For God so loved the World

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son,

that whoever believes in him shall not perish

but have eternal life.

For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world,

but to save the world through him.”

They are such familiar words, aren't they?

The absolute basis of our faith –

they are pretty much the heart of what it means to be a Christian.

But, of course, like all of these things,

it's really hard to unpack what it originally meant.

We all have our own interpretation, of course, and who's to say we're wrong?

But let's look at the whole passage, first of all,

before trying to look more closely at our text, since it's a well-known fact that “a text without a context is a pretext!”

Nicodemus seems to have been an older man,

prominent among the Jews,

a Pharisee.

Maybe the local equivalent of the Archbishop of Canterbury, or of Westminster.

Certainly well-known in his community,

and very much looked up to as a religious leader.

But, for him, something was missing.

He was beginning to realise, perhaps, that he was coming to the end of his life here on earth,

and wondering what his religion had to say about this.

And now there is this new young teacher going the rounds,

doing miracles,

really seems to be from God.

Nicodemus begs a very private interview.

He can't be seen to be too closely associated with Jesus,

although he does, in fact, stand up for him in the Sanhedrin,

and helps Joseph of Arimathea prepare his body for burial.

But at this stage he doesn't want to be seen to be too interested in what might, after all, prove to be another cult.

But it wasn't.

Jesus tells him that he doesn't just need to be physically alive,

he needs to be spiritually alive, too.

He must be born from above, born anew, born again –

the word used translates as all those things.

And Nicodemus doesn't understand.

Perhaps he's not really used to thinking in spiritual terms,

or perhaps it totally doesn't make sense to him.

So he blanks it.

“How can you enter your mother's womb a second time?”

But Jesus explains that this second birth is of the Spirit.

We need to be born spiritually, to recognise that we are more than just animals, to allow God's spirit to work in us.

And Nicodemus says, “Yes, well, how do you do this?”

and the answer, of course, is through Jesus.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son,

that whoever believes in him shall not perish

but have eternal life.”

---oo0oo---

You note, of course, that this is all God's idea!

It's not something we humans can do.

We may or may not have our own interpretation of the phrase “Born again”, but I think we all agree that it's something that God does,

not some­thing that we do.

Had God not sent his only Son, Jesus,

then it would not be an option for us.

But Jesus came, we are told, out of God's love for us.

And our response must be one of believing.

Again, people differ, sometimes, as to what degree of belief actually “counts”, whether it is a mild intellectual assent,

or a total commitment to the exclusion of anything else,

or somewhere in between.

For some of us, “being a Christian” is kind of like being pregnant –

you either are or aren't, there's no two ways about it.

Others see it as a journey, a process,

starting, perhaps with a tiny step of faith,

an intellectual assent to the fact that God could exist,

that Jesus perhaps is God's son, and so on.

And gradually growing more and more into our faith,

going through various stages,

and gradually, perhaps over many years,

developing a mature and wonderful faith,

and becoming the sort of Christian we all look up to and admire!

It's a bit of both, isn't it.

Many of us will look back to a moment when we first said “Yes” to Jesus –

perhaps we even remember the date and the time!

For me, it was the tenth or the seventeenth of October, 1971,

I can't remember exactly which.

Sheesh, was it really that long ago – help!

But loads of people don't have a datable conversion –

it happened so gradually that they simply can't point to a date and say

“before then I wasn't a Christian;

after it I was.”

But even those of us who did have a definite date which they remember as their conversion, it didn't happen in a vacuum.

It might have felt, at the time, like a total bolt from the blue,

something totally unexpected,

but when you look back, it probably wasn't.

Let’s take John Wesley as an example.

We remember the date of his conversion, on 24 May.

Remember what he wrote:

“In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street,

where one was reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans.

About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ,

I felt my heart strangely warmed.

I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation;

and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”

A not untypical conversion experience, perhaps.

But Wesley was already a minister of the Church.

He had been on missionary trips in the USA,

and he had been searching and searching for the faith that he knew existed, but that he himself couldn’t find.

One of his counsellors –

I forget who, offhand –

had told him to “preach faith until you have it,

and then you will preach it because you can’t help it”.

So for John Wesley, that experience on Aldersgate Street was very much a part of his Christian journey.

