Grace for the Heart-Broken (Lamentations 3.13-26 and Luke 7.11-17)

Introduction

I was saying at the bereavement service in Long Newton the other week, and if you were there you’ll remember it, that one of the unique features of being human is that we cry.

One of the ways we know that Jesus was fully human as well as fully God is that he shed tears. The shortest verse in the Bible, John 11.35, contains just two words; “Jesus wept.” It’s how we know that Jesus took flesh and blood and came to earth to fully experience every aspect of life that we do.

According to recent YouGov research, 66% of men and 93% of women say they have cried at some point in the last year. Almost one in five women and one in twenty men say they cry at least once a week. Whether that shows that women have a harder time of it than men do or that women just know better than men how unhealthy it is to bottle things up I don’t really know.

Machines never cry. I don’t think they’ll ever make a computer that will get upset when I make a mistake at the keyboard or forget to save my work and lose it all. We don’t expect our mobile phones to get all emotional when we leave them at home by mistake do we? Machines don’t cry.

Animals don’t really cry either. All animals are created with tear ducts but only to lubricate the eyes. Actually, with the possible exception of elephants, no animal ever sheds tears of emotion. And even with elephants we don’t really know. Even our closest cousins (chimps and orangutans) share 97% of our DNA but they never cry to express feeling. Crocodiles do actually produce tears but never when they’re sad; they only cry when they are eating their victims. Perhaps their prey is just a bit too tasteless without salt and pepper…

Plants don’t cry. Although scientists at the University of Bonn in Germany suggest that plants might possibly secrete a hormone when they’re being cut or pressed – and that is supposed to be equivalent to shedding tears. I just hope this vital research isn’t being funded by your hard-earned taxes.

But we cry because we’re human. It’s part of our makeup in this broken world and it seems to be unique to our species. It’s as human to cry as it is to have flesh and blood.

Our tear ducts are wired to the part of our brain that commands the emotions so we weep when we experience pain, when we feel lonely, when we share the burden of someone else’s sorrow, when we feel bereft, and most of all when we go through loss and grief.

The Psalms speak of the world as the Valley of Baka, it means a vale of bitter tears, an existence just flooded by a river of pain and loss bursting its banks.

And because we all cry at some point in our lives, and some of us often, the Bible has a place for tears; the Book of Lamentations. It’s probably the least cheerful book in Scripture but God has given it to us for a reason.

Of all the books in God’s word, this one gives expression to what people in Paris have been feeling since Friday 13th. There are tears running down children’s faces as they flee carnage in Syria and this book is for them too. There are tears running down mothers’ faces as they grieve another day without their kidnapped schoolgirls in Nigeria; this book conveys their pain as well.

That is public grief but so much pain is private. Who hears the sobbing of the woman whose world has fallen in because she’s just discovered her husband is having an affair with a younger woman?

Who dries the eyes of the man who’s been given his P45 and who’ll never work again after 30 years in an industry for which there is no future?

Who sees the tears of the young lad whose daddy walked out and never came back? There’s no man about the house, no masculine model he can look up to and admire, how is he ever going to relate to God as Father?

Who wipes away the tears of the woman whose husband has got dementia and is getting worse? She can’t face putting him in a home but she doesn’t recognise the man she fell in love with in her youth; his personality has changed, he shouts at her all day, he doesn’t seem to know who she is and she can no longer cope.

In this fallen world there are tears of loss, tears of rage, at every funeral, after every divorce, in every war, after every terrorist outrage. What a wretched world this is. What a mess we’re in.

But there is grace for the broken-hearted. God reveals himself in the Old Testament as the Father to the fatherless, the husband to the widow and the refuge to the foreigner. In 2 Kings 20 he says, “I have heard your prayer and seen your tears; I will heal you.” In Psalm 126 he promises that “those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy.”

When Jesus came, it was said of him, “A bruised reed he will not break, and a smouldering wick he will not quench.” The world breaks bruised reeds. It snuffs out smouldering wicks. But Jesus restores and strengthens. He sets ablaze with life and hope.

Jesus mends people who are downtrodden and heartbroken. He fixes people who feel they’ve reached the end of the line, who are hopeless, who don’t see any future.

