Saturday 7 July 2018

Sermon for Sunday 8th July (2)

Based on "2nd Service" readings, from Jeremiah 20.1-11 and Romans 14.1-17 :-

You know, I do often find myself feeling sorry for Jeremiah. I know he moans a lot, so that in past generations anyone who tended to moan and complain might well be nicknamed Jeremiah. But he did have some cause to moan. He hadn’t really wanted to be a prophet, but he ended up being one anyway. Not a bad career move on the face of it, prophets could earn a good living, folk looked up to them, they had status in society.

But the words given to Jeremiah to say tended not to be the sort of hopeful, upbeat pronouncements people liked to hear. Where other prophets were saying to the king and his council, “Your plans are good, and God is on your side. Press ahead, you can’t go wrong!” - or words to that effect - Jeremiah was saying things like “Your plans are rubbish, and God has had enough of you; the kingdom will fall, and if you’re lucky you might get carted off into slavery and exile.” Not surprisingly, he wasn’t heard gladly.

No wonder then that Jeremiah spoke of having been duped! But the word he has is the word of the Lord, the word of truth, a word that would simply burn within him were he not to speak it. The work of a prophet is to speak for God, to speak his word as it is, for good or for bad. Prophets weren’t supposed to be augurists or fortune tellers, predicting the future, even though they might well be looking at what would happen next. The great prophets like Jeremiah were there to tell it like it is, to coin a phrase. And often to say that things can’t go on as they are.

So, says Jeremiah, I’ve been duped. People should be looking up to me. Instead they deride me and search for ways to do me down. But after he’s had his moan he goes on to say, “But the Lord is on my side, a powerful champion.” Moaner he might be, but he was also a man who kept the faith. God chose him as a prophet, as a true prophet against all the false prophets feathering their own nests, because of he was the kind of faithful man who could be trusted with the truth. However unpopular it made him, he’d speak it.

The Church is supposed to be prophetic. What does that mean? I suppose that we’re here to show the way to people, and to shine a light into the world’s dark places. That’s not always going to be a cheery and songs-of-praisy sort of a job. Sometimes we’ll have hard things to say, and if we have we need to say them and not hold back. So long as they really are God’s hard things, and not our own gripes. And so long as our own deeds match our words - since we’ll quickly be caught out and discarded if they don’t. People are on the watch for any slip we might make, just as they were with Jeremiah.

Paul’s letter to the Romans is different from many of his other letters. Elsewhere, Paul’s often writing to places he’s been, churches he’s had some share in founding, and people he knows. To Rome, though, Paul is writing to commend himself, and to make sure the church that is already there will accept him. So it’s much more a statement of where Paul stands, a manifesto for his mission you might say, than his other letters.

But that’s not to say he doesn’t spend some of his time and ink trying to put right those things he thinks might be going wrong. Deeds need to match with words, and maybe they didn’t always, even in the Roman church. “None of us lives, and equally none of us dies, for himself alone,” writes Paul. We need to be serious about belonging together if we’re serious about belonging to God.

So, says Paul, don’t fall out about stuff. Stuff like differences in the way we do things, differences in the way we see things. We won’t always all of us agree on everything. But it’s no job of ours to sit in judgement on one another. That’s God’s job, and we all stand under the same judgement, a judgement that’s guaranteed. We can safely leave the judging to him.

The boundaries between denominations are certainly not as strong as they were when I was little. We went to both church and chapel, and were looked on with some suspicion as being neither fish nor fowl, neither one thing nor the other.

But we do tend to still be very tied to our own church, building by building. I don’t understand why people who’ll drive twenty miles to visit their dentist won’t drive a mile down the road to attend church when there isn’t a service in their own. But there we are, that’s human nature, I suppose.

Still, it’s good that people are different. We eat different things, listen to different music, vote for different political parties, and mostly it doesn’t make that much difference. We can still be friends. We make space for one another, mostly. And we should never cease to listen to those we don’t agree with, because our own beliefs are tested when we put them against others. We best discern God’s word together too, sharing, challenging, being challenged, and also of course praying. I never trust anyone who claims to have their own personal hot line to God. One of the things I like about Jeremiah, by the way, is the way he and God are always falling out with each other. That makes him real. I do that too.

“Love divine” was the top ten hymn when I did a survey recently on my patch; but it’s sung to a lot of different tunes, and not everyone wanted the same one. Most people wanted “Blaenwern”, but there were some who preferred the John Stainer tune “Love Divine”. Chapel folk often sing it to the tune “Hyfrydol” which we use for “Alleluia, Sing to Jesus”. “If we sing it, I want it to the original tune,” said someone to me as we talked about it. “I bet you don’t even know the original tune,” I replied, and when I sang it to him he didn’t. Charles Wesley wrote the words to fit the Purcell tune “Precious Isle,” which was very popular in the theatres at the time, and Wesley thought it ought to have some religious words. These days he’d probably have been writing hymns to fit things like the Eastenders theme tune. Someone has, by the way. For the record, the guy who liked the original tune was thinking of the Stainer one.

Here’s the point, though: it’s the same love divine, whatever tune we sing it to. It’s the same love divine, whatever our tradition of worship. And of course I chose that hymn very deliberately. Love is what makes sense of it all. God loves all kinds of people who come to church, whether they make the sign of the cross and kneel a lot, or raise their hands in the air and dance a lot. More to the point, he also loves all kinds of people who don’t come to church - people who mean to but don’t get round to it, people who refuse to have anything to do with it, people who’ve been hurt by the church, as some have. God loves people who are out playing Sunday league soccer or home washing their cars or watering their cucumbers. I’m sure he’d like to see them in church, but he loves them anyway. They may not know he loves them or care all that much, but that’s where we come in.

For a prophetic church isn’t prophetic in order to look good, and to make sure in the process that everyone else knows just how bad they look. A church in mission isn’t doing it so we can fill our pews and pay our bills. It can sometimes come across that way, but what we need to be is servant churches in the image of our servant King. And prophecy and mission done in his name and after his example must rest in this simple statement: God wants people to know the truth, so we who have the truth mustn’t keep it to ourselves but need to be spreading it around. People may not always like what they hear, because no-one can sign up with Jesus without changing, without being changed. Nor can we, by the way. And no-one likes change.

But our motivation for mission is love - for live is God’s motivation all the way through. “God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son . . .” Are people hearing that from us? Are people seeing that in us? They need to; we mustn’t hold back. God’s word should be burning in each one of us just as it did in Jeremiah: not that we’re all quite called to do all that he did, but we are all called in some way to be part of the process.

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