Light shiners & Glory givers!

A sermon on Matthew 5:16

“Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.”

Just for a few moments I want you to think about everywhere you have been in the last seven days; in other words between worship last Sunday and now.  Where have you been?  Jot down as many places as you can remember.

How many places have we been collectively?

That is our first really important piece of information this morning so let’s just try to remember that.

Now just pause for a moment and think about what you are doing now and what I am doing now in this moment.  I have to say that each week I labour and pray over the words I will say on Sunday making a huge assumption – that it will make a difference in your lives.  That in the midst of the sermon God will speak and that as God speaks you and I might actually be transformed.

Or to put it another way as I preach I, and I suspect some of you too, are expecting that salt will be tasted and light will shine.  In the safety of these four walls with people whom we presume are somewhat like minded salt and light are shared.

One of the most challenging aspects of all of this is the notion that when the preaching occurs I am not going to be saying to you “hey everything things great just keep on doing what you are doing”.  I am not going to simply affirm hey we got it right you don’t have to concern yourself with personal spiritual growth and transformation.

That to me would be like answering the perennial question “Are we there yet?” with a yes.

The sermon assumes that as salt is tasted and light shines we will discover that there is a journey of spiritual growth and change that still lies ahead.

So this is our second piece of information that we want to remember – the sermon is about salt and light and therefore is also about change.

But, and this is a big but... when Jesus was talking about salt and light what exactly was he inferring and how does it still relate to who we are and what we are doing?

Jumping in my imaginary time machine if I hurtle back to Jesus time I would discover that salt was a pretty common item then as now.  It was used for preserving, purifying, fertilising and yes seasoning.  Was Jesus being particularly about one of these, maybe seasoning but on the other hand does it really matter which use Jesus was referring to?

What struck me was that salt then as now is any everyday item used by everyone.  It is uniquely salt but it is really common.

The same is true of light. There is always light, even in darkness there is light, it may be

dim light and yes the brighter the light the more we can see but light is always there, always shining.

So here’s our next thing to remember for today salt and light are really common, not just a little bit common but accessible to everyone and used by everyone. 

So when Jesus starts referring to people as salt and light and talks about light shining before others the question came to me is Jesus only talking about some people doing this?

You see part of the tension for Jesus and his predominantly Jewish audience, and more importantly for Matthew who decided that this bit was important to write down 60 years later, was that Jesus message was not about closing down community and making it exclusive, rather it was about opening our God’s love for everyone.

Remember the beginning of John’s gospel: 

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with god and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God and through him all things came into being.  What has come into being in him was light and the light was the life of all peoples.... And the light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.

So here’s a wild thought, what if the light we are shining is not actually our own, but is the light which is the life of the world: the light of Christ.

OK so let’s get back to where I started with the quote from verse 16:

“Let you light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.”

There are a few things to take note of in this statement:

Firstly, the purpose of shining the light has nothing to do with yours or my personal salvation.  Being light shiners is about helping others glorify God.

Secondly, light shining is about what we do, our works!  Jesus comments which follow about the law and the prophets are there to remind people that what we do matters.

Now I want to temper Jesus words about our righteousness exceeding the scribes and Pharisees with two additional things said about the seeming impossibility of this injunction.

First in Matthew 19 Jesus says to the disciples about the rich young man who is completely righteous but won’t sell everything he has that “with God all things are possible.”

Secondly, Paul in Romans 7 reminds the community that the Law was given that sin might be revealed.

So with those bits of information on board to be “light shiners” might actually mean it is not us shining our light but the light of Christ shining through us and that the shining of the light is associated with what we do.

But wait there’s more!  What if there are no limits to through whom and where Christ’s light shines. 

Clearly in the scriptures God works in and through people who are no always recognisable as part of the exclusive community of faith.

So what if the task we have is not simply to be light shiners but glory givers.  Giving glory to God when we perceive the light shining through others be they a part of the community of faith or not.

This all brings me back to our little survey about where you have been this week, and causes me to ask another question, “How many people did you interact with in those different places?”