With Jesus dawns a new day for people who have been ravaged by the cruelty of life, who have been weighed down by inherited darkness, who self-harm and get into all sorts of mess. If despair and dejection is where you are today, there is good news for you in this place because Jesus is here.

A Lament for Jerusalem

When you read Lamentations you find the utter despair of a man who looks around his city and all he can see is rubble.

It’s a book that was written by the prophet Jeremiah the morning after his city was attacked and destroyed. We know from secular history exactly when this happened; 586 B.C. Buildings were smashed to the ground. Bodies lay in the streets. The markets, usually bustling with trade, were laid empty and silent.

So Jeremiah looks around, takes his pen and starts to write down what he sees and how he feels.

How deserted lies the city, once so full of people….

Young and old lie together in the dust of the streets…

My eyes overflow with tears, they fail from weeping…

He goes on to say, “He pierced my heart, he has filled me with bitter herbs, he has broken my teeth with gravel.” He’s blaming God for the disaster in front of him. He’s saying “God did this.”

And the shocking truth is that God did do that. For over 200 years, prophet after prophet was saying, “If we continue as a nation on the path we’re on, God says he will withdraw his promise of blessing on our land. So turn your hearts back to what you know is right.”

No one listened. People blocked their ears and said “la, la, la, I can’t hear you.” They locked the prophets up or put them to death. Or both. And in the end, God withdrew his hand of protection, and what he said would happen happened. The Babylonians came and the nation of Israel fell into their hands.

But when we read the saddest, heaviest, bleakest book in the Bible, Lamentations, when our own tears are falling on the page we suddenly run into a moment of grace. It’s the grace that Jesus came to bring; healing for the broken-hearted. Here’s what it says:

“Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope:

Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed,

for his compassions never fail.
They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.
I say to myself, ‘The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.’

The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him, 

to the one who seeks him;
it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.”

There is no place on earth so low and so dark that hope is gone forever.

Beauty for Ashes

A few years ago, one of our mission partners told us about a man he knew called William Sempija. William fled Rwanda after his parents and siblings were butchered before his eyes during the genocide. As a refugee he ended up as a street kid in Kampala in neighbouring Uganda. Imagine his broken heart.

He lived ten years on the streets before he was spotted by a Christian and fostered. Miraculously, William began to achieve among the highest school grades in Uganda. After some time, William became a Christian and he now works with street children in Kampala. Over 250 children, orphans from war, AIDS or victims of poverty, are now cared for every day by his charity.

“Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed,

for his compassions never fail.”

Among the things I get to do as a minister is take funerals. I have one tomorrow as it happens. Once in a while, a funeral is utterly depressing. Usually they’re very moving and, especially when the deceased was young, some can be absolutely heart-breaking.

There is no greater pain than that of a mother burying her child. I’ve seen it. It’s unbearable. The part of her that she has just lost will always be missing. No consolation is adequate. No affliction in human experience seems to compare with this one.

So you can picture the ghostly, grief-stricken face of the widow of Nain in Luke chapter 7 as it describes two groups of people converging at the town gate.

The first crowd is the funeral cortege making its way out of the town to the cemetery. The second crowd is a large gathering of interested followers surrounding Jesus who just happens to be passing that way.

What’s going through this woman’s mind? She’s at that stage in the grieving process where everything is numb. Nothing has really sunk in yet. She still can’t believe what has happened to her. She had already lost her husband, she was a widow. Now her only son has died too and with his death the family line has ended.

With her son gone, this woman has just lost her last source of income. In a culture with no social security she is now facing destitution. Her son was her one and only pension plan – and the basic income that she would need in old age was now gone forever.

In a few hours, the crowd of mourners would give her a hug, say ‘goodbye’ and then all go home. When the last one leaves she’ll be penniless and alone.

We know her son was grown up (it says he was a man) so we can guess that she will have been in her forties - and in her society, at that age, her prospects for remarriage are practically zero. The bottom line is this; she is facing a bleak future - probably begging bread.

But her funeral procession on the way to the grave meets Jesus and his followers and immediately everyone knows that something is not quite right.

