“So, friends, we can now –
without hesitation –
walk
right up to God, into “the Holy Place.”
Jesus has cleared
the way by the blood of his sacrifice, acting as our priest before
God.
The “curtain” into God’s presence is his body.
So
let’s do it –
full of belief, confident that we’re
presentable inside and out.
Let’s keep a firm grip on the
promises that keep us going.
That's
a modern translation of part of our first reading today,
from
the letter to the Hebrews.
I don't know how much you know about
this letter;
it's thought to date from around the year 63 or 64
AD,
before the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed
and
before the Eucharist became a widespread form of Christian
worship.
Nobody knows who wrote it, either;
arguments about
its authorship go back to at least the 4th century
AD!
Probably one of Paul's pupils, but nobody actually knows
who.
The Temple in Jerusalem is still standing when this
letter is written.
The author uses it to contrast what used to
be –
in the olden days only the High Priest could go into
God's presence,
and he had to take blood with him to atone for
the people's sins and his own.
Nowadays, it is only Christ, the
great High Priest, who can go into God's presence –
but he can
and does take us with him.
We can go with Jesus into the very
presence of God himself, confidently,
just like you'd walk into
your own front room.
The thing is, of course, that it's
all because of what Jesus has done for us.
We can't go into
God's presence, as the prayer says,
“trusting in our own
righteousness”.
If we are to go in with any degree of
confidence,
it is because of what Jesus has done for us,
arguably whether or not we recognise this.
The
author of the Letter to the Hebrews tells us that Christ takes us in
there in his own body.
I don't know about you, but for me that
rather helps clarify what St Paul said about our being part of the
Body of Christ –
and in that Body, we can go into God's
presence.
There is nothing we can do to make it any easier
or any more difficult;
it is all down to Jesus.
We are made
right with God by what Jesus has done, end of.
It isn't about
whether we have confessed our sins –
although I hope we have
faced up to where we have gone wrong.
It isn't about whether we
have asked Jesus to be our Saviour and our Lord –
although I
very much hope we have done so.
Neither of those things will
save us.
Only God will save us –
and as soon as we reach
out a tentative finger to him,
and sometimes even before, he is
there,
reassuring us that we are loved,
we are saved,
we are forgiven.
The trouble is, all too often we
focus on sin as though that were what Christianity were all about.
We
even tend to think the Good News goes
“You are a sinner and
God will condemn you to hell unless you believe the right things
about him.”
Erm, no.
Just no.
We do things
like that.
We are quick to condemn, especially people in public
life.
Just read any newspaper, any day.
Look how people’s
careers can be destroyed by the revelation of an injudicious tweet
they sent when they were a teenager!
We are slow to forgive –
we
don't believe people can change, we keep on bringing up episodes in
the lives of our nearest and dearest that might have happened a
quarter of a century ago!
But God is not like that.
God
is love.
God is salvation.
We don't have to do anything,
only God can save us.
Yes, following Jesus is not an easy
option, we know that.
If we are Jesus' person, we are Jesus'
person in every part of our lives –
it isn't just something we
do here in Church on Sundays.
It affects who we are when we are
at work,
or at home with our families,
or going to the
supermarket.
It affects what we choose to do with our free time,
who we choose to spend it with –
not, I hope,
exclusively people who think the same way as we do.
You
see, the thing is, you never know exactly what God's going to do.
An
acquaintance of mine is a fairly well-known author whose books have
been published both here and in the USA.
She is a few months
older than I am, and some years ago she announced on
her blog
that she had met Jesus and was now a Christian.
You don't really
expect people to become Christians just before their 60th
birthday, but it happened to her.
God reached out to her and, as
she put it, everything changed.
Yet she was still
herself.
Another
fairly well-known author –
well, well-known to me, anyway,
but if you don't read science fiction or fantasy you'll not
have heard of either of these lovely women –
confirmed in the
comments on this blog that she, too, is a believer,
although
you couldn't have actually read some of her books and not realised
that.
And one of her comments read, in part:
“I'm still
who I was, probably more so. . . . I was scared of the other –
of
becoming the cookie fresh from the cutter, just like every other
cookie.
But individuality and diversity appears to be built in
to the design concept.”
Individuality and diversity
appear to be built into the design concept.
Yes.
God has
created and designed each one of us to be uniquely ourselves.
When
we are told that we will become more Christ-like as we go on with
Jesus,
it doesn't mean we'll all grow to resemble a
first-century Jewish carpenter!