If you and I are to be light shiners and glory givers, helping others to identify Jesus the light of the world so that God might be glorified, remember this is not to do with our being saved, it is as Jesus says about God being glorified the question should then be asked: in all of those interactions how much light shining and glory giving were you engaged in.

You see it is one thing to expect me to be slat and light whilst I am preaching but at the end of the service when we head out into the world, each one of us is called to live out our discipleship to God’s glory.

Of course this ain’t easy, not for me or for you, but Jesus invitation to follow was not simply an invitation to follow me and don’t change but to be transformed by God’s love and to share that love and light with others.

To be light shiners and glory givers not for our own benefit but for God’s glory.

Take a moment to consider where you are going to be this week:  how will you be a light shiner and glory giver in those places?

Christmas Day: “You shall be led forth with peace”

“You shall be led forth with peace”

How might we understand being led forth with peace on this day as we come to celebrate Jesus birth?  What peace can we find within the story of Jesus coming among us?

So often when we think of the narrative of Jesus’ birth we think of it in childish ways but John’s account of

the Word being made flesh with its ancient and alien images confronts us with the idea that something bigger is going on here.

What sort of world does the Word come into?  What sort of world is Jesus born into?

John tells us from the outset of his gospel what sort of world it is: it is a world that does not know its maker and a world in which we find conflict.

Photo Kudaker flickr Creative commons

“He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.”

In these words we hear that live in a world where peace seems to be a pipe dream; to be something beyond us.

We are not at peace with the one who made us and we are not at peace with one another.

Last week I listened to an aid worker who been working with the hundreds of thousands of displaced people on the borders of Syria.

The outworking of our lack of peace is palpable.  The inability of people to love one another results in such tragic scenes as hear coming out of the Syrian refugee camps.

As we cover our trees in tinsel and our houses with lights, we also block the asylum seekers at our borders, billions of people long for the basic necessities of life.  Our festivities may bring us joy but peace for all who God love, no.

It is easy to distance ourselves from global affairs and the difficulties of many closer to home at Christmas until we remember those fateful words “He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.” 

Civil war, broken relationships, tensions, mourning, and illness all hang as spectres lurking beneath the surface of our celebrations.

How can we be led forth with peace?  Not just a personal sense of peace but a peace which encompasses all people everywhere, a peace which speaks of  bigger more wholesome hope.

The clue is in the narrative “he came”, “the Word became flesh”!  Instead of remaining aloof from the problems of the world and its opposition to God and our opposition to one another “he came”, “the Word became flesh”.

God enters into the midst of our lack peace and God shares in the experience of life.

The world did not know him but he came anyway.  Jesus came to what was his own, even though they did not know him.  Jesus was a refugee, an outcast, a political and religious troublemaker, he associated with the prostitutes and tax collectors, he searched and served among the least and the lost.

And he knew what it meant to enter into the space where peace seems a forlorn hope: he endured suffering and degradation and the cross.

If there is any sense of peace that we can find this today it is not in a Santa Clause God who simple gives us random gifts but a God who shares the fullness of life and when it is done says that the lack peace, the absence of hope is not all there is for Jesus rose again from the grave.

If we are to be led forth with peace on this day, if we have anything to say to the world, it is that God does not shun the disputes of our lives but shares in the suffering and recreates them in and through Jesus, the Word made flesh, a vulnerable and innocent and tiny child.

Whether you have a sense of peace in your own life and relationships on this day the hope of “the Word made flesh” is a hope which transcends our current lives and says there is more.

May God bless and enrich not only we who are privileged enough to be here this day but peoples everywhere this Christmas!

Christmas Eve: You shall go out with joy!

The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God

for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.

They went out with joy.  And this evening it would be my prayer that you too will go out with joy!

The same kind of joy experienced by the shepherds, the joy of encountering God!

This is not something I can actually give you, it is God’s business, but is my prayer that as you hear the story again you might have such an encounter.

Now the story of the shepherds has always been for me one of the quintessential Christmas stories.  For me this is a family tradition.  My dad, who was also a minister, often told the story of the shepherds in his Christmas Eve sermon because the shepherds were ordinary blokes working in the fields.  It is an image we can relate to in Australia; God coming to the average bloke at his job.  The ordinary and extraordinary collide.

