Paul 3

 

Let us recall what happened to Saul after he was blinded on the road to Damascus, in his encounter with Jesus. How for three days he remained in the house of Judas on Straight Street, praying and fasting until he was visited by Ananias who had been sent by the Lord, and how Ananias had laid his hands upon him saying:

Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus who appeared to you on the road has sent me so that you might regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit. Instantly something like scales from Saul’s eyes, and he regained his sight. Then he got up and was baptised. Afterwards, he ate some food and regained his strength. (9:17-19)

We move the story on apace now, keeping the focus on Saul in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, we want to see what happens next to this fiery Pharisee, persecutor of the early Church who through divine intervention has now become a convert, a believer in Christ; a follower of The Way. We know from last week’s discussion that Saul being the man he was, and full of the Holy Spirit, wasted no time in going to the synagogues in Damascus, preaching and witnessing that Jesus indeed, is the Son of God. We can infer again much about the ability of Saul because Luke in his account of the Acts of the Apostles wrote that:

Saul’s preaching became more and more powerful and the Jews in Damascus couldn’t refute his proofs that Jesus was indeed the Messiah. (9:22)

In the end, Saul aroused a lot of opposition in Damascus, from those Jews who would not accept this new message, this turn around, coming from Saul which was of course his preaching of the gospel of Jesus. We will recall that Saul aroused such opposition that the Jews plotted together to have him murdered. And so it was that under cover of darkness that he was helped to escape by being lowered in a basket, through an opening or a large window that were part of the city walls of Damascus.

Now in Luke’s account, that is the Acts of the Apostles we could be forgiven for thinking that Saul, having left Damascus, went straight to Jerusalem because in Acts 9:26-31 we can read:

When Saul arrived in Jerusalem, he tried to meet with the believers, but they were all afraid of him. They did not believe he had truly become a believer! Then Barnabas brought him to the apostles and told them how Saul had seen the Lord on the way to Damascus and how the Lord had spoken to Saul. He also told them that Saul had preached boldly in the name of Jesus in Damascus.

So Saul stayed with the apostles and went all around Jerusalem with them, preaching boldly in the name of the Lord. He debated with some Greek-speaking Jews, but they tried to murder him. When the believers heard about this, they took him down to Caesarea and sent him away to Tarsus, his home town.

The church then had peace throughout Judea, Galilee, and Samaria, and it became stronger as the believers lived in the fear of the Lord. And with the encouragement of the Holy Spirit, it also grew in numbers.

Thus, we get a portrait, a picture that depicts the courage of Saul, a man who although to save his own life had to escape from Damascus, now enters Jerusalem where the same kind of enemies also existed and were prepared to murder him. Indeed, as we have just heard from the text that is indeed what they tried to do. And again, it was the believers, the disciples in the early Church who ensured his safety by smuggling or escorting him out of the city of Jerusalem, taking him to the port of Caesarea and getting him on a boat to his hometown of Tarsus which was in the country we know today as Turkey. In the proceeding account taken from Acts, apart from his boldly preaching in Jerusalem in the name of Jesus and his eventual escape, we can also see that the apostle, Barnabas, was instrumental in introducing Saul to the other apostles vouching for him and giving witness to his conversion and his fearless preaching in Damascus.

However, you will remember that previously I did say that in Luke’s account, that is the Acts of the Apostles, that we could be forgiven for thinking that Saul having escaped from Damascus, (lowered in a basket from the city walls) went straight to Jerusalem. But apparently, this is not so, because according to Paul's own writing, as in his Letter to the Galatians he tells us that in fact, he did not rush up to Jerusalem straight away, but went away to Arabia and then returned to Damascus, and neither, he says, did he consult anyone. By this, I think he meant that he did not seek religious or spiritual instruction from anyone but spent three years in the Arabian desert before his return to Jerusalem. Time alone in the Arabian Desert to give him time to reflect and pray and consolidate and to prepare for all that he would have to face. Indeed, as he stated in his Letter to the Galatians, the gospel he would preach, he received from God and no one else. There was to be a three-year gap before he returned to Jerusalem, where Barnabas would vouch for him and introduce him to Peter, the leader of the twelve and to James, the brother of Jesus.