Would anybody really say that before it he was not a Christian?

I don’t think I would, and I’m not sure that Wesley himself did, either!

And another thing to notice is that although Wesley was searching and searching for the personal faith he knew was a reality for so many,

it was, in the end, God who gave him that faith.

Wesley didn’t manufacture it himself.

He wasn’t working himself up at an emotional revival meeting.

He was just sitting listening to a sermon on the Epistle to the Romans!

And God acted.

I’ve seen that happen, too.

I remember once, many years ago, a group of us were sitting in a café,

singing Christian songs,

when quite suddenly the words we were singing became real to one of the group in a totally new and different way.

I’ve long since lost touch with that person,

and have no idea whether she still follows Jesus or not,

but I will not forget how it suddenly became totally real to her.

But that young woman had been coming to Church,

and joining in our fellowship, for several weeks.

I can’t remember whether she’d been a churchgoer at home, or university, or whatever –

this was in Paris, and a great many young people came to the church to meet other English people, and met Jesus when they were at it!

I did, myself, for that matter!

And for many years I assumed that I had not been a Christian before I went to that church,

and heard someone preach on “Behold, I stand at the door and knock”....

but, when I looked back, I realised that in fact,

I had experienced a call to preach some years earlier than that,

when I was about fifteen!

And I had been a regular attender at Church –

usually because I had to, because it was required when I was at school,

but also at the voluntary mid-week Communion services the school held occasionally, where I acted as a server.

I know my Confirmation was very real and special to me, too.

I reckon that what happened that October evening was a huge milepost on my Christian journey,

but it was a milepost on the road, not the start of that journey!

---oo0oo---

Of course, the start of a journey to faith is just that, a start.

Like Abraham and Sarah, from our first reading, we have to carry on.

Jesus told Nicodemus that we need to be born from anew,

but it’s always so sad when people have a baby who simply doesn’t develop and grow, but remains an infant throughout life.

As Christians, we need to be open to allowing God to grow and change us,

to become the people he created us to be,

the people he designed us to be.

Abraham was told to get up and move to the land God would show him,

and God would bless him abundantly,

in a way that perhaps would not have been possible had Abraham remained in Ur.

And we know how Abraham believed God,

and he and his brother Lot got up and travelled,

leaving a very comfortable and civilised life in Ur

to become nomads, travellers.

And were blessed enormously by God,

despite all sorts of trials and tribulations,

times when they lacked faith,

times when they sinned,

all sorts of awfulnesses.

But there again, it was God’s idea.

Abraham didn’t just suddenly decide that he’d abandon his settled life and go off into the desert in the hope that God would bless him for doing so.

God told Abraham to go, and that if he went, he would be made great.

---oo0oo---

Sometimes, we who are Christians forget that it’s all God’s idea.

We act as though our relationship with God depended totally on us.

It doesn’t.

It depends far more on God.

“For God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world,

but to save the world through him.”

God has far more invested in the relationship than we do,

no matter how committed we are.

God loves us far more than we love him!

And God’s love is constant, unremitting, and never, ever grows cold.

We can be very variable in our faith, but God never changes.

There are times when we move away from God –

and you can practically see the Good Shepherd donning Barbour and wellies to go off in search of us!

Of course, there are those people who say “No” to God.

As C S Lewis once said, if people go on refusing to say “Thy will be done”, eventually God will, with great sadness, say “All right, have it your own way! Thy will be done!”

But that, I think, does not apply to any of us here.

We have said “Yes” to Jesus, we have said, like Martha, “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the son of God, who has come into this world.”

And we know, deep in our hearts, that “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son,

that whoever believes in him shall not perish

but have eternal life.

For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world,

but to save the world through him.”

Thanks be to God.

Listen to Him

The problem with having two thousand years of Christian history behind us is that we don't always appreciate the significance of the stories about Jesus that we hear so regularly each year.

I'm thinking particularly of this story of the Transfiguration,

because it is so easy for it to slide over our heads and mean nothing to us.
It's not like Christmas, when we celebrate God's having come to earth as a human baby.
It's not like Easter,

when we celebrate Jesus' death and resurrection,

with their obvious consequences for us today.
It's not even like the Ascension,

when we celebrate Jesus' going to glory,

so that the Holy Spirit can be sent upon us.