Yet as we think about our theme this evening “You shall go out with joy” I want to dig a little deeper into the story of these shepherds and speculate about our own encounter with God.

In the ancient world shepherds were working boys and men and the job was filled with its dangers and hardships.  Out on that hillside so long ago the shepherds had a responsibility to protect the sheep from whatever might come along: wolves, lions, thieves, storms and so on.  They had to stay awake and keep their woolen charges safe.

It was their job and they did it day in day out, night after night, year after year.

The interruption of the angels into their existence and their journey to see a child in a manger only gives us a glimpse of their lives.  We only hear about these mere few hours, we do not even know their names.  They remain anonymous to us.

Yet they are given the privilege of an encounter with the divine after which they go out with joy “glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as had been told them.”

The shepherds returned to their flocks on this spiritual high.  Did they really fully understand who this baby was?  Could they fully comprehend their encounter with the angels?  What was to happen next for them?

Well the reality is they still had sheep to care for the next day, and the day after that and the day after that and so on.  I have little doubt that their encounter with angels and the baby Jesus change them but life goes on.  And, in all likelihood by the time Jesus grew to be a man and taught and shared the good news and died and was raised from the dead these shepherds would have already died.

They never followed Jesus.  At best they had an inkling that they had seen the Messiah. Yet afterwards they lived out their days working the field as Jewish shepherds in an occupied country.

The mystery of the way in which the shepherds encounter God and go out with joy I believe can give us a context by which we live after our encounter or encounters with God.

For like the shepherds we go about the world in our daily tasks: we face the dangers and drudgeries of this earthly existence, we wonder what life is about as we see the difficulties of the world around us.  But, we too like the shepherds can be blessed as we encounter God.

This is God’s gift to us, moments of divine connectedness, moments when simply hearing an ancient story about an unusual birth in a manger we glimpse God’s presence coming into our lives and into our world.

I suspect in all of the ways that we seek to fabricate joy at Christmas we are revealing a deeper yearning for an encounter with that divine joy.

We hang lights on our houses, we sing carols, we erect trees and give presents, and we share in meals and times of family gathering together.  We long for joy but as we know as happy as these things might make us they do not plug us in to any kind of divine experience and often, sadly, as we go on in our celebrating countless millions suffer.

The encounter of the shepherds with God may have been momentary, but all these hundreds and thousands of years later here we are listening to their story entwined in God’s story.

It is my prayer that this night you will go out with joy rejoicing because you have encountered God and that if tonight is not the night that you glimpse the divine that if it has not already happened there will come a time for you that God’s reality invades the drudgery and dangers of your existence and you will go out with joy praising God.

May you indeed have a holy and a joyous Christmas and may God bless you all!

After Christmas: We live!

A sermon on Matthew 2:13-18

So Christmas is over what happens next?

I think to understand what happens next for us it is helpful to continue to look at the story of Jesus’ birth as it is told to us by Matthew and see what happened next for Jesus, Joseph and Mary.

Now there are stories in the Bible that I think many of us would prefer not to be there and you can tell this is the case by the way we tell them.

A good example is the story of the wise men that came travelling from the East.  Most of us know that these men turned up with their gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh. And many may even know that they came to see Jesus via King Herod.

This morning I want to share with you what happens next in the story of the wise men as we think about the idea that Christmas is over and what happens next for us, for you and for I. 

So to set the scene the wise men have already been and visited Jesus with their gifts and then in the gospel of Matthew he tells us this:

Now after they had left, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, ‘Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.’ 14Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt, 15and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfil what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, ‘Out of Egypt I have called my son.’

16 When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men. 17This was to fulfil what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah:

18 ‘A voice was heard in Ramah,

   wailing and loud lamentation,

Rachel weeping for her children;

   she refused to be consoled,

because they are no more.’

Now I don’t know about you but I find this story a particularly difficult one.  The nice manger scene disappears.  The shepherds and angels, and the wise men and their gifts disappear into the horror of this account. Joseph and Mary become refugees fleeing in terror to another land where they will seek asylum.

