Tag: Change

“THIS IS THAT”

On By revrayvincent1 Comment

A Sermon preached at Tonyfelin Baptist Church, Caerphilly, Pentecost 2024

I remember when I was a small child going with my parents to some special service. I don’t remember which church it was or who the preacher was, and I was too young to understand much of it, especially the sermon. But the one thing I still remember is the preacher's text. He kept repeating it from time to time in the sermon. It was “This is that”. I remember that even as a small child I was thinking, “What a daft text to take!”

When I was a bit older, I realised it was from the story of Pentecost in Acts 2: "But this is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel”. I also came to realise that choosing those three words for a text was not a silly gimmick at all. The words are actually very significant and central to the nature of our Christian faith. Peter was explaining to the people the meaning of this strange event that was happening – the excitement, the speaking in tongues, the joyful praise of God. He was reminding them of the words in their Scriptures and inviting them to recognise how that prophesy was coming true before their very eyes: “This is that”.

In a sense, those words express something essential to the nature of the Christian faith. It is a faith that looks back and at the same time looks to the present and the future. We read the Bible, and we look at the world around us and at our own lives, and every now and then there is a moment when we say, “Yes! This is that!” Whether it's the stories and the teaching of Jesus, or whether it's something we read in the Old Testament, we sometimes have what is called an “aha moment” when we say, “This isn’t just something that happened thousands of years ago – it’s happening now!” In a way every sermon is a “this is that” exercise – the preacher takes a story or a saying from the Bible and connects it with something happening now in the world or in our lives.

So, what does this story of Pentecost mean to us today? In what way can we say, "This is that"? Most of us don't understand this “speaking in tongues” business. What was it that really happened? Was it a miracle that everybody heard the disciples speaking their own language, or did it feel like that because there was a communication and a sense of sharing beyond words? We don't know. What we do know is that we don't see ourselves in the church today getting so wildly excited and telling the whole world about Jesus because we can't keep it to ourselves. For us, "witnessing", telling others about Jesus, is something we feel we ought to do but somehow don’t do for much of the time. This old story is just that – an old story, and we're not quite sure what to make of it.

I would suggest that its meaning for us today is very much connected with the bit we often leave out because we don't like it! Quoting the words of Joel about the pouring out of the Holy Spirit, Peter includes the verses that follow them: “… and I will show portents in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood and fire and smoky mist. The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the Lord's great and glorious day. Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”

We sometimes forget that the early disciples were convinced that Jesus, who had been condemned to death by the religious leaders, was coming back very soon as a judge. Peter was appealing to the people to repent and acknowledge Jesus so that their sin would be forgiven. That's why he ended his sermon with the urgent plea, “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation”.

That sounds more like the world we live in today – “portents in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood and fire and smoky mist. The sun turned to darkness and the moon to blood”. That doesn’t sound as far-fetched as it used to. So much of the news today frightens us: war in Ukraine, Palestine, Sudan, Yemen and so many other places; the terrible possibility of nuclear war; the extreme weather conditions threatening our life on this planet because of the way we have polluted the soil, the sea and the air; conflict in outer space. The day could soon come when there will literally be blood on the moon.

The numerous wars and civil conflicts going on the world, the ever increasing streams of refugees, the increasing bitterness and violence in politics and in society generally, make us wonder whether we are facing the collapse of our whole civilisation. If ever the world needed someone to save it, it's now.

Peter stood up courageously in front of the crowd and said, “God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified”. Here again we can look at today's world and say “this is that”. Innocent people are dying cruel deaths everywhere, killed by war and terrorism or starved to death by poverty. We can't just blame villains like Putin or Netanyahu or the terrorists or the big companies or the super-rich. It's the whole nature of our society, of the way the world is run, that is killing innocent people. We are all part of this and must share the guilt of it. We are crucifying Jesus over and over again. We are destroying the image of God in human beings.

The people's response to Peter's speech was to say, “Brothers, what should be do?” The answer was simple: “Repent and be baptised every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit”. The answer is the forgiving, loving grace of Jesus. And this is just as true today. God is alive and working through Jesus to save the world from its sins. Not in just the way it happened at Pentecost, nor in the way things happened in revivals in the past.  God is the same always and yet always doing something new.

New things are happening. There are many signs that we are not without hope. There are people in the world who are concerned about what is going on and who believe that things can be different. Some of them are very young and doing things that are inspiring and hopeful, challenging their elders and sometimes putting them to shame.  Yes, young men are seeing visions. Old men are dreaming dreams too – I like to think I am one of them.  The older I get the more convinced I am about the good news of Christ. It's not about getting more people to come to church, and it's not about me and my personal salvation. It's about the new world that God has promised to create, a world where, in the words of Amos, “justice will roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream”.

And it’s just not just about ministers, or clever people, or powerful people. It's all classes of society: “even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit, and they shall prophesy”. People who have been ignored or downtrodden – women, children, people of different races, poor communities, disabled people – are finding their dignity and their voice and playing their part in changing the world. Yes, there are many signs in the world today of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit "on all flesh", if only we read the promises of God in the Bible and look around and say “This is that!”