We will, in fact, become more
and more ourselves, more and more who we were intended to
be.
Salvation comes from God, through nothing you or I can
do, although we are, of course, at liberty to say “No thank
you!”
But if we say “Yes please”, as I suspect most of us
here have said, at one time or another, then everything changes.
I've
spoken before, although not, I think here, about the consequences of
healing.
For make no mistake, my friends, when God touches our
lives, things change.
Sometimes it is our behaviour which
changes –
perhaps we used to get drunk, but now we find
ourselves switching to soft drinks after a couple of glasses.
Perhaps
we used to gamble,
but suddenly realise we haven't so much as
bought a Lottery ticket for weeks, never mind visiting a
bookie!
Perhaps we used to be less than scrupulous about what
belongs to us, and what belongs to our employer,
but now we
find ourselves asking permission to use an office envelope.
Very
often these sorts of changes happen without our even noticing them.
Others take more struggle –
sometimes it is many years before
we can finally let go of an addiction, or a bad habit or
a wrong attitude.
But
as I've said before, the more open we are to God,
the more we
can allow God to change us.
Sometimes, of course, we cling on to
the familiar bad habits,
as we don't know how to replace them
with healthier ways of acting and thinking, and that's scary.
But
the point is, when God touches our lives, things change.
They
changed for my friend, I know they changed for me,
and they
will have changed for many of you, if not all of you, too.
So
where does this leave our reading?
Jesus, in our gospel reading,
reminded us that we mustn't go running this way and that way,
convinced of doomsday scenarios every time we hear a news
bulletin.
Yes, the world as we know it is going to end some day
–
it wasn't built to be permanent, just ask the dinosaurs!
We
don't know how and why it will end;
in my youth, I would have
assumed it would end in a nuclear war that would destroy all living
things.
These days that is, perhaps,
less
probable,
but what about runaway global warming or an asteroid
strike?
Or just simply running out of fossil fuels and unable to
replace them?
And
who knows what a second Trump presidency will do to the United
States, never mind to the rest of the world?
The
answer is that we simply don't know.
Unlike the first
Christians,
we don't really expect Jesus to return any minute
now –
although I suppose that is possible.
We do,
however, accept and appreciate that this world is finite and that one
day humanity will no longer exist here.
And we mustn't be
scared all the time, either.
Yes, our news headlines can be
very scary –
but isn't God greater than terrorists?
Isn't
God greater than Russia,
or Hamas, or Israel, or even the USA?
And we musn't get bogged down in details, either.
A
few years ago there was
such a silly row in the USA this week because Starbucks hadn't
put Christmas symbols –
not Christian ones, but snowflakes
and so on –
on their red cups that
year.
Too silly – the God we worship is so very much bigger
than whether or not a corporation has decorations on its cups.
There are many good reasons not to go to Starbucks, but that
really isn't one of them!
And at
the moment there are huge rows going on in the Church of England
about reaction to historical abuse scandals, and failures in
safeguarding. People are calling for the Archbishop of Canterbury to
resign, as indeed he apparently considered doing, but another cleric
has
pointed out
that it’s not a scalp that is needed, but a complete change in
safeguarding culture.
Methodists have been working very hard on
safeguarding –
just last week I did a course, as all local
preachers and others in positions of responsibility must do, about
safeguarding and how
to ensure vulnerable people are not abused or exploited.
And
that is a very important thing, and to know who to contact if you
become aware of such things going on, and see what systems and so on
need to be implemented to make it more difficult for people to abuse
or exploit others.
It is, of course, vital to our life on
earth to be aware of such things. But when
we are also taught that we will be raised from death and go on
Somewhere Else, it
almost pales into insignificance.
We
don't know what that Somewhere Else will be like,
nor who we'll
be when we get there –
although I imagine we'll still be
recognisably ourselves.
But we do know that Jesus will be there
with us,
and that we will see Him face to face.
But
eternal life isn't just pie in the sky when you die, as it is so
often caricatured.
If we are Christians, we have eternal life
here and now;
so often, it's living it that's the problem, as
I expect some of the examples I’ve given have shown.
So
I'm going to conclude with part of the quote from Hebrews with which
I began:
“Jesus has cleared the way by the blood of his
sacrifice,
acting as our priest before God.
The “curtain”
into God’s presence is his body.
So let’s do
it –
full of belief, confident that we’re presentable inside
and out.”
Let's do it!
Amen.