Does this story actually mean anything at all to us today?

Jesus had gone up the mountain,

with his three closest friends,

Peter, James and John.
And suddenly something happened to him,

and he looked quite different,

was dressed in white,

and was chatting to two figures who, we are told,

were Moses and Elijah.
What I am not at all sure is how they knew they were Moses and Elijah –

it's not, after all, very probable that they had their names printed on their T-shirts.
I suppose either they were heard to introduce themselves,

or Jesus knew who they were and said "Hullo Moses, hullo Elijah!"

Anyway, at first the three friends think they are dreaming,

because they were half-asleep anyway,

but then they realise they aren't.
And Peter, getting a bit over-excited,

as he tended to in those days, babbles on about building shelters for the three men, and so on and so forth.
He didn't really, we are told, know what he was saying;

he was just so excited that he wanted to prolong the moment,

go on being there,

keep it going.

Perhaps, too, he felt the need to say something to reassure himself that he was still there.

And then the cloud comes down;

they can't see a thing,

not Moses,

nor Elijah,

nor nothing.
And they are scared, and cold,

the way you are up a mountain when the clouds come down.
And then, the voice that comes out of the cloud:

“This is my own dear Son, with whom I am pleased—listen to him!”

And they couldn't see Moses or Elijah any more, only Jesus.

“This is my own dear Son, with whom I am pleased—listen to him!”

It wasn't Moses they were to listen to,

and it wasn't Elijah.
It was Jesus.
Now, for us, that makes a great deal of sense;

we are quite accustomed to knowing that Jesus is far greater than Elijah or Moses.
But for Peter, James and John –

and, perhaps, for Jesus Himself –

it was far otherwise.
They had grown up being taught that Moses and Elijah were the greatest historical figures there were.
Moses, in their hagiography, represented the Law,

the very foundation of their relationship with God.
And Elijah represented the prophets,

those men and women of old who had walked with God and who had told forth God's message to the world,

whether or not the world would listen.
There really could be no people greater than Moses or Elijah.
No wonder they didn't say anything to anybody until many years later, when it became clearer exactly Who Jesus is.

Because they'd been told not to listen to Moses,

not to listen to Elijah,

but to listen to Jesus.

Well, that's all very well, but we know that.
It doesn't mean anything to us today,

so why do we remember it?

Well, sometimes I actually wonder whether we do remember to listen only to Jesus.
It's not that we don't mean to, but we get distracted.
And I think sometimes we find ourselves listening to Moses, or to Elijah.

If Moses represents the Law, then I think we listen to Moses a great deal more than we mean to!

We know, in our heads, that what matters isn't how well we keep the various rules and regulations we impose upon ourselves,

but whether we are walking with Jesus.
But sometimes we act as though what we do matters more!

As if whether or not we pray, or how we do it, was more important.
As if the various restrictions we impose on ourselves were more important.
As if whether or not we read the Bible every day, were more important.
But what really matters is our walk with Jesus.
If we are walking with Jesus, then we are His people,

and that fact matters far more than the various ways we may try to express that walk.

And sometimes –

I am a bit hesitant to say this, in fear you misunderstand me –

sometimes we even put the Bible in place of Jesus.
It's an easy mistake to make, because after all,

we do sometimes call the Bible the Word of God.
But it's actually clear from the Bible that Jesus is the Word of God.
And the Bible is, if anything, words about the Word.
But it's from the Bible that we learn about Jesus,

it's from the Bible that we learn who God is,

and what sort of people we will become when we become His people.
And it's not too surprising if, sometimes, we get confused.
I have heard people say

"Oh, I do love the Bible"

with the kind of fervour you would expect them to use only of Jesus.
I always want to say,

"but surely it's Jesus who you worship, not the Bible!

Surely it is Jesus you are following, in that sense."

Of course, we do follow the Bible,

we would be very silly if we didn't.
If we didn't read our Bibles and learn from them,

we wouldn't know how to follow Jesus, and we'd go off on all sorts of tangents.
And of course, even if we do read our Bibles and learn from them, we can still go off at all sorts of tangents,

and get things tragically wrong.

