Getting Ready

This was a "sustainable sermon", the text of which can be found here.

Don't be Discouraged

Long, long ago, in a land far away from here, God’s people were feeling discouraged. For many years, all the people who mattered had been taken off to exile in Babylon, and now only a few of the poorest remaining, plus people from other tribes who had taken advantage of the empty city. Most of the city had been reduced to rubble, and, worst of all, the Temple had been burnt down.

But that had been some sixty years ago. Now, the Babylonians had been conquered in their turn. King Darius was on the throne of one of the greatest empires the world had ever known, the Achaemenid Empire, also known as the First Persian Empire. It had been founded by his grandfather, Cyrus the Great – you might remember Cyrus from when you’ve been reading Isaiah – and now spanned a huge swathe of territory, which, at its greatest extent included all of the territory of modern-day Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan, parts of Egypt and as far west as eastern Libya, Macedonia, the Black Sea coastal regions of Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, and Russia, all of Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, parts of the North Caucasus, and much of Central Asia. It truly was one of the largest empires ever!

Obviously one person couldn’t govern all that, so they basically devolved their government into provinces, ruled over by a provincial governor. The area we’re concerned with today was known as Yehud Medinata, which is basically just a translation of “Kingdom of Judah”, but, of course, it wasn’t a kingdom any more, just one more province of this huge empire.

King Cyrus had decreed that the Jews could, if they wished, return to Judah and rebuild their temple, and appointed a man named Zerubbabel, a grandson of the penultimate king of Judah, as governor. Zerubbabel went to Jerusalem with the new High Priest, a man called Joshua or Yeshua, it’s not quite clear which. Unfortunately, not all that many exiles went with them. The people had settled down in their new homes, as Jeremiah had told them to so long ago, and now were prospering and most reluctant to uproot themselves and their families. Most of them had been born in exile, and had no idea what Jerusalem was like, other than that it was some distant corner of the Empire. No thanks, they were very-nicely-thank-you where they were, they might come and visit when the city was rebuilt, but not just now.

That was the first setback. But those who went with Zerubbabel worked very hard, and gave very generously, and eventually the foundations of the Temple were laid. There was great rejoicing – you can read all about this in the book of Ezra, if you feel so minded – great rejoicing, although some of the older people were overcome with grief at the memory of the first Temple, which they could just, just remember.... and this? Not the same at all!

But many of the people who lived in the area – again, this is all in the book of Ezra – didn’t want to see the Temple rebuilt. Now, they knew as well as anybody that really, only the people authorised by King Cyrus could do any building work, and anyway, these people were not really Jewish. But they came to Zerubbabel and said, sweetly, “Oh, do let us help!” and when he said “No”, they did all they could to stop the building works – sabotage, frightening people, and writing incessantly to the King to ask him to make them stop work.

And for eighteen years, no more work was done on the Temple.

But then King Darius came to the throne and eventually the situation came to his notice. So he wrote to the other governors in the area saying that Cyrus had authorised the rebuilding of the Temple, and therefore: “I order you to stay away from Jerusalem. Don’t bother the workers. Don’t try to stop the work on this Temple of God. Let the Jewish governor and the Jewish leaders rebuild it. Let them rebuild God’s Temple in the same place it was in the past.

Now I give this order. You must do this for the Jewish leaders building God’s Temple: The cost of the building must be fully paid from the king’s treasury. The money will come from the taxes collected from the provinces in the area west of the Euphrates River. Do these things quickly, so the work will not stop. Give them anything they need. If they need young bulls, rams, or male lambs for sacrifices to the God of heaven, give these things to them. If the priests of Jerusalem ask for wheat, salt, wine, and oil, give these things to them every day without fail. Give them to the Jewish priests so that they may offer sacrifices that please the God of heaven. Give these things so that the priests may pray for me and my sons.

Also, I give this order: If anyone changes this order, a wooden beam must be pulled from their house and pushed through their body. Then their house must be destroyed until it is only a pile of rocks.

God put his name there in Jerusalem. May God defeat any king or other person who tries to change this order. If anyone tries to destroy this Temple in Jerusalem, may God destroy that person.

I, Darius, have ordered it. This order must be obeyed quickly and completely.”