Normally, Jesus and those with him would just stand respectfully to one side as the funeral party passed by – or perhaps they’d join the back of the crowd out of sympathy. To interrupt a funeral procession was completely taboo. It was one of the most serious faux pas you could think of in 1st Century Jewish culture.

To touch the cart on which the body lay, meant that, according to the Law, Jesus would be ritually unclean for the rest of the day. To touch the body he would be ritually unclean for a week.

But Jesus never let that sort of thing get in the way of binding up someone’s broken heart.

The funeral party would have been led by the widow (the next of kin always went out in front); so she’s the one Jesus will have met first. When the Lord sees her, it says, “his heart went out to her” and he says, “Don’t cry.”

He turns to the dead young man. A body ready for burial would usually be anointed in fine spices to cover the smell of decay, dressed in strips of linen, and a shroud would be covering the face. “Young man, I say to you, get up!” The dead man sits up and begins to talk, and Jesus gives him back to his mother.

Someone once came up to the American pastor John Wimber after a Sunday service once and said, “I feel God is calling me to make myself available to you for the next three months. I’m in between jobs and I’ve got some money saved up. How can I serve you?” He said, “OK, tell me, what do you do?” She says, “I’m a palliative care nurse, I specialise in looking after people who are dying of cancer.” He says, “I’ll let you know if we need it.”

He thought it was a bit random and put it to the back of his mind but later he felt God say, “Don’t dismiss this, I’ve sent her to you, listen to what she says.”

Not long after, the phone rang. It was Lonnie Frisby. Lonnie was a former Vineyard pastor who was an amazing evangelist and gifted in the prophetic and healing ministries. But he was flawed, and he avoided accountability and he made some big mistakes. It happened to David, the man with a heart for God, and it can happen to anyone. He left his wife, he got involved with some other woman, and generally went off the rails.

So he calls John Wimber and says, “It’s Lonnie. I’ve got AIDS. I’m dying. They’ve told me I’ve got three months to live. And I’ve got nowhere to go.”

So John Wimber says, “You come here. You come home.” And he rented an appartment, and got this nurse in. And she cared for him round the clock until he died. And the church paid for it.

God’s grace for the broken-hearted. It means beautiful things come from even life’s ugliest self-inflicted tragedies.

Ending

It’s because of Jesus. In the very last book of the Bible, it says of Jesus, “Do not weep! See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah… has triumphed.”

And looking forward to the day when he returns to judge the living and the dead, it says, “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

Let’s pray…

Sermon preached at All Saints' Preston on Tees, 22nd November 2015

Thanks to Simon Ponsonby at New Wine 2015 for some of the Introduction

Grace In Time Of Need (Remembrance Day Sermon 2015)

Psalm 20 and Matthew 26.36-39

Queues outside Westminster Abbey, 26 May 1940

This year marked the 75^th anniversary of one of the greatest miracles this country has witnessed in recent times. It was an expression of the grace of God at a time of unprecedented national emergency.

It’s a sad reflection of our times that our media stopped short of retelling the full story this year. So, in case you haven’t been told before, let me tell you what happened in the life of our nation 75 years ago.

On 10 May 1940 Adolf Hitler launched his blitzkrieg against the Low Countries and France. Blitzkrieg literally means “lightning war,” and it was a military strategy designed to create panic among opposing forces through the use of concentrated, mobile firepower.

Barely a week after this blitzkrieg began, French and Belgian defences had been breached and overrun. The 7^th Panzer Tank Division made a rapid advance across northern France and western Belgium.

There is no other way to say it: the allied forces took a pounding. They just didn’t expect to meet a military machine so well trained, so well organised and so well armed.

Days later, they were threatening our retreating British troops with encirclement. It was an embarrassing mismatch of firepower and our forces were driven back.

With the entire allied front pushed back and collapsing like a house of cards, the decision was made in Whitehall to pull out and get as many of our forces back from the Continent as we could. You probably know this already from the opening credits of Dad’s Army. This is exactly the situation they depict.

This was a fight Britain could not win, so the best option available was to retreat, regroup, retrain and hopefully fight another day.

