Introduction
Our mission statement describes what we are about as a church. We say that we believe we are
>
Raised up by God
> To be transformed disciples,
> Following Jesus
> Using our gifts
> So that our people might be saved.
For the last two weeks we have been looking at what this statement means in particular; two weeks ago we looked at what we meant by affirming that we were “raised up by God” and then last week we looked at what it meant to be a transformed disciple. Today we are going to look at what it means to follow Jesus at the start of the 3rd Millennium.
In the past
In the past it was quite easy to see how to follow Jesus. For the most part Christians had to be in church every Sunday and work to support their pastors. Missions were something that happened in other countries and God raised up priests to evangelise and nuns to nurse and teach. In Protestant churches ministers were raised up to pastor and lay women went to teach and nurse.
It was easy to know what Jesus wanted us to be as missionaries as there was a whole world our there where we could go to be missionaries, to spread the gospel, and the English language to say nothing about repressed views on sex! The worldwide Anglican communion, the Roman Catholic and most of the other churches in the developing world are there as a result of missions to them, mainly in the 19th Century – though in Latin America the missionaries went on the same boats as the conquering Spanish armies. Even now there are Protestant and Catholic missionary organisations which work in supporting the Church and spreading the faith in various parts of the world. John Gresham’s book The Testament tells, movingly, of the work of a Baptist missionary to a remote Indian tribe in Brazil. As a child we use to have a little plastic red box we put loose change into in order to support the work of a Catholic missionary organisation. The Rev Jean White pastor of our church in South London spent the first part of her ministry as a missionary for the Brethren Church working in China and Macao in the 1960s.
In the past, then, to follow Jesus meant either being a faithful member of one’s local church or it meant following a call to be clergy or a lay missionary. The past however has gone and we live in a new world.
Now
Now the world has been turned upside down! The world of the mission has come to our doors. Clergy or professional ministers are no longer the missionaries – you are! Once we let schools, church and secular, tell people about the Christian faith and, fatally, left the responsibility for that to others. Once we assumed we lived in a Christian country but woke up one day to find that only 7% of the population go to church once a month or more. In every age the Church has been superb at understanding how to make itself appeal to the culture of that age, but in our age we seem to have lost site of how to do this. I read in a Catholic paper last year that a parish priest in Bristol has been recruited from Africa. The pastor of the largest Evangelical church in London comes from Nigeria. The missionaries that are easy to see come from the countries that we helped to evangelise and are now returning to re-evangelise our country, following in the footsteps of the Celtic saints all the way back in the 5th and 6th Centuries.
There is no longer a part of the world loosely called “Christendom” but a mix and muddle of culture and ideologies competing for our attention - just as there was in the days of the Early Church. People are more likely to hear the Good News that God cares for them and loves them from you than they are from a cleric. They are more likely to be evangelised by you than a professional missionary.
This is a good thing, as it means a return to the pattern seen in the Early Church – a pattern which was very successful. But it makes demands on us. It is easier to sit in the pews, pay money into the collection, and let another, professional minister, do your work for you. It is very difficult to try and re-evaluate the role of the clergy and the laity, but that is what we have to do if we are to follow Jesus at the start of the 3rd Millennium.
Return to the Beginning
The Early Church was born in a world which isn’t so dissimilar to us. There was one super-power in the world – Rome. Roman society – which effectively meant all of Europe around the Mediterranean – was very liberal in religious things. There were many gods and spiritualities on offer. People could, and did, worship in a variety of ways or not at all. People could get their fortunes told, go to a magical healer, or worship in a rich Temple. In some places sex was part of worship which no doubt added to the appeal. Everyone’s truth was equally valid – so long as the Emperor was seen as divine. In practice this meant little more than burning some incense in front of a statue to him and people did this without really believing he was a god. The established religions, however, were not really meeting people’s spiritual yearnings, and many were dissatisfied with the religions to which they belonged.
In our post-modern world we see a variety of religions and spiritual movements competing for our attention. All of the six main world religions can be found in Manchester, and many smaller ones. The New Age Movement offers a range of spiritual alternatives and we are encouraged to see all truth as being relative – something is true if it works for us.
In the world of the Early Church there were the most amazing movements of peoples around the Mediterranean. Because there was, effectively, only one government and one currency people were free to move. This helped the Jewish community which, by the time of Jesus, had spread all over the Mediterranean area. There doesn’t seem to have been the same hostility to migration that we see today, though Roman society was incredibly structured and slavery was a large part of the economic success of that world.
We don’t have slavery in our world today, but our economy works, in a large part, by oppressing people. We don’t pay a fair wage for the goods we buy from other parts of the world. We subsidise our farmers to grow food we don’t need which means that farmers in other parts of the world can’t compete in our brave new global economy. People move around our world much more than in Roman times because they can – air travel means we can travel vast differences in a few hours, but also there is such a difference in the wealth of the West with the rest of the world. Such wealth is a result of our often unfair trade and acts as a pull to migrants.
In the world of the Early Church there were religious tensions. The Jewish Religion was the only religion allowed which did not have to see the Emperor as divine; instead they prayed for him. Any religion which did not see buy into the Imperial Cult was persecuted and seen as being anti-social. Before long Christians were persecuted because of their fundamental belief in only one God. But Christianity also attracted some slightly mad people who were intoxicated by the idea of dying for their faith (sound familiar?). Believing that a martyrs death would secure them all the glory of heaven, they would go up to Roman Centurions and proclaim again and again that Jesus, not the Emperor, was Lord. The first bishops quickly condemned this saying one should not seek martyrdom. One wonders if they had been seen by representatives of hassled centurion’s who began to get wary of going out shopping for fear of lunatic Christians!