Quite a turn-round. And then, enter the prophet Haggai. We don’t really know who he was, whether he was one of those who went off into exile, or one of those who stayed behind. Either way, he supported Zerubbabel and Yeshua, and he knows that God wants the Temple to be rebuilt. So, three weeks after the work began again, he receives this message from God, as we heard in our first reading: ‘How many of you people look at this Temple and try to compare it to the beautiful Temple that was destroyed? What do you think? Does this Temple seem like nothing when you compare it with the first Temple? But the Lord says, “Zerubbabel, don’t be discouraged!” And the Lord says, “Joshua son of Jehozadak, you are the high priest. Don’t be discouraged! And all you people who live in the land, don’t be discouraged! Continue this work, because I am with you.”’

“Don’t be discouraged”. That was God’s message to the people of Jerusalem at that time. The Temple was at that stage of construction that you wish you’d never started, when it gets worse before it gets better. You know what it’s like, when you set out to have a massive tidy-up at home, it always gets worse before it gets better, and half-way through you start to wish you hadn’t bothered! “Don’t be discouraged.”

It’s a good message for us just now, isn’t it? 2016 has been an appalling year so far – not just the celebrity deaths, sad though they are. But the Brexit referendum, and the upsurge in racism and intolerance we’ve seen since then, the awful situation in Calais, the sword of Damocles hanging over us in the shape of the US elections this coming week.... it’s been a dreadful year so far and it’s not over yet.

But I do truly believe that God says to us “Don’t be discouraged!” The Christians in Thessalonica appear to have been discouraged, too, when St Paul wrote to them. They had received false teaching, saying that Christ had already returned, and they thought they had missed out. Which they hadn’t. St Paul points out that there has to be tribulation first, and this hadn’t happened at the time of writing, so Jesus can’t possibly have returned yet. And when he does, they’ll all know all about it!

And he goes on to tell them not to be discouraged, either: “Brothers and sisters, you are people the Lord loves. And we always thank God for you. That’s what we should do, because God chose you to be some of the first people to be saved. You are saved by the Spirit making you holy and by your faith in the truth. God chose you to have that salvation. He chose you by using the Good News that we told you. You were chosen so that you can share in the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ. So, brothers and sisters, stand strong and continue to believe the teachings we gave you when we were there and by letter.”

“Brothers and sisters, you are the people the Lord loves.” And that’s just as true for us as it was for the people of Thessalonica. We, too, are saved by the Spirit making us holy, and by our faith in the truth, and God chose us to have that salvation.

So, in the face of all the awful things happening around us, let’s not be discouraged! We are the people the Lord loves, and we will continue to share that love with others in His name, no matter how many awful things happen. No matter what the result of the American election. No matter how badly our quality of life may deteriorate when we leave the EU. If we leave – I still find it hard to believe that anything so disastrous could possibly happen.

We are the people the Lord loves. We will not allow ourselves to be discouraged. Amen!

Settle down!

This sermon was preached at a Service at which the Sea Scouts paraded



It’s not very often I open my Bible – or, these days, open a Bible app on my phone or tablet – and come across a passage I’ve never even heard of before, but, do you know, that’s exactly what happened when I read the Old Testament reading for today, from the prophet Jeremiah. I thought I had read all the book of Jeremiah, but this bit obviously escaped me!

Jeremiah writes a letter to the people of Israel, who have been taken into captivity in Babylonia, and this is what he says: “The Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those people whom he allowed Nebuchadnezzar to take away as prisoners from Jerusalem to Babylonia:  ‘Build houses and settle down. Plant gardens and eat what you grow in them. Marry and have children. Then let your children get married, so that they also may have children. You must increase in numbers and not decrease.  Work for the good of the cities where I have made you go as prisoners. Pray to me on their behalf, because if they are prosperous, you will be prosperous too.’”

Well, what’s this all about, then? What had happened to the people of Israel, and why did God want them to settle down?

Well, a few centuries earlier, the kingdom of Israel had been divided into two, with the northern kingdom being larger, and the southern kingdom, Judah, being smaller. But the Middle East is, was, and probably always will be a very unsettled area, and back in the day, the strongest nation in the region was called Assyria. And eventually the Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom, known as Israel, and carted its leaders off into exile.

The southern kingdom, Judah, struggled along for another couple of centuries, being more or less allied with Assyria. Eventually Assyria fell in its turn, and Babylonia became a power in the region. King Nebuchadnezzar was able to conquer the kingdom of Judah, and he carried its people off into captivity. Not everybody went, of course, either time, but certainly they would have taken the leaders and influential people, and their families and extended families, and what was left behind were the ordinary people. We do know that some of the people who went to Babylon had great influence there – Daniel, for instance, or Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. You can read their stories in the Book of Daniel.