Look at the Crusades –

hundreds of years ago, they genuinely believed that fighting and killing Moslems was what God wanted them to do;

they seem to have taken some of the bloodthirstier parts of the Old Testament a bit literally!

Er – has anything changed much? People do seem to want to worship a bloodthirsty God, a God who is judgemental and harsh, who wants nothing more than to condemn people,

and looks for any excuse to do so,

And, sadly, they apt to find him.

You only have to look at some of the stuff coming out of the USA these days, the Biblical literalism that demands that men have control of women’s bodies, that believes it is all right to hate people of certain ethnicities,

or certain sexualities.

And similarly, if we come to it looking for a God who is loving and kind,

wanting nothing more than not to condemn people

and looking for any excuse not to do so, then that is what we are apt to find!

So while the Bible is terribly important,

we have to be careful with it.
We can't rely on the Bible without knowing that we are to rely on the One to whom the Bible points.
The Bible alone, Moses alone, cannot save us.
"This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!"

And if Moses alone cannot save us, how much less can Elijah!

Elijah was on that mountain-top representing the prophets.
We are to listen, we are told, to Jesus.

That doesn't mean that prophets are not important to us.
Prophets, of course, are those people who speak forth God's word, whether as preachers –

although not all preachers are prophetic, many are –

or whether more informally,

in the sort of setting where the so-called charismata are used.
Of course if someone is telling you what he or she believes God is saying to the assembled company, that is very important,

and you would do well to listen.
But you also have to weigh it up,

to make sure that this is what God is really saying.
They do say, don't they, that one of the marks of a cult is when the leader's words are given an importance equal to, or greater than, the Bible.
Which would not, I suspect, happen if the leader's followers weren't prepared to let it!

I don't know about anybody else,

but when I come to preach, I have to remember two things.
The first is that all I have is words.
They may be very good words, or I may have written a load of –

er –

round objects,

but all they are is words.
And unless God takes those words and does something with them, we might as well all go home!

My job is to provide the words;

God's job is to do the rest.

The other thing I try to remember when I come to preach is a story I read when I was training.
Two men were coming out of church on a morning when the preacher had been more than usually dull,

and the first man had not only been bored, but had had a severe case of chapel-bottom!

And he said to his friend,

"You know, there are times I really don't know why I bother!

I have heard a sermon nearly every Sunday for the past 40 years, they have mostly been very dull, and I can hardly remember any of them!"

To which his friend, who was somewhat older, replied,

"Well yes.
I've been married for 40 years,

and my wife has cooked me dinner almost every night of those years.
I can't remember many of them, either –

but where would I be today without them?"

In other words, our sermons are to be daily bread.
They aren't supposed to last a life-time, and be life-changing –

if they are to be, that's God's job, again, not ours.

"Listen to Him".
It is Jesus that matters, not the preachers and prophets of our age.
They are at best conductors –

they bring us to Jesus.
They are not Jesus, and we are very silly if we trust them more than Him.
They cannot save us;

only Jesus can do that.

It is not Moses we must listen to,

Moses who represents the Law, or the Scriptures.
It is not Elijah,

Elijah who represents the prophets and preachers.
It is Jesus.
"This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!"

Of course, the Bible is important.
Of course, our prophets and preachers are important.
But they are only important in so far as they lead us to Jesus.
That is what matters.
They do not, and cannot, of themselves save us;

only Jesus can do that.

And do note that I said only Jesus –

all too often we use a form of shorthand,

when we say that we are saved by faith!

Mostly we know what we mean –

but it is not our faith that saves us.
It is Jesus.
Sometimes we talk and think and act as though our faith saves us.
It doesn't.
Jesus does.
We are saved by what Jesus did on the Cross,

not by what we believe about it.
Nor by what we read about it.
Nor by what our preachers tell us about it.
Salvation is God's idea, and God's job, not ours.

And that, I think, is the message of the Transfiguration.
"This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!"
Amen.

Salt and Light

Children's talk:

When it's really dark outside, what do we do?

We turn on the lights, and we draw the curtains,

and we are all snug and cosy indoors.

Here in London, we don't often see it being really dark, unless there's a power-cut, because of the street lights and all the lighting up.