The one last port from which an evacuation would be possible was Dunkirk. But as Hitler’s tanks advanced, the window of opportunity was closing rapidly and Dunkirk wouldn’t be viable as a launching harbour for long.

Taking stock of the dilemma facing our country, Winston Churchill wrote in his Nobel Prize winning memoirs these words: “I thought - and some good judges agreed with me - that perhaps 20,000 or 30,000 men might be re-embarked. The whole root and core and brain of the British army... seemed about to perish upon the field, or to be led into ignominious and starving captivity.”

30,000 maximum from a force of about 340,000. We were looking at the prospect of about a third of a million casualties.

Seeing the scale and urgency of the unfolding crisis, King George VI called for Sunday 26 May to be observed as a National Day of Prayer. This quiet and shy man who could barely string three sentences together without stammering awkwardly found something in him to give a stirring radio broadcast, calling the entire nation to commit their cause to God and cry out for his deliverance. 

Some of the lines from our first reading, Psalm 20, seem to encapsulate the crisis faced in those days:

May the Lord answer you when you are in distress;
may the name of the God of Jacob protect you.

Some trust in chariots and some in horses,
but we trust in the name of the Lord our God.

Lord, give victory to the king!
Answer us when we call!

History records that together with members of the Cabinet and the military, the King got down on his knees in Westminster Abbey, and millions of his subjects flocked to churches up and down the land to join him in prayer. Britain was a nation before God that Sunday.

The scene outside the Abbey was astounding - long lines of people queued outside but most couldn’t get in because the church was full.

There was a fervour in prayer. Churchill said afterwards, “The English are loath to expose their feelings, but in my stall in the choir I could feel the pent-up passionate emotion.” Our nation poured out its soul in a heartfelt cry to almighty God.

Here’s a short Pathé newsreel report from that day… [Click on the picture to go to the go to the page at britishpathe.com].

“The empire responds to the King's call. And at Westminster Abbey, heart of the empire, the statesmen, the soldiers, the ambassadors and hundreds of ordinary men and women join the mighty congregation. Her majesty Queen Philomena of the Netherlands arrives just a few moments before their majesties. No one here today could have forseen the grave news that has come from Belgium. All the more! It is well for us to show the world that we still believe in divine guidance, in the laws of Christianity. May we find inspiration and faith from this solemn day.”

I became quite emotional this week as I watched that clip and read archived newspaper reports in preparation for this talk. Will I ever see the like of those reports in the Guardian or of that film clip on the BBC in my lifetime? I don’t believe I will. Can we really say that we still believe in divine guidance as a nation? I’m afraid that I don’t believe we can today.

The following morning, the front page of the Daily Sketch carried a report of the National Day of Prayer with a photograph of huge crowds outside Westminster Abbey. The report said, “Nothing like this has ever happened before.”

The very day people read those words at their breakfast tables, Monday 27 May, the Nazi High Command made this boast: “The British army is encircled and our troops are proceeding to its annihilation.” They were now only ten miles away and the buffer of resistance between the two armies had vanished.

It seemed a matter of time before our defences would be overrun and our armed forces would be decimated, leaving wide open the route for a military invasion of these islands. We would have been sitting ducks.

But immediately following that Day of Prayer three extraordinary things happened.

The first was that for some reason – and this has never been fully explained – with his Generals just waiting for his order to advance, Hitler simply froze. This is a matter of historical record. For two or three days the Fürher didn’t know what to do. He parked his tanks at the very moment they were poised to power ahead, press their advance to the beach at Dunkirk, and smash the last British resistance.

The second extraordinary thing came the next day. On Tuesday 28 May a fierce and prolonged storm suddenly broke over southern Belgium and northern France. The weather was so atrocious that the entire Luftwaffe had to be grounded, enabling British formations to retreat safely on foot to the coast with all aerial bombardment immobilized.

The third extraordinary thing was that despite the appalling weather in Flanders, there were mill pond calm seas and open skies in the English Channel just a few miles away.

It enabled a great flotilla of ships, naval escort vessels, lifeboats, sailing dinghies, tugs, barges, rowing boats, yachts, paddle-steamers… every floating device imaginable… to relay back and forth in perfect conditions in the desperate scramble to save as many troops as possible.  