And where are the churches in all this? Mostly it looks as if they are bypassed. God sometimes seems more active in the world than in the church. The people striving to change the world are often those who don’t go to church, those who say they are “spiritual but not religious”, and many who don’t believe in God at all. I believe the Holy Spirit is in them and God is using them. But I believe God still has a place for the church – only it must be a church very different from the one we see now.

The Church must change. And that doesn't necessarily mean having guitars and drums instead of an organ, singing modern choruses or changing the order of service. We need a church that is geared to demonstrating the kingdom of God by living in a radical new way, a church that has its eyes on the good of the whole community and not just its own members; a church that shows the love of Jesus by being inclusive; a church where people of different ages, races, nationalities and cultures, different sexuality, different life experience, can be together and demonstrate that human beings can be a family instead of a lot of divided tribes; a church where people whose lives are in a mess are not condemned or excluded but embraced with the love of Christ; a church in which people are willing to give sacrificially in order to make the world fairer and happier; a church that is a little colony of heaven on earth.

We need to recapture the vision of the early church, where all who believed were together and had all things in common and would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all who had need; a church where barriers were broken down, with Jews and Gentiles, rich and poor, slaves and free people eating together. 
Being this kind of church won't change the world overnight, but it will light a candle in a dark world, and as more and more candles are lit, the dark world will become lighter.

And this is not all struggle and serious business. It is joy. The second chapter of Acts closes with words describing the life of the early disciples and saying: “day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.” Of course, there was persecution to come. For us, too, the call to be the true church is not always an easy one. But there is something at the heart of it that is full of hope and joy. The church God wants to see is a happy church and an attractive one. Are you and I in it, and if it is still in the future, will we be in it?

Faith: A Journey of Discovery

On By revrayvincentLeave a comment

New thinking and the questioning of inherited beliefs is not an aberration from Christianity, nor a sign of heresy or disloyalty. It is deeply embedded in the nature of the Judaeo-Christian heritage itself. From the very beginning faith has evolved through questioning and argument.

At an early stage in the history of their faith Jewish people began to move away from the old idea that their God had chosen them for special favour irrespective of how they behaved. The stories of the patriarchs in the Book of Genesis – Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their families – show them getting up to all kinds of things we would consider reprehensible – deceit, trickery and theft – and prospering by them just because they were specially favoured by their God. In time this changed. People began to see that God was not an arbitrary, capricious despot, but a God who was consistent, fair, and just. God expected standards of behaviour from his people. They must not worship another god or make idols. They must not murder, commit adultery, steal, deceive, or plot against their neighbours.

In the book of Deuteronomy (ch 28), the conditions of God’s relationship with his people are set out at length. If the nation serves God faithfully and obeys the commandments, it will be blessed in every way. The people will live safely in their land, enjoy rich crops and abundant harvests, good health, long life, and many children. They will be defended from all their enemies and win all their battles. But if they turn away from God and act unjustly, they will face disaster on all sides.

The history of Israel in the books of Samuel and Kings are a long illustration of this principle. When there was a good king who reigned justly and encouraged people in the pure worship of God, there was peace and prosperity, but when there was a king who disobeyed the commandments, there was famine, disease, natural disasters, defeat in war, and all kinds of misfortune.

Sometimes the historians had difficulty in explaining certain parts of the history. King Josiah, who instituted a thorough reform of religious practice and was a good and faithful king, was killed in battle at the age of 39. The historian explains this by saying that the nation was still being punished for the terrible sins of his grandfather Manasseh (2 Kings 23:25-30). As an old scripture said, God visits the sins of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation (Exodus 20:5). But there was one prophet, Ezekiel, who disagreed with this. He was addressing the Jewish people when they had lost their freedom, their holy city, and their land to the Babylonians. They were in a depressed and defeatist mood, believing they were being punished because of the sins of their forefathers. Ezekiel offered them hope by asserting that God’s judgment does not go down through the generations – every individual is rewarded or punished according to their own behaviour (Ezek 18).

But some people realised that this too is not always true. Many of the Psalms and other writings drive home the message that good people are rewarded with long life, health, prosperity, and large families. The wicked may appear to prosper for a time, but they will eventually suffer for their sins. The Book of Job is a passionate argument against this. It presents the hypothetical situation of a man of impeccable piety and virtue who loses all his property, his family, and then his health. His friends (‘Job’s comforters’) preach to him the conventional message that suffering is a punishment for wrong-doing, and that his only hope is to confess his sins and pray for forgiveness. Job refuses to believe that he has deserved what he is suffering. He insists on arguing his case with God. In chapters of profound poetry, the whole question of the working out of God’s justice in human life is pondered. There is no ultimate answer, but the interesting thing is that in the end God commends Job for having the honesty and courage to argue with him, and rebukes Job’s friends for having the audacity to try to defend God’s justice with shallow arguments.