Recalling that Stephen was the first Christian martyr, stoned to death in Jerusalem (AD 34) and that it was Saul, then as a young man, who looked after the coats of the men, men whom he completely agreed with, looked after their coats while they stoned Stephen to death. From then on, the believers, members of the early Church fled and scattered to avoid persecution. One such place that the believers migrated to was Antioch in Syria. As the gospel of Jesus began to spread beyond Jerusalem, that same gospel spread beyond the confines of the Jewish faith to the Gentiles.

In connection with this, we have the story of the apostle Peter, on that rooftop in Joppa, seeing in a vision as the sky opened, seeing a large sheet let down by its four corners, seeing a sheet containing live animals and then there was God’s command, ordering him to ‘kill and eat’, even though the animals for consumption would not have been acceptable according to Jewish dietary law. This dream prefigured Cornelius the Roman centurion and his gentile household receiving the Holy Spirit at Caesarea the following day, in the presence of Peter.

And so it was that some of the believers who went to Antioch began preaching to the gentiles with great success, so much so that the Church in Jerusalem sent Barnabas to Antioch:

When he arrived and saw this evidence of God’s blessing, he was filled with joy, and he encouraged the believers to stay true to the Lord. Barnabas was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and strong in faith. And many people were brought to the Lord.

Then Barnabas went on to Tarsus to look for Saul. When he found him, he brought him back to Antioch. Both of them stayed there with the church for a full year, teaching large crowds of people. (It was at Antioch that the believers were first called Christians.) (11:22-26)

It seems that such a lot has happened since Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus and of course it had. Saul’s conversion is thought to have taken place in 31 AD, but it was some fourteen years later that we actually find Paul now at that growing and dynamic church in Antioch Syria with Barnabas, and what energy there was there!  And so, with the blessing of that church and led by the Holy Spirit, Saul and Barnabas taking with them a young man, John Mark as an assistant, Saul embarked on the first leg of his first missionary journey, to Cyprus, to preach the gospel of Jesus; the year was 48 AD.

They sailed from the port of Seleucia which was sixteen miles from Antioch, a sea journey of 130 miles. With a favourable wind it would take only a day to arrive at Cyprus. In Cyprus, there was no church as there was in Antioch. There, the believers in the gospel of Jesus were for the most part Jews and so Saul and Barnabas first preached their message, proclaiming Christ in the Synagogue at Salamis in. We can imagine that Barnabas being a native of Cyprus would have played an essential role in making those first contacts, introducing Saul and John Mark in the local synagogues and paving the way for the Christian message.

Ninety miles southwest of Salamis is Pathos, this major city was the seat of the Roman governor, Sergius Paulus. Arriving at Pathos, we are told that Saul and Barnabas were invited to appear before him. In this audience before Sergius Paulus appeared also, a Jewish sorcerer named Bar-Jesus or otherwise known as Elymas. Elymas, it seems, had gained some credibility and influence over the Roman governor, and attempted to intervene and to prevent the governor from hearing the gospel message. Filled with the Holy Spirit, Paul* responded by proclaiming that the ‘Lord had laid his hand of punishment’, on Elymas and that he would be ‘struck blind’. This happened instantly and when the governor, Sergius Paulus saw what had happened, he became a believer, ‘for he was astonished at the teaching of the Lord.’

Eighteen years in the life of the early Church:

• Stephen the first Christian Martyr (30 AD)
• The scattering of the Jerusalem Church
• Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus
• Ananias visits Saul, restore his sight and baptises him
• Saul’s escape from Damascus (in a basket)
• Saul’s time in Arabia
• Peter’s vision at Joppa and the coming of the Holy Spirit to the Gentiles
• Barnabas introduces Saul to the Apostle’s Peter and James
• Saul’s escape from Jerusalem and return to Tarsus
• Saul and Barnabas at the church in Antioch
• Commencement of the First Missionary Journey (48 AD)
• In Cyprus Saul becomes Paul

I hope that this ‘helicopter tour’ may be useful to you in helping, as far as it goes, to trace Paul’s movements in relation to the development of the early Church.