General Halder, Hitler’s Chief of Staff, just three days after his High Command had boasted that our forces were hours from annihilation, recorded in his diary on 30 May these words: “Bad weather has grounded the Luftwaffe, and now we must stand by and watch countless thousands of the enemy getting away to England right under our noses.”

Fleet Street put it on published record that what had seemed impossible was achieved only through a miracle of deliverance.

Journalist C. B. Mortlock wrote in the Daily Telegraph these words: “The prayers of the nation were answered by the God of hosts himself… Officers of high rank do not hesitate to put down the deliverance of the British Expeditionary Force to the fact of the nation being at prayer on Sunday 26 May, two days before that great storm in Flanders and the calm that came over the Channel.”

Churchill made a statement to the House of Commons on 4 June, and in a voice charged with emotion reported that, rather than 20,000 or 30,000 men being evacuated, “335,000 men have been carried out of the jaws of death and shame to their native land.”

He too referred to what had transpired as “a miracle of deliverance.”

So grateful was our nation to God that Sunday 9 June 1940 was set aside as a Day of National Thanksgiving.

I believe God’s grace was shown to us in our time of need. I learned this year that on fourteen subsequent occasions George VI called the nation to prayer. He was a great and godly man who knew that God invites us, many times in the Bible, to humbly call on him in times of need.

“Turn to me and be saved,” he says, “all you ends of the earth; for I am God, and there is no other.”

“Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence,” it says, “so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.”

“Cast your cares upon him”, it says, “because he cares for you.”

“Seek the Lord while he may be found,” it says, “and call on him while he is near.”

And God will be near to you if call on him today.

Time magazine in April 1941, almost a year after these events, carried an article called “Days of Prayer.” And Churchill is quoted in it, saying this: “Thank God that we were all spared the nightmare of Nazi tyranny. He heard the prayers of this people not only in Britain, but in other parts of the world during this time of tribulation. The outcome of the war, I am convinced, hinged at one critical moment on a National Day of Prayer.”

You and I may never be brought into the confidence of the great and the good in our land. We may never be on first-name terms with whoever the Prime Minister of the day is. We may never converse with royalty or drink tea with peers of the realm. But we have the ear of almighty God. We can go straight to the top and find grace in time of need.

I wonder what went through the minds of those men and women from the British Expeditionary Force cornered on the beach at Dunkirk? Maybe a prayer, “Lord, if it’s possible, deliver me from the jaws of death and certain defeat.” He did.

That prayer, “Lord, if it’s possible, deliver me from the jaws of death” may have been uttered later in the war by the same soldiers who would give their lives in a fight that delivered victory and peace for us. Their sacrifice delivered us from the jaws of death. And today we show our gratitude.

It was also, as our second reading tells us, a prayer that Jesus prayed between his betrayal and arrest. “Lord, if it’s possible, take this cup of suffering from me. Nevertheless, your will be done.” It wasn’t possible. He had to drink that cup of suffering dry on the cross to make forgiveness and healing and peace available for all who believe. 

To those who laid down their lives be honour today. And to him who laid down the most precious life of all be glory forever.

Sermon preached at All Saints' Preston on Tees, 8 November 2015

Grace for the Worst (2 Chronicles 33.1-20)

Introduction

There’s a nice little story about an Archbishop who was visiting one of his vicars in his home and before the Archbishop arrived the vicar though he’d give his little girl some guidance on how to address their guest. “Now don’t forget,” he said. “before you say anything else to him, say “Your Grace.” So as soon as the Archbishop walked into the room, she said, “For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful.”

We use the word grace to describe the movement of a dancer, we choose it as a girl’s name, it comes up in many expressions; grace and favour homes are properties that the Queen offers rent-free. We talk of falling from grace, saving grace, putting on airs and graces, and when we hear of someone who has messed up their life we say “there but for the grace of God go I…”

I wonder what the word “grace” means to you when you close your eyes and think about it? What does it say to you? What kind of thoughts – or feelings – come into your heart when you hear this word, “grace”?

