AAW)
John 19:25-27

What is a family? Who is in your family? What does your family look like?

Someone a few years ago gave us a tea towel saying: “Friends are the family we choose for ourselves.” Friends are also part of our family. Sometimes they can even be closer to us than our real or biological family. There’s a proverb in the Bible that says the same thing: “There is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.” It’s possible to have friends who are more like family than family are.

It’s one of the amazing things about the story we’ve just read that even as Jesus was in terrible pain and about to die, he was thinking about other people and more worried about their problems than his own. Jesus looked down at his mother and his best friend standing next to her at the foot of his cross and in love he entrusted them to each other. There at the cross, Jesus created a new kind of family; a family where all of Jesus’ friends became brothers and sisters to one another.

There’s a story in another place in the Gospels when Jesus is told that his mother and brothers are outside looking for him and he responded by asking, “Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?” He then pointed to his friends sat around listening to him and said that whoever lives the way God wants them to live is his brother, his sister and his mother. This is God’s family; a family of people like Mary and John who are willing to stand with Jesus to the end even through the pain of the cross.

Jesus gives us a whole new picture of what it means to be family. It is a family of all different sorts of people; people from every place and country, people from every age and ethnicity—men and women, old and young, rich and poor, black and white. This is a family of people tied together by more than genes; it is a family of people tied together by the love of Jesus and a desire to follow him in living lives that make God happy. In this kind of family, God is the Father and we are the children.

This is a family like no other. A third century Christian teacher called Cyprian once said: “You cannot have God as your Father unless you have the Church for your Mother.” And like any of the families we’re born into, you can’t choose your siblings; some you’ll get along with, some you won’t. In the Church, we are related to everyone who is a friend of Jesus. As a Methodist minister in America, Will Willimon, put it so wonderfully, “We have got to eat with anybody Jesus drags in the door.”

Like most families, the Church family can be dysfunctional at times. It too has its fair share of spats and quarrels; but what makes the Church family unique is that it always keeps coming back to sit and eat with one another around the Lord’s table. Because we are related to one another by the simple fact of being Jesus’s friends, it means that if we want to sit and eat with Jesus, we also have to sit and eat with anyone else Jesus chooses to sit and eat with. It is the love of Jesus which holds us all together, which binds us as family.

Now I want to stay with the idea of the Church as our Mother for a bit longer. I want you to think for a moment of what that means. What do our mothers do for us?

There’s a huge long list we could make: they love us, they care for us, they forgive us, they pick us up when we fall down, they change our dirty nappies when we’re babies, they feed us, they cook for us, they clean for us, they wash our clothes, they nurture us, they tell us off when we’ve done something wrong, they give us a hug when we’re feeling down, they encourage us, they spend time with us, they talk with us, they play with us, they eat with us, they laugh with us, they cry with us, they watch over us, they protect us, they give us the freedom to make mistakes, they teach us things, they show us how to do things. The list could go on, I’m sure.

Something else they do for us that we haven’t mentioned: they give birth to us. We are all here today because a mother gave birth to us; they carried us in the womb and gave birth to us. The Church is our Mother because it is the place where Christians are born, where people begin life in relationship with God. Now when I talk about ‘the Church’ I’m not talking about a building, but about people, about the Christians who come together to worship God and centre their lives on Jesus. None of us get connected with Jesus by ourselves; we come because other people show him and share him with us, we come because Jesus reveals himself to us through God’s other children, through his family. It is through the Church we learn the life of faith.

The Church is the place where Christians are born. And like the love of our heavenly Father, Mother Church loves us and accepts us just as we are; we are welcomed and cherished without doing anything to earn or deserve it, but simply for being ourselves. Sometimes, like children, we come home with a scraped knee and mud all over us and it is the Church our Mother who cleans and dresses the wound, washes and changes our clothes. It is in the family of the Church that we learn both to receive forgiveness and to give it as well. Sometimes our mothers tell us off for doing something dangerous, selfish or unkind and sometimes Mother Church will do the same. We are loved as we are; but too much to allow us to stay infants forever.

The Church, like a mother, also teaches us to speak. She shows us who we are and why we’re here. She tells us our story, our family history. She explains why we’re special, why we’re different and why we don’t behave like everyone else does. Mother Church names us as God’s children and helps us work out what it means to live as God’s children. She instructs us in what’s right and what’s wrong. She feeds us and nourishes us with the food of God’s word in the Bible and God’s presence in the bread and wine of Holy Communion. Mother Church helps us grow and flourish as the people God made us to be. She holds us in her land like a clutch of helium balloons and releases us to soar upwards into God. She rejoices when we rejoice and when we’re sad she puts her arm around us and comforts us.

This is the family Jesus creates at the cross for anyone who will be his friend. It’s not exclusive little club for holy Joes; it’s a Sunday school for children learning how to walk. Mother Church is our home away from home; it is the place we come in order to find God’s presence, power and purpose for our lives, preparing us for the day that home is here to stay. The question for us this Mothering Sunday is this: The kettle’s on and the food is in the oven; but are on our way back home to God?

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.