*After 13:9 in Acts, Saul is thereafter referred to as the Roman equivalent: Paul

 

 Photograph: Peloponnisios, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons 

 

 

St Paul 2

In my last Blog, I tried to convey to you something of the character of Paul the Apostle. Paul, as you know, before his conversion on the road to Damascus was known as Saul the Pharisee. Before that dramatic conversion we can in the Acts of Acts of the Apostles get a glimpse of that passionate angry Saul:
 
Meanwhile, Saul was uttering threats with every breath and was eager to kill the Lord’s followers. So he went to the high priest. He requested letters addressed to the synagogues in Damascus, asking for their cooperation in the arrest of any followers of the Way he found there. He wanted to bring them—both men and women—back to Jerusalem in chains. (9:1-2)

I have also previously mentioned a description of Paul, a description that has been handed down to us from the second century. That description amongst other things, describes him as being ‘full of grace’ a man of undeniable presence, so much so that his letters, and his actions have left an indelible mark on the pages of human history. It was my intention, at the time, to present this little cameo of Paul as a way also to personify the attributes of the beginnings of the early Church, its struggles, its victories and its suffering in a pagan world, and how Paul as one of its leaders endured in adversity. Why should we be interested? And my answer to that question is that there are clearly valuable lessons that are here for us today as we too must live in an unregenerate society along with the corrupted churches that increasingly are becoming more and more blatant in their godlessness and their estrangement from the teachings of the Bible.
 
In a recent conversation, I talked about the churches, how they are today and what is actually being preached in them. For those members of congregations that are subject to that thing we know as a ‘sermon’, I said in the same conversation, that they, the gathered congregation on a Sunday should at least receive something from the preaching of the Word, the preaching of the scriptures that is meaningful to them. It’s got to be something of practical help and of spiritual value. In other words, a sermon has got to have direct relevance to the Christian lives that we are all trying to live; it must have some direct relevance to your life. Preaching is not merely an  attempt to present some information or to say ‘something interesting’;  though that wouldn’t be a bad thing. But, rather this, and I put it to you like this, by asking you what actually is it that is required of us as Christians, as followers of Jesus within your own personal ministry? Yes, that’s right, your own personal ministry. Does your faith make a difference in the world amongst other people, even amongst unbelievers? Does it make a difference?  Because you and I, all of us, we who gather under the roof of the Church today have to make that difference. We are judged are we not? - Not so much by what we say we are, but rather by what we might not mean to say, and ultimately what we do.
 
We might not think that the conditions are always favourable towards acting out our highest ideals, our love of God and loving our neighbour as we love ourselves. It’s not always easy. It’s not easy because we have to deal with what they call ‘the nitty gritty of life’, the nitty gritty of life, the adversity of it all and the unexpected problems that always seem to pop up. When things seem always to be going against us, when it's difficult to make headway. And when our intentions are misunderstood, and when we make mistakes as well. So, in line with this ‘strength from adversity’ idea I’ll mention an adage that no doubt you will have heard, an adage that has been described as ‘a proverbial phrase used to encourage optimism and a positive can-do attitude in the face of adversity and misfortune’. It reads like this:
 
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.
 
The explanation being that, ‘Lemons suggest sourness or difficulty in life; making lemonade is turning them into something positive or desirable.’
 
But being positive, or staying positive is one of these things we are always being told about. I mean to say, we would always prefer the company of someone who has a positive attitude rather than a negative one. Who wants to listen to someone who is always whinging? We know from experience that negative people are physically and spiritually sapping. At the same time, I think it’s not always possible to put a positive spin on a negative situation. Sometimes it’s best to say nothing. Sometimes we just have to accept things the way they are or just the way that things have panned out. Sometimes we just have to remember to live in faith and put our trust in God.
 
You’ll remember that story in the book of Genesis, Joseph and his coat of many colours who when he was about 17 years of age was stripped of his special coat, made for him by his father, and then sold into slavery by his jealous and hostile brothers. Later, he was resold as a slave again, in Egypt. How bad can that be, how bad can that be to be sold into slavery by your own kith and kin, by your own brothers? How rejecting and how painful that experience must have been! That’s not something that can be easily forgotten! But the man, Potiphar, who bought Joseph as a slave soon recognised that there was something about Joseph, something different and we know that because the Bible tells us that the Lord blessed Potiphar’s house for Joseph’s sake.
 