Grace is a word you virtually never hear in any other religion. Hindus don’t use it. Sikhs don’t use it. Muslims don’t either and neither do Buddhists or anyone else. Even Jews rarely speak of the grace of God. But our Christian hymn books, our worship albums and New Testaments are replete with this word – it is essentially Christian.

I quoted the Manhattan-based church leader Tim Keller the other week and I’m going to do so again; this is something else he said recently and it fits the theme of our Bible reading today. He said, “The more you see your own flaws and sins, the more precious, electrifying, and amazing God’s grace appears to you.”

Do you feel God’s grace as something precious, electrifying, and amazing?

Do you think the person sitting next to you this morning would like you more or like you less if they knew everything about you? I don’t think you’d like me any better if you knew all that God knows about me. But have you ever stopped to think that God knows every thought you think, every word you say, and every action you take, past present and future, and it doesn’t diminish one bit the love he has for you.

Grace means that God doesn’t love us because we’re good. It means he loves us because he is good.

So how bad do you think you have to be in order to lose hope of a future with God? I sometimes hear it said that some people are beyond the pale. Something will come up in the news that seems to reach a new low and people say, “That’s it, that’s gone too far.” The Moors murderers. The Jamie Bulger case. The kidnapping, forced conversion and marriage of those schoolgirls in Nigeria. ISIS. How disgustingly awful is it possible to be and yet still be able to get right with God?

Manasseh – the Worst King of Judah

Meet King Manasseh of Judah, who our first reading was about. Some kings in the Bible are very well known – many people outside the Church have heard of David and Solomon for example.

Then there are some quite good ones who stand out and therefore might register in the memory of your average churchgoer; kings like Hezekiah and Josiah.

Then there are kings that virtually no one has heard of or knows anything about – usually bad ones who reign only a short time like Pekahiah and Shallum. How much can anyone tell me about those two?

Manasseh is probably not one of the best known kings in the Bible though I suspect some of you will know a bit about him. Of the 42 kings and 1 queen of Israel and Judah listed in the Old Testament, Manasseh has the distinction of holding two records among them. Firstly, and this is an accolade he now shares with Queen Elizabeth II for our country, he reigned the longest of all (occupying the throne for 55 years).

Secondly, a distinction he possibly shares with King John for our country, he was the worst of the lot.

Manasseh was, of all the kings of Judah, the most wretched. This is what the 2 Kings 21 and 2 Chronicles 33 say about him:

·         It says he was involved with astrology and spiritist mediums in defiance of God’s commands.

·         It says he placed phallic symbols of the fertility god Baal and a statue of the sex goddess Asherah right in the middle of God’s Temple.

·         It says he was involved with devil worship, sacrificing his own children in the fire in a satanic ritual.

·         It says, besides his own sinful heart, he led his people astray into practices of evil.

·         It says he was an indiscriminate murderer. A despot. He drenched Jerusalem with innocent blood.

Manasseh’s reign was a calculated attempt to replace the God of Israel with a cult of sex and violence. It says “The Lord spoke to Manasseh and his people, but they paid no attention.”

The books of Isaiah and Zephaniah tell us more about that. The prophet Isaiah lived during Manasseh’s reign and he spoke out about what was going on but Manasseh had him silenced, banning him from speaking in public. Time and again, Isaiah warned him “What you’re doing are the very things the Canaanites did before us and that is why God removed them from this land.” But Manasseh just blanked him and carried on and, in fact, he ramped it up even more just to provoke him.

In the end, when Manasseh couldn’t stand the sound of Isaiah any more, he hollowed out a tree trunk, had Isaiah bound and placed him inside it, then gave the order to have it sawn in two.

The verdict: it says Manasseh exceeded the evil of the original Canaanites. That is staggering. God had expelled the Canaanites to make room for his holy people and now, thanks to Manasseh, they were actually worse than the society they had replaced.

He was a thoroughly violent and truly horrible man.

What was it about Manasseh that made him such a bad king, the worst of all? What went wrong? Was it maybe his environment and his upbringing? Can we blame his parents or his education? Did someone corrupt him?