And as they flee a most barbaric act is reported as Herod orders the slaying of innocent children in a mad expression of vengeance and power and protectionism.

Not surprisingly none of these gritty and uncomfortable scenes make it on to the front of our Christmas cards.

We think of Christmas as a happy time: as the celebration of Jesus birth; of God becoming one of us; of pretty nativities with angels and shepherds.  The contrast with this story could not be more pronounced.  It could leave us perplexed and dumbfounded.  What is going here?

Yet this story gives me great hope because what it does is remind me that: it is precisely because of the dislocation that occurs within peoples’ lives; it is precisely because of the insane abuses of power by those who wield it; it is precisely because innocents suffer and people are left heartbroken and mourning; it is precisely because we are so often left grasping at straws to find meaning; that God enters the world in Jesus.

Our sentimentalism about the manger scene must at some point give way to the seriousness of our human predicament and Matthew makes clear as he recounts the story of the slaughter of innocents just how serious things are.

Whilst Jesus is never recorded as saying anything directly about the slaughter of these children I can only imagine the deep sorrow he felt when he grew old enough to hear about this story and understand it. 

It makes me think of the times that we are told that Jesus looked upon the crowd and had compassion – from the depths of his being, from deep within his gut, emotions well-up as Jesus saw the pain and suffering that people endure.  It is not too fanciful to think that on some of those occasions there were numbered in the crowd people who had a child killed by Herod.  

God does not remain separate from the world in which these things happen but comes into in Jesus and shares in it and feels for us.

After Christmas life goes on.  Some of us may have a great life; some on the other hand find ourselves constantly wondering what it all means.  We stand on the cusp of a new year and maybe we are secretly longing for this year to be better than last.

It might be a personal cry from within our own hearts or it might be a cry that echoes our concerns for others whom we know nearby or who remain anonymous and are far away.

Maybe you are facing personal difficulties:  you are looking for a job; you are not well; you are mourning; you are down or you are depressed.

Or maybe you look upon this world disheartened and disillusioned: a world where over 6 million people in Syria need aid every day; a world in which our government incarcerates asylum seekers coming from other countries; a world in which bushfires, typhoons, droughts and floods are deeply impacting people’s lives now.

The grittiness and horror of the story of Joseph and Mary’s flight into Egypt with their newborn Son alongside the reprehensible killing of the children reminds us that God did not remain apart from the reality of the suffering in our created existence.

Such is God’s identification with us is that Jesus himself endures unimaginable suffering and a torturous death taking all of this suffering in our lives into himself as well.  God literally shares our pain.

But the good news is that Jesus suffering and death are not the last word because God raises Jesus from the dead and pours out the Holy Spirit on the creation.  In this we who live in the ambiguity of this life are given hope that the suffering and wailing and fleeing and horror that we and others experience are not ignored by God but shared by Jesus who continues to look upon us with compassion.

What do we do now that Christmas is over?  We go on living. We go on hoping in the God who lived as one of us.  We go on yearning to experience God more closely in the midst of all the joy and the suffering we might experience.  We go on celebrating God cared enough to be one of us.  We go on living.

Whatever the days and year ahead may hold for you may you to take heart in the serious business of God’s love which reaches beyond the barrier of the divine divide and promises us peace.

This is what we do now that Christmas is over, we accept the gift that God has given us: we live!

May God bless you all in the year ahead!

Advent 4: You shall name him Emmanuel!

Sermon Isaiah 7:10-16

Peter Lockhart

Hope is an elusive thing:  it is that grasping at a future and looking for a transformation that has not been realised.  All of us hope for things: we desire for something to happen, for something to come. 

On this last Sunday of Advent we are challenged with thinking about what it is we hope for.  Too easily we could hope for the trivial, the banal and maybe even the selfish: nice weather for Christmas day; that the turkey or ham cooks well enough and tastes great; no arguments at the Christmas table; the gifts that I listed out so everyone knew what I needed; and the list goes on. 