When I was a girl, the street lights in the town where I went to school were switched off around 11:00 pm or so,

and last weekend Robert and I stayed in a village in France where that still happens.

And it gets really, really dark.

What if you were out then?

You'd be glad of a torch or a lantern so you could see where you were going, wouldn't you?

And you'd be glad if someone in the house you were going to would pull back the curtains so you could see the lights.

In our Bible reading today, Jesus says that we, his people, are the light of the world.

He didn't have electric lights back then, it was all candles and lanterns.

But even they are enough to dispel the darkness a bit.

And when lots of them get together, the light is multiplied and magnified and gets very bright,

so people who are lost in the dark can see it and come for help.

Which is why, Jesus says, we mustn't hide our light.

We don't have to do anything specific to be light, but we do have to be careful not to hide our light by doing things we know God's people don't do, or by not saying “Sorry” to God when we've been and gone and done them anyway!

n

 “You are the salt of the earth;” says Jesus,

“but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?

It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot.”

“You are the salt of the earth;

but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?

It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot.”

Salt.

These days it's often considered a bad thing,

as too much is thought to be implicated in raised blood-pressure, and so on.

But back in the days before refrigeration and so on,

salt was vital to help preserve our foods.

Even today, bacon and ham are preserved with salt, and some other foods are, too.

Salt is also useful in other ways.

It's a disinfectant;

if you rinse a small cut in salty water –

stings like crazy, so don't unless you haven't anything better –

it will stop it going nasty.

And if you have

something that has gone nasty, like a boil or an infected cut,

soaking it in very hot, very salty water will draw out the infection and help it heal.

Salt makes a good emergency toothpaste, and if you have a sore mouth and have run out of mouthwash, again, rinse it out with salty water and it will help.

But above all, salt brings out the flavour of our food.

Processed foods often contain far too much salt,

but when we're cooking, we add a pinch or so to whatever it is to bring out the flavour.

Even if you're making a cake, a pinch of salt, no more, can help bring out the flavour.

And if you make your own bread, it is horrible if you don't add enough salt!

Imagine, then, if salt weren't salty.

If it were just a white powder that sat there and did nothing.

I don't know whether modern salt can lose its saltiness, but if it did, we'd throw it away and go and buy fresh, wouldn't we?

And Jesus tells us we are the salt of the world.

Salt, and light.

But how does this work out in practice?

I think, don't you, that we need to look at our Old Testament reading for today, from Isaiah.

In this passage, Isaiah was speaking God's word to people who were wondering why God was taking no notice of their fasting and other religious exercises.

And he was pretty scathing:

it's no good dressing in sackcloth and ashes, and fasting until you faint, if you then spend the day snapping at your servants and quarrelling with your family.

That's not being God's person, and that sort of fast isn't going to do anybody any good.

Jesus said something similar, you may recall, in another part of this collection of his sayings that we call the Sermon on the Mount:

“And whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting.

Truly I tell you, they have received their reward.

But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face,

so that your fasting may be seen not by others

but by your Father who is in secret;

and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.”

It's what your heart is doing, not what you look as though you are doing that matters!

Isaiah tells us what sort of fasting God wants:

“Is not this the fast that I choose:

to loose the bonds of injustice,

to undo the thongs of the yoke,

to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? 

Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,

and bring the homeless poor into your house;

when you see the naked, to cover them,

and not to hide yourself from your own kin?”

This is what God wants.

It's not just the big picture, you see.

Yes, maybe we are called to be working for the rights of Palestinians in Israel, or whichever tribe is oppressing whoever –

sadly, it seems inevitable throughout history that whenever two tribes try to share a territory, there will always be friction, whether it is the Muslims and Hindus in India and Pakistan, or Greeks and Turks, Tutsi and Hutu, Loyalists and Nationalists in Northern Ireland, or Palestinians and Israelis.

Throughout history it has been the same –

and that it has not been very much worse has been down to the efforts of God's people,

often unsung,

often not thanked,

often, even, persecuted and tormented for their efforts.

But they have been there, and they have helped.

And God knows their names and has rewarded them.

But it's not just about the big picture, is it?