And then when Joseph found himself unjustly imprisoned even the keeper of the prison saw that there was something godly about Joseph, the Lord was with him and so the jailer treated him accordingly and treated him well. Eventually Joseph rose to become second only to Pharaoh in command in Egypt. Why should that be? Because the Lord was with him, it’s as simple as that. You know that none of us will probably ever rise to high office, but that’s not the point, is it? I mean even as a slave in prison, in what should have been another low point in his life, Joseph’s relationship with God still made a difference. Joseph didn’t achieve anything by making positive affirmations about changing lemons into lemonade or whatever the Hebrew or Egyptian equivalent would be. He achieved through the grace of God because God was with him.
 
And therefore, I say to you, that your ministry too is about your relationship with God, it’s about your prayer life, it’s not about trying to look good, or by pretending that bad things don’t happen, but it is about holding on to your faith and by allowing that inner light of yours to shine so that as Jesus said in his Sermon on the Mount letting your light shine before others so that they may see you and praise your Father who is in heaven. What we must do is to live only to the glory of God.
 
Well, it seems that we have come quite away from my initial comments, my restatement on the life of Paul. But there is a thread, a link from godliness to Paul to the life of the early Church and the life of the Church today. We want the life of our church today to shine in a dark world. But it has to begin at the level of the individual a personal quest for holiness a quest and for personal piety and in this quest we would do well to remember those words from the Psalms (139: 23-24)
 
Search me, O God, and know my heart;
test me and know my anxious thoughts.
Point out anything in me that offends you,
and lead me along the path of everlasting life.
 
In other words, we also have to be humble. As in the words of Max Ehrmann, we should not compare ourselves to others otherwise we could become vain or bitter, for there will always be greater and lesser people than ourselves. Sometimes I think, we may not, in our own busyness or in our own self-esteem, be consciously aware of the qualities and abilities of someone else or we may just overlook them. If I think about Paul after his experience of Jesus on the road to Damascus, I’d have to say that he would be in a pretty difficult situation, leaving his relatively high-ranking, zealous, Pharisaic position and then trying to join and get in with the people of the church he was trying to kill and destroy. He began his ministry pretty much as the loathed outsider, treated with suspicion, treated with contempt and very much seen as being at the bottom of the pile.If we want a glimpse of that church Paul was trying to destroy, we need only look at the text from Acts 4:32-36:
 
All the believers were united in heart and mind. And they felt that what they owned was not their own, so they shared everything they had. The apostles testified powerfully to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and God’s great blessing was upon them all. There were no needy people among them, because those who owned land or houses would sell them and bring the money to the apostles to give to those in need.

For instance, there was Joseph, the one the apostles nicknamed Barnabas (which means “Son of Encouragement”). He was from the tribe of Levi and came from the island of Cyprus. He sold a field he owned and brought the money to the apostles.

Now, I want to draw your attention to that name, Barnabas; he became Paul’s sponsor, so to speak. You will see that Barnabas is described as an apostle; he was definitely what we might today call a ‘member in good standing.’ On the other hand, Paul at the beginning wasn’t. But God had other plans, there was something about Paul that attracted Barnabas’s attention. The Lord was definitely with Paul. Barnabas in the beginning obviously carried more clout than Paul, and perhaps it never occurred to anyone, maybe least of all Barnabas, that Paul, in the end, would eclipse all the apostles in a way that would have been unimaginable in those very early years. True humility is a Christian virtue. Years later in his letter to his Church in Philippi, Paul expressed this sentiment in one sentence:

Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. (2:2-4)

 

Photograph: Peloponnisios, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons  

Jesus bids us shine

Jesus bids us shine with a clear pure light

Like a little candle burning in the night

He looks down from heaven to see us shine

You in your small corner and I in mine.

Yes. It’s a children’s Sunday school song, a song of encouragement. Potentially there exists a purity, a light that lies within us and can shine through the day-to-day darkness of our lives, shine through the darkness of this world. If we kindle or rekindle this light it can be a work in progress hopefully growing ever brighter through age, experience, and faith. You will remember those words of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount those words of letting your light shine before you, he said:

“You are the light of the world—like a city on a hilltop that cannot be hidden. No one lights a lamp and then puts it under a basket. Instead, a lamp is placed on a stand, where it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your good deeds shine out for all to see, so that everyone will praise your heavenly Father.