But on this day as we set out on our pathway of hope we hear ancient words of hope which have a much deeper meaning and resonance in our lives.  They have echoed down over 2500 years to be heard again by our ears:

“Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel.”

When Ahaz refuses God’s offer of a sign of hope the prophet Isaiah intervenes and declares the sign that God is giving anyway:

“The young woman is with child and shall name him Immanuel!”

The situation for Ahaz appeared dire as the Assyrian Empire asserted its strength and threatened Israel’s future and stability.  Isaiah’s prophecies were filled with images of darkness and destruction but they were also matched with hope.

“Before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted.”

The future still held trepidation, turmoil was still at hand but hope was given.  Beyond the limitations of Ahaz’s vision and faith God’s promise was made tangible in a child who was to be born.

As Christians we can easily confuse this prophecy of Isaiah to be speaking of Jesus because Matthew borrows the prophet’s words in his recount of the annunciation of Jesus birth to Joseph. Yet following the ancient text it is more likely that Isaiah was referring to Hezekiah: Ahaz’s successor.

Regardless, of whether the child being referred to was Hezekiah or not, and regardless of the fact Matthew uses the prophet’s words in reference to Jesus what is at stake is found in the name.

She shall name him Immanuel, which means God us with us.

Here is the message of hope, “God is with us!”  God is not against us!  God has not deserted us! God is not our enemy! God has not turned away!

God is! And God is with us!

This was the message of Isaiah to Ahaz.  This is the message from Matthew to his community. And this is the message of hope that we hear today “God is with us”.

Of course for those of us who believe that Jesus is the Son of God, the eternal Word made flesh, there is a true and new sense of God being with us in and through the incarnation.  But even for Isaiah and Ahaz the name Immanuel carries an eternal, if not incarnated, truth.  “God is with us!”

This is the hope to which Ahaz was to cling.  This was the hope that Matthew gave to his community as he retold the story of the incarnation.  And this is the message that I would continue to declare to you “God is with us!”

This hope, this faith, is a hope we can cling to regardless of our situation in life.

Ahaz was facing the possibility of war and destruction and we know the Israelites went through a time of desolation and despair.

The word of hope and promise comes in the naming of a child “God is with us”!

Matthew’s community was facing persecution coming from the conflict within the early Christian community as it broke away from being a Jewish sect.  Probably largely believers of Jewish origins Matthew’s community sat between traditional Jews and gentile Christians.  There would have been a sense of confusion as they sought their identity as followers of Christ

In addition to these internal ructions Matthew’s community was also confronted by the might of Rome with its so called divine Emperors.

The word of hope and promise comes in the naming of a child “God is with us”!

This is the message that breaks into our reality as well.  A message that goes back long before Isaiah prophesied to Ahaz and a message that rolls beyond the incarnation and into the future not yet come: God is with us!

This is the eternity of God’s life breaking in and making it known. 

It is this hope in God’s continued and constant presence which serves those hopes which lie deeper in our

existence: hope in a future for our children; hope for good health and well-being; hope for those who suffer in the world; hope for the meeting of basic needs; hope for understanding and meaning and purpose in life.

These larger and more universal hopes are met with the declaration of the constancy and care of God’s love “God is with us!”

Even when things seem dire, even when things seem bad:

God is with us!

God is not against us!  God has not deserted us! God is not our enemy! God has not turned away!

This is the hope to which we can cling and this is the hope we declare to the world this advent and each and every day. 

When Isaiah declared the child’s name would be Immanuel Isaiah was providing a tangible sign of what always remains true.  When Matthew used Isaiah’s words to rightly describe the incarnation of God in Jesus, he too was pointing at an ongoing eternal reality. 

To say “God is with us” is not simply to affirm the incarnation and momentary entry into the world by God, as monumental as this event was, but is to say something which maybe sounds even more confronting in reverse, if you will excuse the double negative:

“God is never not with us!”

This is our hope whether we experience it in the full or walk through life not feeling God’s closeness as others seem to “God is with us!”

All of our hopes and fears are met in this and we cling to this good news as we approach the celebration of Jesus birth.