Anyway, the point was Jeremiah lived around that time, and he was one of those left behind. There seems to have been a certain amount of coming and going. Anyway, Jeremiah’s letter said what he believed God was asking him to say to the people: Settle down in your new cities, raise your families, and, above all, pray for your new homes and your new rulers. The people were obviously going to be away for some years, and it made sense to make proper homes for themselves rather than hope – as some of the crowd-pleasers kept telling them – that they would be able to go back home next week.

Well, that’s all very well, and all very interesting, but what does it have to do with us today? These people lived long ago in history, and there aren’t even many sources to confirm what really happened!

Well, that letter might have been written about two and a half thousand years ago, but it’s still relevant today. We are not exiles in a strange land – but goodness, more people are today than at any time in human history! Millions of people, quite literally, have had to leave their homes and flee to safety; many now have to live in refugee camps, which I believe is all very well in the summer, but would you like to have to live in a wet and muddy tent as winter draws on? No, me neither! Others have been able to get to safety in Europe, and many here, to the United Kingdom. Some of them set out to cross the sea in the kind of rickety little boats that would give your leaders a heart attack – and some, sadly, didn’t make it. And many, if not all, of those who come will do just exactly as Jeremiah told his people, all those years ago. They will settle down, get jobs, and work for the good of their new country. And if they are praying people – and many of them are Muslim, so they will be – they will be praying for their new country, and their new friends, too.

And if they are doing it, how much more should we be doing it? We are told to pray for our city and our homes, and that includes our friends.

Prayer is an odd sort of activity, isn’t it? Especially what’s called intercessory prayer, which is when we ask God for other people, and for ourselves. You would think God would know people’s needs before they ask – and of course, God does! But we are told to pray; it seems in the Bible that it’s absolutely indispensable. Jesus assumed that people prayed; you might remember that he said “When you pray....” rather than “if”. In a few minutes, when we have our intercessory prayer, I’ll be reading out a list of names of people who’ve asked the church to pray for them. Yet God already knows their needs. And it’s the same if you see on social media that a friend is poorly or something, and you stop what you’re doing and say a little prayer for them, even something like, “Dear God, please look after them and help them feel better.” God already knew they didn’t feel great....

I don’t know why we are told to pray, but we are. It seems as if prayer creates a condition, an energy if you like, that enables God to work. I do know that when we pray, things change. We change. The more we pray, I think, the closer we come to God, and the more we are enabled to see things from God’s point of view. We aren’t telling God what to do, although it might start off feeling like that; we are barely even asking, other than to say here’s this person with this need, can you do something about it? And sometimes God says, yes, here’s this person with this need, what are *you* going to do about it?

We can’t, of course, make someone feel better if they’re not well, but we can text them and say we’re thinking of them; if new children come to your school who don’t yet speak much English, you can befriend them, show them what they need to know – where the toilets are, for instance, or where to go when it’s lunchtime. If someone’s being bullied, you can help them report it, or just stay with them so the bullies can’t get at them. That sort of thing. And the grown-ups will have their equivalents, too.

But we need to pray, we need to bring our concerns to God. Jeremiah told his people to settle down, and to work and pray for their community.­ They needed to become part of their new communities, even though they hoped they’d be able to go home soon. In fact, it was about fifty years before they could go home – that’s another amazing story in the Bible, and you can read all about it in the books called Ezra and Nehemiah. But they did go home, although the Jewish community also ended up scattered throughout the world.

We need to pray for our community, whether large or small – our family, our schools or workplaces, our London boroughs, London in general – the Mayor and our elected representatives.... all of those. And for our government, for Mrs May and her Cabinet. God said to the people of Judah in exile: “Work for the good of the cities where I have made you go as prisoners. Pray to me on their behalf, because if they are prosperous, you will be prosperous too.” Amen.

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Great Expectations

For the first time since I started using my Kindle Fire to record my sermons, the recording has failed me!  Only the first 4 minutes recorded, one of which had to be edited out when I dropped the microphone and couldn't reattach it to my t-shirt.

The sermon was a "sustainable sermon", and you can find the text here.