Becoming Ourselves

 

“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.

He always keeps his word.”

©2000 Nathan Nettleton LaughingBird.net

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 4^th 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 60^th 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.

Remembrance Sunday 2024

 

Photo of Oradour-sur-Glane 

Today is Remembrance Sunday.
It’s not an easy day to preach on, although I have done so many times over the years.
But what do you say that doesn’t appear either a facile glorification of war, or a total dismissal of those who lost their lives, or were injured, or, worst of all, lost their faith during them?

Here in Britain we’ve been relatively lucky.
There hasn’t been a battle fought on British soil since Culloden in 1745.
We suffered the Blitz, of course, when many of our cities were badly damaged, or even destroyed –
you can see the scars to this day, even around Brixton.
So many streets of Edwardian terraces have a sudden more modern block in the middle.
But we haven’t had jackbooted soldiers marching about the place, or tanks running through our back gardens.

You know, the more I think of it, the more awful I feel, because I know that many of you had to endure, or your parents had to endure, exactly that!
British troops strutting about the place, issuing orders, interfering with your daily lives, generally behaving as if they owned the world!

It isn’t just the British, of course!
In fact, in 1944, British soldiers were warmly welcomed into Normandy by the local people, who had suffered for four long years of Nazi occupation.
But that, of course, was not the end of it –
much of the local area was destroyed by the troops fighting for dominance.

Today we are supposed to remember those who fought and died, those who fought and were wounded.
And indeed we must and should –
whatever side they fought on;
whether they enlisted voluntarily or were conscripted;
whether they thought their cause was right and just, or whether they went unwillingly in service to a regime they hated. Many of us will know of family members who were killed or wounded in one of the two great wars of the 20^th century, or one of the many lesser conflicts.
Perhaps you have family members involved in the current wars in Ukraine or Gaza or Sudan, or again, in many of the lesser conflicts around the world.
Today is the day we honour them and remember them.

But we also need to remember the civilians;
those whose houses or livelihoods were destroyed by enemy action;
those whose homes were requisitioned by the armed forces, whether their own, or the enemy;
those who lost loved ones;
those whose lives were totally disrupted by having to serve as nurses, or in factories, or down the mines.

This summer, we visited the village of Oradour-sur-Glane in France, which has been left as a memorial to the 641 people who were killed by SS troops there in June 1944.
You go into the village through the visitor centre, and past a wall with photographs of all those who were killed.
From old men down to small children.
Many of the photos were formal pictures, wedding shots, first Communion pictures, that sort of thing.
It really didn’t bear thinking about, and yet it was only one of many atrocities committed in that war.
Allies as well as Axis powers, I may say –
both sides did awful things, as happens in any war.

And even if you escaped being bombed, or shot, or anything, there were still awful things.
I’ve read my great-grandfather’s diaries.
His elder son was wounded so badly in 1916 that nobody thought he would live –
although he did, or I wouldn’t be here to tell the tale.
He only lived because the surgeon said he would remove his leg if he thought it would save his life, but it probably wouldn’t.
So he was left in the pile of soldiers who were going to die which, it is thought, is what saved him, as the cold protected him from shock.
Anyway,
my great-grandfather got permission from the War Office and went over to France to visit him.
And then it became clear that he would live, after all, so my great-grandfather came home again, only to hear that his other son had been killed on the Somme.
And, twenty years later or so, my grandparents had to suffer the agony of knowing their only son –
my father –
was on active service, as was a daughter’s fiancé.
Not only that, but their home had been requisitioned by the War Office and they had ten days to get out – and the troops that occupied it damaged it and destroyed many old family records.

I’m not saying this to elicit pity.
It happened, and we were very far from the only family it happened to.
Many had things far, far worse.

So where, then, is God in all this?
To quote St Paul:
“I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
But it’s difficult, isn’t it?
Many people, I know, lost their faith during and after the World Wars, feeling that if God could allow such horrors –
well….

But then, we were never told life would be a bed of roses.
In fact, rather the reverse.
In fact, Jesus explicitly said it wouldn’t be easy.
He said, “Blessed are the Peacemakers”
But he also said that there would always be wars, and rumours of wars.
We are told to make peace, even while we know we will be unsuccessful.

Many years ago now, Robert and I visited New York less than a fortnight after the World Trade Centre was destroyed.
We had planned our holiday months earlier, and decided not to allow terrorism and war to disrupt our lives more than was strictly necessary.
Besides, what safer time to go, just when security was at its height?

Anyway, the first Sunday we were there, we felt an urgent need to go to Church, to worship with God’s people.
Not knowing anything about churches in Brooklyn, we went to the one round the corner from where we were staying, which turned out to be a Lutheran Church.
And I’m so glad we went –
the people there were so pleased to know that people were still visiting from England.
They knew they faced a hard time coming to terms with what had happened, and that the future was very uncertain for all of us, yet they knew, too, that God was in it with them.

And God is in it with us, too.
Whatever happens.
God was there in the trenches with those young men in the first War;
God was there in the bombing and occupations of the Second War.
God was there in the Twin Towers that day, and in the hijacked planes, too.
God is there in Ukraine, and in Russia;
in Gaza and in Israel.

We, who call ourselves Christians, sometimes refuse to fight for our country,
believing that warfare and Christianity aren’t really compatible.
I am inclined to agree, but for one thing –
do we really want our armed forces to be places where God is not honoured?
That’s the big problem with Christian pacifism –
it leaves the armed forces very vulnerable.

But we must do all that we can to make peace.
I don’t know what the rights and wrongs of most current conflicts, but I do know that people are suffering.

They are suffering in Ukraine.
They are suffering in Gaza, and that conflict may yet escalate –
British troops have been sent to Cyprus to help if British subjects need to be evacuated from Lebanon.
At that British troops are training, with others, all across Europe in case the Ukraine conflicts escalate.

War causes suffering.
It is never noble, or glorious, and I’m not quite sure whether it is ever right.
Even if it is, it is horrible.
And inevitable.
And we Christians must do all we can to bring peace,
and we must wear our poppies
and remember, each year, those who had to suffer and die, and those who continue to suffer and die.

And above all, we must pray for our armed forces –
for any value of “our”, by the way;
I certainly don’t mean just British ones!
We need to pray, and to remember, with St Paul, that nothing, absolutely nothing, can separate us from the love of Christ.
Amen.