What we can we say about this light is that this light is an inner light, and when we are aware of this inner light, that divine spark as it sometimes known, we have to know, we have to recognise that this particular light needs to be nurtured and grown. This inner light which is really our connection with God. It’s a light that not only needs to be nurtured, fed and fanned into flame it has to be protected and sustained. So as in the words of that other song we sing, This Little Light of Mine, we sing ‘ain’t nobody gonna blow it out, I’m going to make it shine,’ In other words we are not going to be discouraged, we are not going to be taken off that path of righteousness, that path that Jesus lays before us when he said, ‘take up your cross and follow me’ in the words of John Bunyan who in the same spirit wrote those famous words: ‘There’s no discouragement will make him once relent his first avowed intent to be a pilgrim.’ The spiritual life is therefore not a passive thing not something we can simply take for granted with ease, but something we have to strive for.

When Jesus sought to encourage his listeners, he prefixed his stories his parables with that phrase: ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is like,’ or ‘The Kingdom of Heaven will be like.’ For example, the Kingdom of Heaven is like a mustards seed planted in a field’ (Matt 13:31), The Kingdom of Heaven is like the yeast a women used in baking bread (13:33). Then the Kingdom of Heaven will be like the ten bridesmaids who took their lamps to meet the bridegroom. (25:1)

The New Living Translation Bible gives us the Parable of the Three Servants (14-30) traditionally we’d probably remember it as the Parable of the Talents, but again, it begins with these words of Jesus saying, ‘The kingdom of Heaven will be like,’ or in this particular translation it reads as follows:

“Again, the Kingdom of Heaven can be illustrated by the story of a man going on a long trip. He called together his servants and entrusted his money to them while he was gone. He gave five bags of silver to one, two bags of silver to another, and one bag of silver to the last—dividing it in proportion to their abilities. He then left on his trip.

“The servant who received the five bags of silver began to invest the money and earned five more. The servant with two bags of silver also went to work and earned two more. But the servant who received the one bag of silver dug a hole in the ground and hid the master’s money.

“After a long time their master returned from his trip and called them to give an account of how they had used his money. The servant to whom he had entrusted the five bags of silver came forward with five more and said, ‘Master, you gave me five bags of silver to invest, and I have earned five more.’

“The master was full of praise. ‘Well done, my good and faithful servant. You have been faithful in handling this small amount, so now I will give you many more responsibilities. Let’s celebrate together!’

“The servant who had received the two bags of silver came forward and said, ‘Master, you gave me two bags of silver to invest, and I have earned two more.’

“The master said, ‘Well done, my good and faithful servant. You have been faithful in handling this small amount, so now I will give you many more responsibilities. Let’s celebrate together!’

“Then the servant with the one bag of silver came and said, ‘Master, I knew you were a harsh man, harvesting crops you didn’t plant and gathering crops you didn’t cultivate. I was afraid I would lose your money, so I hid it in the earth. Look, here is your money back.’

“But the master replied, ‘You wicked and lazy servant! If you knew I harvested crops I didn’t plant and gathered crops I didn’t cultivate, why didn’t you deposit my money in the bank? At least I could have gotten some interest on it.’ 

“Then he ordered, ‘Take the money from this servant, and give it to the one with the ten bags of silver. To those who use well what they are given, even more will be given, and they will have an abundance. But from those who do nothing, even what little they have will be taken away. Now throw this useless servant into outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’

Now we can read and understand the meaning of this story in more than one way. You can read it and take your own meaning from it. But we have to understand, the Parable of the Talents or the Parable of the Three Servants in its true meaning. We can do this quite easily if we take Jesus at his word because he says right at the beginning of this story that it’s a parable about the Kingdom of Heaven, he says:

“Again, the Kingdom of Heaven can be illustrated by the story of a man going on a long trip. He called together his servants and entrusted his money to them while he was gone.

So, when Jesus speaks of the kingdom of Heaven, I can assure you that in regard to this last parable mentioned about bags of silver, that that he wasn’t acting as a property guru when he told this story. He wasn’t some prosperity gospel preacher telling everyone that God wants to make us all rich and that what we in our prayers should demand wealth riches and worldly success from him because real faith isn’t about getting rich, real faith isn’t about getting in with the in-crowd and the pages of the Bible are not copied from the money pages of the Daily Mail. We should remember that only one of the twelve disciples who was concerned with money was Judas Iscariot. If getting rich and having lots of money was what Jesus wanted for us, he would have said so, but he didn’t. In fact, he said quite the opposite. We’ve only got read his Sermon on the Mount, words that are central to the Christian faith to know this so he said:

Don’t store up treasures here on earth, where moths can eat them, and thieves break in and steal. Store your treasures in heaven where moths and rust cannot destroy, and thieves do not break in and steal. Wherever your treasure is, there the desires of your heart will also be.