Sadly in our world there are those who seem to want to die for their radical faith and, worse, there are those who want to kill for it.
What did Early Church do?
So what did the Early Church do in the midst of all this?
The simple truth is that the Early Church relied on the radical working of the Holy Spirit. It had to as it had nothing else! It didn’t have orders of monks and nuns, scores of professionally trained ministers, or bulging bank accounts. What the members of the Early Church had was a grasp on the fact that their experience of Jesus was life changing and that their community could not live without it. They were so consumed with this knowledge that they became rather bold. We saw this in the reading today from the Book of Acts.
A couple of weeks ago I heard a guy called John Drane give a talk at the Christian Resources Exhibition here in Manchester. He told us he went off to get his hair cut in his usual place and had built up, over time, a good relationship with the woman who cut his hair. As he went on this particular day, she was bursting to tell him what an awful time she had been having, as her brother had just died. She was very annoyed as the minister who conducted the funeral did it badly and she really wanted to pray, to get a message to her brother but didn’t know how to pray. She wanted to feel God’s presence but didn’t know how to. Suddenly it dawned on her that the man whose hair she was cutting was a professor of religion at the local university and that he might know how to pray, how to pass on a message to her brother, how to experience God. Suddenly it dawned on John that he was getting rather more than he bargained for in his hair cut. But he overcame his reluctance and asked if she wanted to be prayed for and told how to pray. She did. Then the Spirit told John to anoint her. This he thought was plain silly as the only thing he had to anoint her with were the gooey shampoos and conditioners that littered the shop. But it dawned on him that if he believed in the sacraments, that God could use the simple things of the earth to pass on grace, then he needed to do this. So he prayed and anointed this woman. He taught her how to pray. She asked God to tell her brother that she was not angry with him, and she, for the first time in her life, experienced God – through being anointed with oil in a hairdressers in Aberdeen.
This talk got me thinking about a wedding I was asked to conduct a couple of weeks ago in a pub in Sheffield. Now I really hate doing weddings in pubs, but a whole sequence of disasters meant that the couple were not able to get their friends over to Manchester so to Sheffield I went. The wedding went ok, the couple weren’t too disorganised, the congregation weren’t too drunk, and the whole thing didn’t start too late! As I was waiting, however, for the proceedings to start I noticed that no one wanted to talk to me. Vicars aren’t good at wedding receptions – even ones where the service is a part of it. The second thing I noticed is that one person really did want to talk to me. She came over and asked me to bless her crucifix that she was wearing. I said 'of course' (not quite knowing what to do) but took the crucifix, asked her name, and prayed that God would use this piece of jewellery to remind Tanya how special she was, and how loved she was. After I prayed she told me that she was in recovery from being a heroin user and had managed to stay clean for 6 months. She told me about her brother who was still using, of her fears about not being able to stay clean, of her mum who was ill. (They didn’t tell me what to say to Tanya at seminary either). I was in a different city, talking to someone who couldn’t get to our church, who was lesbian and who was in need. So I told her to get into a Narcotics Anonymous group as this would help her stay clean. She said she wanted to but was scared, and I encouraged her to go.
It seemed to me that Philip in the reading, John Drane in his hairdressers and myself in that pub in Sheffield were all about the same thing. We were about trying to follow Jesus into the mission field of our world.
In each case we did the same three things.
Be Sensitive to the Holy Spirit
The first thing we did was to be sensitive to the Holy Spirit. Now I wasn’t in the mood to be sensitive to any Spirit Holy or otherwise. I had arrived late, which was just as well as they couple were even later. The pub was ok, but not really my chosen venue for a wedding, and my walking into the pub just stopped conversation! But when Tanya came to speak to me her need rang out and I knew that she didn’t just want me to bless a piece of jewellery, but that was her way into a meaningful conversation. A conversation she knew would be helpful. In your lives, at home, at work, at play, in the pub, with friends and neighbours, be sensitive to what the Spirit tells you to say.
Be Yourself – you are the light of the world
The second thing all three of us did was to be ourselves. Jesus said we are the “light of the world” but often we forget to act like it! If I had come across as being all pompous and 'vicar-like', that woman would never have talked to me. If I had said I was too busy getting ready for the wedding, she would have been put off. If John Drane had simply sat there and empathised with the woman she would never have had the experience she needed of the Divine. If Philip had not been himself and had the courage to start talking to that important official, then the faith would not have been shared. Be yourselves, trust that you are good enough for God, trust that you are the light of the world!
Be Bold – take risks.
And finally, be bold, take risks! It was a great risk for Philip to run up to that chariot and start a conversation based on what he heard. How many of us would start up a conversation with a total stranger. It was a risk for John Drane to pray with that woman in the hairdressers – he told us everyone else was listening intently. And then to pray for her and anoint her and to help her experience God. It felt really strange to bless the crucifix of a young unchurched lesbian in a pub in Sheffield, and even stranger to listen to her story of brokenness and gradual recovery. But be bold, be strong, for God is with you.
Conclusion
The church is different from what it has been for most of its history. We do not have hoards of professionals to go out and win our cities and people for Jesus; all we have is each other. We don’t have advanced missionary skills and programmes, we don’t have loads of money and resources, we don’t have simple answers. All we have is each other, a willingness to listen to God’s Holy Spirit, a willingness to be ourselves and a willingness to be bold – and these things are enough for these are the things that Jesus uses to build his church.
Amen.
This sermon was first preached in the Metropolitan Community Church of Manchester. Click here for further information.