We sometimes try and account for someone’s terrible crimes by pointing out that they were led astray and were themselves abused. Let’s look at that…

His father was King Hezekiah, who the Bible says was one of the very best kings of all. So he can’t blame his dad. His mother was called Hephzibah and Jewish history records that she was none other than the daughter of the prophet Isaiah. So with one of the greatest kings for a father and one of the greatest prophets for a maternal grandfather he could hardly say his family had driven him to it.

He had it all; he had a good gene pool, a nice upbringing, he would have been trained in godliness from birth, he had money, the position, lineage... he was born for greatness. No one can say there were mitigating circumstances and that it wasn’t his fault. It was.

On 29 July 1949 the Stanford Daily News in Palo Alto California carried a report with a photo of a 55 year-old local man called Jack Wurm who was walking along a beach in nearby San Francisco when he came across a sealed bottle with a piece of paper in it.

He opened the bottle and read the note, and discovered that it was the last will and testament of Daisy Singer Alexander, heiress to the Singer sewing machine fortune. The note read as follows: "To avoid confusion, I leave my entire estate to the person who finds this bottle and to my lawyer, Barry Cohen, to share and share alike."

There are two things to say about this: 1) Why anyone would leave half their estate to their lawyer is anyone’s guess but there you are. 2) Why anyone would leave the other half to some random stranger is also a bit weird and sure enough Jack Wurm thought it was probably a hoax. In fact it took the courts until after Barry Cohen and Jack Wurm’s death to finally decide on its authenticity. Had it been judged authentic in their lifetime it would have been worth to each of them over $6 million in cash and $80,000 annual income from Singer shares.

And yet that wouldn’t even begin to compare with the spiritual inheritance Manasseh had from his family and line! And he turned his back on the whole lot. It’s like finding that bottle, realising it’s a valid will and testament and then burning it in a bonfire before showing anyone.

So Manasseh couldn’t blame his environment or his upbringing. None of us can. We are all, as Simon Ponsonby has said, “sindividuals.”

But the Lord loves the least, and the last, and the lost. Rabbi Aaron the Great used to say, “I wish I could love the greatest saint like the Lord loves the greatest sinner.”

And God does love the greatest sinner. You cannot go too low, you cannot stray too far, you cannot be too lost for the reach of God’s grace to be insufficient.

The big question to ask is not can God save someone else, but, can God save me? What about you today? Do you ever feel as if you have done some terrible act that God will not forgive? Do you feel sometimes like you do not deserve the mercy of God? Whatever you’ve done, however recent or long ago, however culpable you were, let me assure you that God has the means and the motivation to deal with it and put it behind you.

That’s what happened to Manasseh as we’ll see in a minute.

Transforming Grace

This year at New Wine, one of the speakers talked about a church weekend he was invited to lead somewhere up north. And he said he noticed a woman, possibly in her fifties, seated near the front just radiating the joy of the Lord. He was struck by her. Her face had the look of someone loved and at peace. She was so free in worship. She had this kind of aura of spiritual well-being. She stood out from the crowd.

So after a few days he asked her if she would tell him a bit about her story. “Well,” she said, “for many years I was weighed down by guilt and remorse for something I did.” She didn’t say what it was she’d done and he didn’t ask her either. “For several decades, I carried around this burden, this weight of disgrace and shame,” she said.

It turns out she wasn’t remotely religious, she had no church background at all, and had never read the Bible… she had no vocabulary to articulate what she felt spiritually.

Her husband was a lapsed Catholic and he told her that, from what he could remember, what she had done was a mortal sin, so it couldn’t be forgiven, that God was ticked off with her and that she was going to hell. Thanks for that, mate. Why don’t you rub some lemon juice into my paper cut while you’re at it.

It turns out she used to sometimes go into empty churches and chapels and just cry about the heaviness that weighed her down. But all she heard was the echo of silence. She had no peace and no rest; her conscience condemned her. She became depressed about it and even contemplated suicide.

Then one day, driving the car to the supermarket she just yelled out, “God, if you’re there, you’ve got to help me.” And straight away, in her mind she saw letters and numbers – Romans 3.23. That meant nothing to her at all.