It's about the little things we do here at home, every day.

We can't always take homeless people into our homes, although some do –

but we can give to the food bank, either in cash or in kind.

We can help the Robes project, either with cash or by volunteering on a Friday night.

And maybe we should be asking our MP awkward questions about exactly why, in 2020, our food bank is so necessary!

Why do we need a soup kitchen in Brixton in 2020?

Why are we still suffering from austerity, especially when the government promised we wouldn’t?

That's part of what our being salt and light to our community is all about.

Not just doing the giving, not just helping out where necessary –

although that too.

But asking the awkward questions,

not settling for the status quo,

making a nuisance of ourselves, if necessary,

until we get some of the answers.

It's not always easy to see how one person can make a difference.

Sometimes, I don't know about you, but when I watch those nature documentaries on TV

and they – especially David Attenborough – go on about how a given species is on the brink of extinction and it's All Our Fault,

I wonder what they expect me to do about it,

and ditto when we get programmes about climate change and all the other frighteners the BBC likes to put on us.

But it's like I said to the children –

maybe one little candle doesn't make too much difference in the dark, except for being there and enabling us to see a little way ahead.

But when lots of us get together, it blazes out and nothing can dim it.

One person alone can't do very much –

but if all of us recycled,

if we all used our own shopping bags,

including for loose fruit and vegetables,

drank water from the tap rather than from a plastic bottle,

used public transport when feasible,

and limited our family sizes,

then there would soon be a difference.

Obviously you don't have to be God's person to do such things.

Lots of excellent projects, including the Brixton soup kitchen, are firmly secular.

But we, God's people, should be in the forefront of doing such things,

leading by example,

showing others how to help this world.

Historically, we always have been.

But sometimes the temptation is to hide in our little ghettoes and shut ourselves away from the world.

It's all too easy to say “Oh dear, this sinful world!”

and to refuse to have anything to do with it –

but if God had done that, if Jesus had done that, then where would we be?

We don't bring people to faith through our words, but through what we do.

As St James says in his letter, it's all very well to say “Go in peace;

keep warm and eat your fill,” to someone who hasn't enough clothes or food, but what good does that do?

That person won't think much of Christianity, will they?

A few years ago a friend told me about someone she knew who had been left a widow with four very small children,

and how the local church heard about her plight and gave her very practical help;

they were there for her when her husband died,

and helped her cope with all the practical details;

and they kept an eye on her and did things like paying for a baby-sitter so she could go to church events without always having to be with her children.

And so on.

And it is through their steady love and support,

rather than through any preaching they may or may not have done,

that this woman came to faith.

Ordinary Time,

and we are in a brief bit of Ordinary Time before the countdown to Lent starts,

is the time when what we say we believe comes up against what we really believe,

and how we allow our faith to work out in practice.

It's all too easy to listen to this sort of sermon and feel all hot and wriggly because you're aware that you don't do all you could to be salt and light in the community –

and then to forget about it by the time you've had a cup of coffee.

It's also all too easy to think it doesn't apply to you –

but, my friends, the Bible says we are all salt and light, doesn't it?

It doesn't say we must be, but that we are.

It's what we do with it that matters!

We don't want to be putting our light under a basket so it can't be seen.

And if, as salt, we lose our saltiness –

well, let's not go there, shall we?

Many of us, of course, are already very engaged in God's work in our community, in whatever way –

youth work of various kinds, the Robes project, such community outreach as happens here….

We might not even think of it as God's work, but that's what it is.

We are being salt and light in the community.

The question is, what more, as a Church, could we or should we be doing?

What should I, as an individual, be doing?

And that's where we have the huge advantage over people who do such work who are not yet consciously God's people –

we pray.

We can bring ourselves to God and ask whether there are places that need our gifts, whether there is something we could be doing to help, or what.

Don't forget, too, that there are those whose main work is praying for those out there on the front line, as it were.

And even if all we can do is put 50p a week aside for the food bank,

and write to Bell Ribiero-Addy every few months and ask why we still need food banks in this day and age and what she, and the rest of Parliament, is doing about it –

well, it all adds up.

Because I don't know about you, but I would rather not risk what might happen if we were to lose our saltiness.