Wherever your treasure is, there the desires of your heart will also be. Just think about those words! A few weeks ago, I asked that question, ‘where is your joy? If you don’t know, where that joy can be found, may I suggest you might find it in that four-letter word, that four letter word that spells l-o-v-e, love. It’s printed on that plaque right outside our chapel doors, go and read it, ‘to love God and to love our neighbour as we love ourselves.’ Such poverty it is to live without love or to love inadequately, to let resentment and anger get in the way, to blame others for our own discontent; to blame God even. That’s what Adam did. Adam blamed God for giving him Eve, he said, ‘It was the woman you gave me who gave me the fruit, and I ate it.’ Eve who succumbed to temptation, in the garden of Eden. The third servant in the parable we have just heard was given a bag of silver. He played the blame game too. Never mind what the other two servants were given, because he too was given a precious gift all the same. You know, our God doesn’t work on the basis of fairness as we understand that concept in our own limited way. God’s ways are not our ways, if we don’t understand that we will never grow up, we’ll remain forever like children with that plaintiff whinge, ‘its not fair’.

That bag of silver, given to the third servant, that gift of trust should have been used, it should have been burnished, it should have been polished it should have been lovingly invested in. The third servant should have found joy in that gift. That gift that the master gives, the gift that God may give to each of us in varying proportion according to his judgement not ours. All we have to do is to realise the enormity of that gift, the privilege of life itself, that bag of silver, waiting to be discovered, to discover that inner light, our own inner light and power it with love and gratitude that is the Kingdom of Heaven, the Kingdom of Heaven here and now and in the promise of eternity. Remember those words of Jesus:

Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you. Luke 17:21

That is our treasure from God, and our task and our duty, our joy is not to turn our back on him not to bury him in the earth, not to blame him for our own neglect and wickedness and say, ‘Master, I knew you were a harsh man, harvesting crops you didn’t plant and gathering crops you didn’t cultivate’. No! not to do or say any of these things but rather to acknowledge the gifts we have been given in this our earthly existence, to acknowledge what privileges each of us has been afforded by the providence and the grace of God. We can love, we should love God, we must love God because he loved us first. (1 John 4:19)

 

 

Photograph: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sermon_on_the_Mount_by_I.Makarov.jpg

 

The Light Shines in the Darkness

Micah was a prophet of the eighth century BC who prophesied in Jerusalem against those who were ruthlessly exploiting their fellow citizens, he prophesied against the tyrannical ruling class, against the rapacious landlords and the injustices that took place in the courts. The prophet Micah, also spoke out against the priests in the holy city of Jerusalem, those priests who were motivated by personal gain, those priests who used their influence as men of God to support the highest bidder: those who would pay them the most to publicly preach what they wanted to hear. Micah prophesied that all of this wickedness would lead to God’s punishment, the destruction not only of Samaria in the north but also of Jerusalem itself, but in spite of all these dire warnings, Micah said that there would come a time; a new age when the ruined Jerusalem would be redeemed by God and that a saviour for Israel and the world would be born in Bethlehem. Through Micah God said:

But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah,

are only a small village among all the people of Judah.

Yet a ruler of Israel,

whose origins are in the distant past,

will come from you on my behalf. (5:2)

There is an interpretation of these words in that well known carol:

O little town of Bethlehem

How still we see thee lie

Above thy deep and dreamless sleep

The silent stars go by

Yet in thy dark streets shineth

The everlasting Light

The hopes and fears of all the years

Are met in thee tonight

I mention this because this carol is inspired by that particular text from Micah (5:2), his prophecy that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. Hundreds of years later, after Micah, Israel was under Roman rule. But the prophecy had not been forgotten and indeed there was an expectation that Christ would be born in Bethlehem, that the birth of the Messiah was imminent. Indeed, in the Gospel of Matthew we have that account of the Magi, the wise men seeking that child who was born the King of the Jews and we remember those chilling words of King Herod, by whom they were summoned. Herod said, “Go to Bethlehem and search carefully for the child. And when you find him, come back, and tell me so that I can go and worship him, too!”