She went and did her shopping, got back into the car and there again, in her mind’s eye she saw written down Romans 3.23 and she said to herself “I wonder if that’s in the Bible?” When she got home she looked it up and found it was from the Bible and this is what she read: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God…” She thought, “That’s me! Yes, I have sinned terribly, I’ve made some awful mistakes, I’ve messed up my life, I’ve fallen short of the standard, that’s it!” And then she read on, “and all are justified freely by his grace through … Jesus.”

And there and then her life was unmade and remade in an instant. It was as if in court she had stood in the dock and with a lump in her throat, heard the guilty verdict, knew it was absolutely correct, only to then hear the Judge say, “You’re free to go. All the charges have been dropped. Your record has been wiped clean. The case is closed. Someone has already paid in full your debt to society.”

This is grace. This is what God is like.

And this is what Manasseh, the worst of the worst, discovered. Verses 11-12 describe how he was humbled by a neighbouring superpower. And now that he was in trouble, he sank to his knees in prayer asking for help. He admitted his wickedness and asked for mercy from the God whose name he had dragged through the mud.

After all he had done, why should God forgive him? Why would anyone? But as he wept over his past and prayed, God was moved, God’s heart was touched; he saw he was sincere and truly sorry - and he wiped his record clean and brought him back home.

This is what the gospel is all about. It’s good news. This is what Jesus came to demonstrate for us. Some people say “Oh, I could never be a good Christian.” Listen, Christianity is not about being nice. It's about being new.

“If anyone is in Christ,” the Bible says, “there is a new creation: the old has gone, the new is here!”

Some of you may have seen the video interview on YouTube with a rock singer from the band Flyleaf called Lacy Sturm. She talks about her tormented years. She says “I couldn’t get away from my own depression.” She tried a lot of religions and philosophies. She said “There were all these great ideas but I never found any tangible healing.” She said “I remember thinking I am tired of the pain in my heart. I am tired of going to bed and feeling this burden. Who am I? Why am I alive?”

Bertrand Russell, the famous atheist, once admitted, “The centre of me is always and eternally a terrible pain—a curious wild pain—a searching for something beyond what the world contains.”

He wrote an essay called Why I Am Not a Christian. But tellingly, when his daughter wrote a biography of her father she wrote this:

“Somewhere in the back of my father’s mind and at the bottom of his heart, in the depths of his soul, there was an empty space that had once been filled by God and he never found anything else to put in it.”

That’s what Lacy Sturm felt; the nagging, gnawing emptiness of life without God. The futility of existence.

One day Lacy woke up and decided that she was going to commit suicide. She saw no other alternatives and resolved to end her life at the end of that day. Well, that evening, by the grace of God, her grandmother whom she lived with, said, “You are coming to church with me now.” Lacy said, “I didn’t want to go to church, I hated it, I never went – but look, I’m going to commit suicide later, it can’t get worse, so I might as well go to church.”

So she went. She said, “I hated it - especially the preacher.” [I just thought I’d include that bit in case any of you can relate to it].

Anyway, the preacher, as he was speaking had a word from the Lord and so he said, “There’s someone here with a suicidal spirit.” That got her attention. But she couldn’t stand what he was saying, so she got up and went to walk out. As she got to the back of the church a man with a white goatee beard came over to her and said, “I think the Lord wants me to say something to you.”

She thought, here we go again. Then he said this; “He wants you to know that even if you’ve never known your earthly father, [which she hadn’t] he knows your pain and will be a better father to you than any man could have been. He knows your pain. He knows what’s in your heart. He’s seen you cry yourself to sleep. He wants to come and deal with it. He is called The Comforter.”

She says, “It was as if the God of the universe showed up right in front of me. I realised that God is holy and good. And that I am not. And that he loves me and he knows I am tired of the way I have been living and that he wants to make me new - if I would let him and I said YES! I want that please. And I woke up the next day with such peace and such joy.”

Ending

That’s the grace of God. The grace to forgive. That’s why it is precious, electrifying, and amazing.

I feel that there are some here want to meet Christ today – maybe for the first time. Or it may be that you’ve stepped back and wandered off a bit and today is a day to recommit yourself. I want to lead you in a prayer so let’s pray…

Sermon preached at All Saints' Preston on Tees, 1st November 2015