They Left Their Nets

“And immediately they left their nets and followed him”.

This is a very familiar story, and a very familiar image, too.

We still talk of following Jesus today, 

although most of us are called to do so within the context
of our families and our jobs.

I rather think that by the time the Gospels were written down, 

most people who were called to follow Jesus 

were doing so within the context of their own lives, too.

All the Gospel writers tell us this story, though, 

so it must have been an important one.

St Luke goes into a bit more detail than either Matthew or Mark, 

whose account is more-or-less identical to Matthew’s.

In Luke’s version of events, Peter –

only he was still Simon, in those days –

had been out in the boat fishing all night, with no sign of a fish anywhere. 

One of those days when you reckon there simply aren't any fish in the lake,
even though you know quite well there must be. 

But the fish were hiding. 

And so Simon and his colleagues decide to call it a night, 

and they pull up their boats on the beach and start to wash the nets.

And along comes Jesus, with a whole crowd of people following him. 

"Can I borrow your boat a minute, mate?" he asks. 

And Simon rows him out just a tiny way offshore, 

so that he can speak to the crowds from there. 

We aren't told what he told them, but we know that Jesus' message tended to be
that the Kingdom of God was now here, and was well worth seeking for.
And I expect he told them, too,
a bit about the sort of people God wanted in the Kingdom –

people who go out of their way to help others,
even people they've nothing in common with,
even people who they can't stand;

people who don't bear grudges,
who don't use other people in any way,
or get angry with them in a destructive way;

people who, basically, treat other people with the greatest possible
respect for who they are,
and who go out of their way for them.
For anybody, just as God himself does.

Anyway, when Jesus had finished his teaching, he grins at Simon and goes,
"Ta very much, Mate.
Tell you what, why don't you take that boat out into deep water,
just over there [points] and see what you don't catch?" 

Simon's sceptical, but –

well, why not. So they row out and throw their nets over one last time....
and the amount of fish in there, the nets couldn't cope and, eventually,
nor could the boats.

And Simon's reaction is to throw himself at Jesus' feet –

I assume Jesus was still in the boat with them –

and say "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man!"

And Jesus reassures him:

“From now on, you will be catching people.”

And not only Simon Peter,
but Andrew, James and John all leave their nets to follow Jesus.

John’s gospel is different again, as it so often is.

In his version of events, Andrew, Simon’s brother, is a disciple of John the Baptist,
and after he hears Jesus speak,
he goes and spends the day with him at his home.

And then comes to find Simon Peter,
and tells him that they have found the Messiah –

and Simon believes them and leaves everything to follow Jesus.

Incidentally, I hadn’t quite noticed, had you,
the first part of our Gospel reading today,
where Matthew explains that Jesus left Nazareth
after John the Baptist had been put in prison, and settled in Capernaum?

One doesn’t really think of his having a home of his own –

we’re so used to the “Foxes have nests” image.

Not quite that, it’s
“Foxes have dens and birds have nests,
but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”

But at this very early stage, this isn’t quite true.

Jesus has taken a house –

or at least rooms –

in Capernaum.

And people could go and visit him there, and eat with him.

The wandering came later on in Jesus’ ministry. 

All the gospels agree that this is a very early stage in Jesus’ ministry.

They place it almost immediately after he returns from being tempted in the desert, where he’s wrestled with the temptations to misuse his divine powers, and has become a lot clearer about who he is,
and what he’s been called to do.

I’m not sure how much he actually knows, at this stage, of what lies ahead,
but he does know that he is to preach that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand
and, like all the preachers and teachers of his day,
he is gathering disciples to help him with this task,
perhaps helping with their physical needs –

Judas, you may remember, kept the communal purse –

and learning from him all that they needed to know in order to spread his message.

Although, as we know, it wasn’t until after the Holy Spirit came, at Pentecost,
that they were truly able to understand
and to spread the good news of the Kingdom.

But that came later.

For now, they left their nets and followed Jesus.

And that’s the important thing.

They followed Jesus.

Sadly, it wasn’t very long before that stopped being the case.

Factionalism arose in the early church.

St Paul picks up on this in his letter to the Corinthians.