The belief that the Jews are God’s chosen people also undergoes some questioning and development within the Bible. It was probably at a time when Jewish leaders were becoming increasingly strict in maintaining the purity of the ‘holy people’ that the little Book of Ruth was written. One of ancient Israel’s close neighbours was the nation of Moab. There was a long history of feud between the two peoples, which was enshrined within the Scriptures in a commandment saying that no Moabite should be admitted to the congregation of the Lord even to the tenth generation (Deuteronomy 23:3). Ruth tells the story of a Moabite woman who remained faithful to her Jewish mother-in-law and was rewarded by marriage to a prosperous Jewish farmer. The story ends with a little genealogy showing that the great King David was a great-grandson of that marriage!

Before that time, the prophet Amos had already questioned what it meant to be the chosen people. He asserts that being chosen does not mean God is always on their side – it means that God will judge them more strictly than others (Amos 3:2). In another place he suggests that they are no more special than any other nation anyway. They may boast about God giving them the land of Canaan, but did not the same God give other nations their lands (Amos 9:7)?

The Jews’ long experience of oppression and suffering generated a deep change in their perception of the meaning of being chosen. Even when they were at their best and most faithful to God, they suffered. A prophet at the time of the Babylonian exile came to see this as part of what it meant to be chosen. They were somehow fulfilling a purpose in the world by the very fact of their undeserved suffering (Isaiah 53). This became a central part of the way Christians saw the whole story of Jesus, the crucified Messiah who embodies the nature and destiny of the holy people. In the New Testament we find the firm belief that God is above all a loving God, and the daring insight that real love shows itself in weakness more than in coercive power: ‘God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength’ (1 Corinthians 1:25).

When sceptics point out that the Bible contradicts itself. they are really missing the point. The contradictions are part of the essential nature of the Bible, and of the whole history of Jewish and Christian faith. Faith in God is an ongoing journey of discovery, constantly dealing with the unexpected, interpreting experience, and discovering new truth. As God says to Moses, ‘I will be who I will be’.

Where Do We Start?

On By revrayvincentLeave a comment

If we want to embark on the journey of finding our own faith, the things we believe in rather than what we have been taught, where do we begin? Ironically, the best answer is probably with what we have been taught. None of us is a blank sheet. We don’t start from scratch. We must start where we are. We do not choose our parents, our place of birth, our nationality, or the religious tradition we inherit. These things shape who we are, and no matter how far life moves us on from them, they are inevitably our starting point.

I was born into the Christian tradition. Both my parents were active members of a Baptist chapel in Wales. I was baptised by total immersion at the age of twelve. With all my experience of working in cooperation with other churches and other faiths, I am still a Baptist minister. But my life experience and thinking have made me a very questioning and unconventional Christian. If I had been born into a different culture, I might well have been a Jew or a Muslim, a Hindu or a Buddhist, but I like to think that, whatever faith I was born into, I would still have become an open-minded, questioning and unconventional member of that faith community.

I have great respect for other faiths and have been inspired by some of their insights. When I attend a synagogue, I have a warm feeling of being in my own faith’s ancestral home. When I talk with humanists, I feel there is very little difference between us. Nevertheless, I am still happy to call myself a Christian and have never considered converting to another faith or belief. This is not because I am certain that the traditional version of Christianity is true, but because it corresponds to the way I see the world, or – to be bluntly honest – the way I want to see the world.

Christianity is often described as an ‘historical’ faith. That is, it is essentially a story. It is the story of a God who created the world and created human beings in God’s own image. It goes on to tell how this God worked in a special way through the long history of the Jewish people, and how their understanding of God’s ways developed through their experience. It tells the story of Jesus of Nazareth, a Jewish teacher who declared and demonstrated a radically new way of life, who died and rose again, and in whom sin and death will be defeated and the image of God will be restored in a new heaven and a new earth. It claims that God has been supremely revealed not in spoken or written words but in this man, the Word made flesh.

Is this story true? Some parts of it of course are history that few if any would dispute. Other parts are legendary or mythological. Some of its central parts are an expression of faith that can never be proved or disproved. But whether strictly ‘true’ or not, I think it is the best story in the world, the story that is most true to the depths of human experience. I find that the more I try to live as if it is true the better it works.

In a sense, faith means believing in spite of the evidence and then watching the evidence change. In the story of Moses at the burning bush, Moses asks God to tell him his name. God’s answer is ‘I am who I am’. Even that simple statement can have more than one meaning. It could be a simple refusal to answer the question. It could suggest that God is the mystery that can never be defined or even named. In the Hebrew language there is no clear distinction between the present and future tenses, and so the statement can just as well mean ‘I will be who I will be’. This too can have more than one meaning. It could mean ‘I am free to be who I want to be’, or ‘you will keep discovering who I am’.

This is an invitation to the journey of faith. It also suggests that new thinking is not an aberration from Christianity, a sign of heresy or disloyalty. It is deeply embedded in the nature of the Judaeo-Christian faith itself. We are not chained by history but invited to keep on discovering God in new ways. We start where we are, but the destination is yet to be known.