Chilling words we know, because Herod was later to send soldiers in and around Bethlehem to kill all the male children who were aged two years and under. Herod’s vain and bloody attempt to forestall the prophecy. Herod’s attempt to undermine what had been divinely ordained, Herod’s attempt to undermine God. Herod failed to kill the infant Jesus as we know. Thus, Jesus Christ was born in Bethlehem, Jesus of the royal line of David, in the town of David, Israel’s greatest king.

 Mostly at Christmas we revisit the Christmas story, the two stories actually, the first one as you know, from the Gospel of Luke, the visit of the shepherds to the infant Jesus, lying as the angels said he would be, in a manger and then of course the later visit by the Magi who brought the gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Turning now to the Gospel of John which offers no nativity story. But rather with John, we are provided with a spiritual portrait of Jesus as the light, thus:

The light shines in the darkness,

and the darkness can never extinguish it.

God sent a man, John the Baptist, to tell about the light so that everyone might believe because of his testimony. John himself was not the light; he was simply a witness to tell about the light. The one who is the true light, who gives light to everyone, was coming into the world.

John in his gospel, his account of the life of Jesus, wanted his readers to know for sure that John the Baptist, although he had a great following and his own disciples, that John was not the Christ, but that he was only a witness to the life and future ministry of Jesus: the true light, Jesus, the light of the world. What John wants us to know, is that in that event he writes about, that night in Bethlehem; God was breaking into human history. Jesus the Son of God was born and was the light that the darkness could not overcome. This is John’s spiritual portrait of Jesus. Jesus was not just born simply as the fulfilment of a prophecy, not just born from the line of David the greatest king, but born of God, born of the Holy Spirit. Both man and God, flesh and spirit, this is what the Gospel of John tells us, this is who John tells us Jesus is.

John said that Christ came into the very world he created but the world didn’t recognise him. He said that Jesus came to his own people and even they rejected him. Let’s think about those dark narrow streets of Bethlehem, and another kind of darkness, the darkness of sin, the darkness of cruelty, the darkness of the crimes against humanity and all the things wrong with the world. The darkness of sin; everybody, even the worst sinners, want to have a good opinion of themselves, to be praised, to have nice things said about themselves. We all do. Nobody wants to be told what their faults are or even wants to face up to the fact that they are less than perfect, the truth is we are much worse than that! Far less than perfect. When you live in that kind of darkness, and are confronted by holiness it’s like coming out of a dark room into intense sunlight, when confronted by holiness, it’s too much to bear when that light of truth, that revealing light comes to shine on us. So, Christ came into the world, but the world didn’t recognize him. He came to his own people, and even they rejected him. Perhaps it was just too much for most people. Even so, John said:

But to all who believed him and accepted him, he gave the right to become children of God. They are reborn—not with a physical birth resulting from human passion or plan, but a birth that comes from God.

O holy Child of Bethlehem

Descend to us, we pray

Cast out our sin and enter in

Be born in us today

We hear the Christmas angels

The great glad tidings tell

O come to us, abide with us

Our Lord Emmanuel Amen

 

Photograph by Gustave Doré - Bible by Doré, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=298147

Advent

For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.

Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to order it, and to establish it with judgment and with justice from henceforth even forever. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this.  (Isaiah 9:6-7)  

Every year, during Advent and at Christmas we hear these words. They are words that echo down the centuries to us from ancient Jerusalem, words from the prophet uttered by God through Isaiah four hundred years before the birth of Jesus. But these words, Isaiah’s prophesy gave hope and comfort, all those centuries ago, to a people who were facing an uncertain future to say the least. To not put too fine a point on it, the people of Israel and Judah would eventually be conquered, enslaved, and taken away from their homeland.

And we too, like them, live in an ever more changing and uncertain world, like those people of the Old Testament, when we look out onto our own world as it is today, we should be able to see the parallels in terms of uncertainty, where food, security, peace and freedom is precarious, and like those people of the Old Testament and their king, we too can witness a loss of faith where we can see our society moving away from God. In fact, in Britain and in much of the West, God has been closed down in the hearts of minds of most people. Even our own King Charles III has abandoned the Christian God, the one true God. He prefers to talk about faiths instead of the faith.