He has heard, from people who lived in Chloe’s household,
that there are an awful lot of squabbles and factions in the local church,
with some people saying they follow Apollos, 

some saying they follow Peter
and some saying they follow Paul...
I wonder whether some also said they followed Jesus,
or whether that was Paul being sarky, we don’t know.

I also don’t know who Chloe was;

we don’t hear of her again,
so we have to assume that she was basically one of the believers in Corinth,
and perhaps gave house-room to one of the churches there.

Peter, of course, is Simon Peter, and Apollos, too, is well-known.

He was a Jew from Alexandria who met up with Paul
and his friends Prisca and Aquila in Ephesus, and was converted there –

he was already a believer in Jesus, but hadn’t got further than John’s baptism.

Prisca and Aquila bring him up-to-date,
and then he goes off to Achaia to preach the gospel there,
and is, apparently, a very effective evangelist.

Certainly Paul often refers to him,
and sends affectionate messages to him in his letters.

Achaia, by the way, is a prefecture –

the local equivalent of a county or other administrative area –

in Greece, bang next door to the prefecture of Corinthia,
whose capital is, of course, Corinth.

So it’s not too surprising that the Corinthians knew Apollos,
and some of them were claiming to follow him.

But, of course, it is Jesus that they needed to follow,
as St Paul makes quite clear, spelling it out to them in words of one syllable.

It’s nothing to do, he says, with who baptised you.

He, Paul, hardly ever baptises anybody, leaving that to the local church.

It’s the message that matters, not the person who preaches it.

“Christ did not send me to baptise,” one modern translation puts it.

“He sent me to tell the good news
without using big words that would make the cross of Christ lose its power.”

The “not using big words” was particularly difficult for Greek people,
as their tradition was very much one of philosophy and of debate.

They had trouble visualising a God who was actually involved with human life,
a God who cared,
a God who cared to the point of becoming a messy, emotional human being.

A God who cared to the point of dying on a cross.

So for them, all too often, Christianity was a matter of intellectual assent,
of rules and regulations,
of doing things in a certain way.

And the person who taught you about this
became almost as important as the message itself.

I think we’re awfully prone to doing that today.

It’s a lot easier to give intellectual assent to one’s faith than to live it.

It’s a lot easier to live by rules and regulations than to live by faith in Jesus.

It’s a lot easier to belong to a denomination than it is to be a Christian!

Don’t get me wrong –

there’s nothing the matter with denominations as such!

It’s denominationalism that is the problem –

where we think that because we are Methodists, 

we are in some way better than Anglicans or Baptists or Free Church people.

We aren’t.

We may have some quite profound theological differences –

especially with the Baptists and others who believe in a limited atonement –

but we are all following Jesus as best we know how,
and we are all sinners in need of redemption.

And that, for St Paul, was what mattered.

The message of the Cross.

The message that we can all be saved.

Simon, Andrew, James and John left their nets to follow Jesus.

We aren’t all called to leave where we are and what we are doing –

in fact, few of us are. But we are all called to follow Jesus!

Not all of us are called to be evangelists, but we are all witnesses to Jesus.

That, by the way, is a function of being Jesus’ person;

he told us that when the Spirit came we would be his witnesses –

not that we would have to be, or that we ought to be,
but that it would happen as part of receiving the Spirit.

If we are truly following Jesus, if we are truly his person,
then we are witnesses to him, even if we never mention our faith out loud.

His Spirit shines through us.

Of course, none of us is perfect.

The Bible is full of examples of when Simon Peter got it wrong –

most notably when he panicked when Jesus was arrested and tried,
and pretended he’d never met him.

But he was forgiven, and restored,
and he went on to become one of the greatest leaders the Church has ever had.

Sure, he wasn’t perfect, even then –

he had his quarrels with St Paul
about how far people who weren’t Jewish should be allowed into the Church,
and under what conditions –

but “the big fisherman” was definitely a great leader.

He became the person God had created him to be,
and fulfilled the role God called him to fill, even though he was far from perfect.

We are not all called to be leaders,
but we can still become all that we were created to be,
because we can all be forgiven and restored and enabled.

They left their nets to follow Jesus.

It’s not what we leave, if we leave anything, that’s important –

it’s that we follow Jesus.

Amen.