Whaley Bridge Parish
April 18th 2021
I want to tell you a story. It starts with emptiness, nothingness. Then into the nothingness God creates time and space matter and energy, waves and particles, endlessly colliding and combining. God creates the possibility of possibility. This is the beginning. Life evolves. Death, birth, woman man. God loves this world he has created. Human beings choose to put themselves at the centre of the world and edge God out. Bad consequences follow: hurt, hate, greed exploitation. Brokenness. God still loves his wayward children. He won’t leave them in this broken place, this loveless, godless place. Like a good shepherd, God will seek out his wayward children. Will find them and gently, tenderly, lead them home. Lead them home to the green pastures of God’s presence, to harmony and joy. But how will God do that?
God starts small. He starts with one man. Then with a family, a tribe, a people. He says, you will be my people and I will be your God. All the world will be blessed by you. God shares his name with his people: I am who I am. This God is life, presence, future, everything. God shares his nature with his people by leading them out of slavery: he is the One who loves justice and abhors oppression. God gives his people commandments to show them how to live. He feeds them in the wilderness. God struggles with his people and his people struggle with God. The people have a name now: Israel, the ones who struggle with God.
God gives his struggling people a land, he teaches them how to worship. He gives them rulers, kings: a people becomes as nation. King David writes a song: The Lord’s my shepherd he sings. He makes me lie down in green pastures. Yet Israel struggles to lives as God’s people. It’s one step forwards, two steps back. They’re assailed by enemies, they forget to be faithful. God sends prophets to chide and challenge his people, to call them back to the way of justice and love, but still they ignore, still they turn away. Their great city is sacked, their temple torn apart. God’s struggling people are led into exile, far from home. By the rivers of Babylon they sit down and weep. How can they sing the Lord’s song in this foreign land? Where are the green pastures now? What will their shepherding God do next?
God doesn’t abandon his wayward children. They return from exile, they rebuild the temple. They wait. For now the time is coming. A voice cries in the wilderness, “Prepare the way of the Lord”. Something is afoot: a new twist in the story of God’s love for his beloved world.
Into the darkness there comes a sound, a cry, a birth. A family at risk, refugees fleeing from violence, simple peasant people, who raise a child, a boy, a man. The man goes to his cousin to be washed in the river and a voice from heaven is heard. This is my Son, my beloved.
Jesus starts small. He calls two fisherman, a tax collector, twelve friends in all, invites them to come on a journey with him, tells them that God’s reign, god’s rule is close at hand. He shows them what God is like by healing the sick and driving out demons; by eating with outcasts and feeding the hungry. By forgiving sins. Opposition gathers, the powers close in, Jesus prepares to walk the way of suffering. God still longs to seek out his wayward children and will not shirk from the flogging, the nails, the slow death on a Roman cross. This love will go to the depths of hell for us. Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing.
And then darkness. Silence.
Three days later there are strange sightings, confusion, terror even, and then a risen presence: “Peace be with you. “It’s impossible, it can’t be, and yet, yes, it is, Jesus, alive in the life of God.
Six weeks later God’s Holy Spirit tears through the upper room like a wind, like a bushfire: Jesus is risen, Jesus is Lord, God in Jesus seeking out his wayward children, unkillable, irrespressible. Across Jerusalem, across the sea, across the known world. This movement of God’s spirit cannot be stopped. Everywhere people are baptised, come to know Jesus, break the bread, pray the prayers, tell the stories. They tell the story of the passionate God who comes to us in Jesus to heal and forgive and set the world right with God. What began small has become very big. What began with one people Israel now reaches to every child, every woman, every man. To Africa and the Americas, to Europe, to England to Derbyshire, to us. It’s promise of forgiveness and a new start to all who turn to God in Jesus. It’s an invitation from God that says: come with me, be part of my family, share my bread, my laughter, my life. And know that I am with you, I am with you until the very end of time.
Well, that’s the Christian story, the story we find in the bible. And of course you know it. It’s a story that belongs to all of us; at our baptism we claim it: the story of salvation, of God’s redeeming love at work in Christ Jesus, made real for you, and you, and you. It’s the good news of grace: that God does not stay self-contained, but pours himself out for us: this is the mission of God. The story of salvation is an open-ended story. What we read in the words of the Bible continues to be lived through the lives of ordinary people like us.
This story of salvation helps us to read the story of our individual lives through a new lens, as we begin to recognise that God has been at work through the ordinary events of our own lives, our ups and downs, our losses and loves.
When I am introducing the Christian faith to people I like to use a video based course called the Start Course. The first session doesn’t start with God – that’s session two. In session one we learn to tell the story of our own life. We are introduced to the idea that God is at work within the texture of our own life. Only then do we go on to explore more about who God is.
Many people have been church goers for many years, but have not been offered an opportunity to connect their own story with God’s story – it’s something that has got missed. Small groups are the best way to do this kind of exploration. It would be really good to start some of this small group work in our own parish.
In our gospel reading we hear the Risen Jesus helping the disciples understand their part in the story. “Thus it is written: that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day……. And you are witnesses of these things.”
They are witnesses. They were there. They saw the live death and rising again of Jesus first hand.
Peter picks this up in his challenge to the people of Jerusalem:
“You killed the author of life, whom God raised from the dead. To this we are witnesses.”
Because the disciples were witnesses are they have evidence: they have something credible and valuable to pass on to others. They were witnesses, and so are we.
We are not witnesses of the events in first century Palestine, that’s true. Yet we are witnesses to our own part in the story of salvation. We are witnesses to what we ourselves have received of God’s love, forgiveness and mercy here in Whaley Bridge.
As lockdown eases and we move towards a new normal here in Whaley Bridge Parish we need to begin to reflect on how we will grow, how we will connect with a new generation and communicate the story of salvation in words and actions that resonate. We need to be credible witnesses to the gospel. Let’s hear the words of Jesus in Luke’s gospel addressed to us as we sit here today:
“Thus it is written: that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.”
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