Well, we recall that story of Ahaz, the King of Judah to whom Isaiah tried to minister too, that king who God wanted to bless with a sign, that king who tried the patience of Isaiah by refusing to accept that offer from God that the prophet conveyed to him leading Isaiah to say to him, ‘Must you exhaust the patience of my God as well? All right then, (said Isaiah to Ahaz) the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look! The virgin will conceive a child she will give birth to a son and will call him Immanuel (which means “God is with us”). The prophesy of that sign was made without the king’s request or even his consent, for we can be sure that he certainly didn’t want to hear it.

What we had here in God’s prophesy, his promised action was a twofold approach. In the first instance we have a king and therefore a nation under judgement, because the hearts and minds of this nation have been closed to God a nation and a king that God had but no choice to abandon, to its fate. God simply said, ‘Unless your faith is firm, I cannot make you stand firm.’ The twofold approach lies in the second part of the prophesy, that such abandonment would not be forever, that Jerusalem would not be abandoned forever because in spite of everything the prophesy gave hope and a promise in that the sign foretold of a child born of a virgin, a child born to be king who’s name would be Immanuel, the Son of God; meaning, ‘God with us.’ We must see that in spite of the seeming ever presence of evil and the darkness of despair, ultimately God is in control.

Our text this morning opened up with these words, ‘For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder.’ ‘The government shall be on his shoulder.’ Now, that’s the word we should be interested in ‘government’. Look how that word is prioritised in Isaiah’s prophesy: government, ‘the government shall be on his shoulders,’ government, it speaks to me of at least three components: leadership, administration and management, leadership being the most important. Someone once said words to the effect that people get the government they deserve. Perhaps they do, but things are never quite so simple as that. The role of government is essential in informing people’s decisions, but what can people do when they are made subject to saturation propaganda, as they are today and as they were in the last two years, made subject to lockdown when billions was spent on the psychological manipulation of the masses and those who objected came up against the repressive power of the state, the police and the army. This is always the response of corrupt leaders when dissenting voices speak power to truth. Even churches get locked down and church leaders get imprisoned as they did in Canada at the time as they continue to do in China. Under these conditions it’s not easy for those who remain faithful to God, to Biblical truth to take a stand and to hold firm.

In this time of Advent, in these weeks now the darkest months of the year, this season behoves us not merely to wait for the joy and celebration of Christmas and to reflect on the state of the world but more importantly - to reflect on ourselves, on our own spiritual lives, our prayer life, and our relationship with God. And the question is, or at least it should be not so much on how much we have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, because we know we have if we are honest with ourselves and that should always be a ready confession.

But perhaps the big question should be how much we desire to be with God, how much we desire to serve him, to truly worship and love him, to be witnesses to his glory and in spite of the wickedness of this world, the question should also be how much we would wish to remain resolute in faith. I am not using these words as a general exhortation, or as filler for this sermon, but to point out to you that today you have a choice to decide in case you haven’t already decided, to decide which side you want to be on. There is the easy option, just to go with the world and all its superficial values but faith rather requires us to hold out against it and hold out in the face of doom as that faithful minority have always done. Such people in the Bible were referred to as the faithful remnant and so Isaiah in spite of all the bad news for Israel and Judah said:

In that day the Lord will reach out his hand a second time
to bring back the remnant of his people—
those who remain in Assyria and northern Egypt;
in southern Egypt, Ethiopia, and Elam;
in Babylonia, Hamath, and all the distant coastlands.
He will raise a flag among the nations
and assemble the exiles of Israel.
He will gather the scattered people of Judah
from the ends of the earth. (11:11-12)

As Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt to the promised land so too will come a new leader and so we return to Isaiah’s prophesy:

For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.

Today, we might ask where the prophetic voice of the Church is today, where is the leadership, where is the voice that can bring hope? I think our experience might show us that whatever we might wish, our experience shows us that events are outside of our control and that political decisions, despite the lip service that is paid to democracy, at the highest levels, decisions are made without our being asked. And when others neither seem to care or to believe, when others despair, God calls us to be that faithful remnant in the world. Without faith there is no future, when the disciples asked Jesus when he the going to restore the kingdom to Israel:

He said to them: “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” (Acts 1 6:7-8).

Likewise in the Gospel of Matthew, we remember that Jesus told the parable of the wise and foolish virgins.

Keep your lamp trimmed and burning.

Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour in which the Son of Man is coming.  

 

 

 Photograph: The annunciation, University of Gladzor. Wikimedia Commons