In Him Was Life (John 1.1-5)

Introduction

Have you ever looked up at the sky after sunset; perhaps on a balmy summer’s night, or maybe on a frosty winter’s evening? You can pick out some constellations quite easily; Orion with its distinctive belt of three stars - and the Plough maybe. You can usually pick out the North Star if you know roughly where to look and maybe one or two others - like Sirius, usually just above the horizon, and the brightest object in the night sky apart from the Moon.

(By the way, somebody once went up to John McEnroe and introduced himself as the brightest star of them all and John McEnroe said, “You cannot be Sirius!”

They say that about 6,000 individual stars are visible from the Earth with the naked eye. But that is of course only a very tiny fraction of all the suns that exist in the universe.

In fact, they think that there are about 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone, the Milky Way, which measures 100,000 light-years across. That’s a lot of chocolate! But confectionery aside, what I’ve just said means that light, travelling at 186,000 miles/second, takes 100,000 years to get from one end of our galaxy to the other. Actually, on the macro scale, the Milky Way is just a walk around the block. They reckon that there are 200 billion galaxies like our Milky Way in the observable universe!

Put another way, how many grains of sand do you think there are on planet Earth? You’d have to use words ending with “illion” - like zillion, bazillion, squillion and kazillion to arrive at the number of grains of sand there in all the deserts, beaches, sandpits and egg-timers on our planet. Not to mention all that sand between your toes after a day out with the kids at Saltburn. It’s a lot of sand.

Well apparently, for every grain of sand there is on the Earth there are about a million stars in the universe.

And, when you gaze up into the cloudless night sky, do you look and begin to wonder? The universe, you, life itself, how we all got here, where it all came from, and is there anything, or anyone, out there beyond us?

In the Beginning…

Those are the sorts of questions the Apostle John was asking when he sat down to write his gospel. How did this all happen? Where does it all come from?  What’s it all made of? How did it get here? How did we get here? And he took a pen and jotted down some simple sentences; “In the beginning was the Word.”

When you go back all the way to the point when it all began, Jesus was already there. And he is the Word; because he is absolutely clear and always true.

The gospels say over and over that people sat up and listened whenever Jesus opened his mouth because he spoke with authority. It was nothing like the usual hot air from their rambling religious leaders.

He is the Word. They tried to trap him every time he walked into the public sphere and without fail he tied them up in knots with razor-sharp words of wisdom. He never withdrew anything he said because he never needed to, he never had to apologise, he never changed his mind, he never hesitated, and he never lied.

He is the Word. Everything he said was 100% the truth.

·       He said he would go to Jerusalem and he went.

·       He said he would suffer many things and he did.

·       He said he’d be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and he was.

·       He said they would mock him, spit on him and kill him and they did.

·       He said after three days he’d rise again and up from the grave he rose on the third day!

He is the Word. He only had to open his mouth and raging storms were instantly calmed. With a simple command from his lips, fig trees withered, all manner of sickness was cured, demons were sent packing and even the dead were raised. People marvelled. “Who is this man” they asked? They’d never seen anything like it.

He is the Word. In Romans 4.17 it says that he gives life to the dead and calls into being things that were not. He only needs to say one word over your life and things begin to shift. Abundant life springs out of utter hopelessness at the sound of his voice. No wonder John called Jesus the Word!

And listen, he is speaking today. Think of all the incomprehensible waffle you have to scroll through and ignore just to update the software on your mobile phone. But just one word from Jesus today can change everything in your world. He is the Word.

As I said last week, but for the benefit of those who were away, the Word is our English translation of the Greek word logos from which we get words like “logic.” Because of Jesus, life, the universe and everything is understandable – we can make logical sense of it. Because of Jesus, we can actually see who we really are and begin to get a feel for what God is like.

…He Was With God and He Was God

Verses 1-2 tell us two things about Jesus – he was with God in the beginning and he was God in the beginning. Christians believe that there is one God, in three persons; Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Each is distinct from the other, and each is equally - and fully - divine. The human mind does not have the room to grasp this.

It is incomprehensible to us. It is too elevated and wonderful for us to understand. God’s ways are not our ways and his thoughts are higher than ours.

Saint Augustine wrote fifteen volumes on the Trinity, can you imagine that? 15 separate but related books on the Trinity before he summed up with one of the most profound and exact statements which have ever been made about the triune God. Yet even he never got anywhere near to plumbing the full depths of the mysteries of the God who is Three in One. You just can’t bottle God in a jar and put a label on him.

In v3 it says “Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.”

I mentioned just now the gargantuan magnitude of the heavens which point to the fact that we have a very great God, because he holds it all together. I could also speak about the infinitesimal constructions of the subatomic world which point to the fact that he meticulously orders the building blocks of matter.

Any learned professor would tell you, with eyes full of wonder, how implausible it is that life anywhere ever came to be at all, such are the overwhelming odds against it being possible. The laughably improbable existence of the universe points to the existence of a wise author who conceived it and called it into being. “Through him all things were made; without him, nothing was made that has been made.”

I have spent about an hour this week following the progress of the Japanese Atatsuki orbiter that has successfully managed to start circling Venus and sending back data about it. (Is anyone aware by the way that a JAXA probe is now orbiting Venus? Well it is!)

Last week, I positively salivated for two hours over high resolution photos of Pluto just sent back from the New Horizons probe. We are the first generation of humans to see these things.

And when the Philae lander touched down on comet 67P last year, I nearly wet myself with excitement.

But space exploration only reveals the fantastic variety of what’s already there. It doesn’t shed any light on what anything actually means.

It gives you the ‘what’ and the ‘how’, but not the ‘why’. The ‘what’ tells you the number of stars up there (give or take a few trillion). The ‘how’ tells you how far away they are. But the ‘why’ – why it was they burst into existence, from nothing, belongs to God, who brought it all about by speaking one word, his Word, the Word – the Lord Jesus Christ.

So in v4, the spotlight on Jesus intensifies. “In him was life, and that life was the light of all people.”

People talk of soft light, bright light, indirect light, diffuse light, natural light... what sort of light is Jesus?

A little later in v9 (and Mark will speak about this next week) it says what the light of Christ is like. John describes Jesus as true light, or real light.

It’s not that Jesus is a bit like light. It’s the other way round. Light is very much like Jesus. Jesus was there before light existed. It was he who said, “Let there be light” and something a bit like him appeared. But it’s actually Jesus who is the true light, and the real thing.

What do we mean that Jesus is light?

I can think of four different ways in which Jesus is light. And I’m going to run through them briefly.

·         He is light that points to the Father.

·         He is light that exposes sin.

·         He is light that leads the way.

·         And he is light that casts out darkness.

Firstly, He is light that points to the Father.

The word logos is also the root of our word “logic” as I said. But it’s also where we get our word “logo” from; Jesus is God’s logo – his public face.

When you see a silhouette of a certain piece of fruit with a chunk bitten out, you immediately think “Apple” – pricey smartphones and tablets. When you see five interlocking circles you think “Olympic Games” - elite sport. When you see a castle under an arc of fairy dust, you think “Walt Disney” – family entertainment.

A logo is the visual identity of a brand. You see a logo, you think of what it embodies.

Well, Jesus is God’s logo. What you look at Jesus you see the Father. He is the image of the invisible God. He is the most vivid picture of God it is possible to see. As a logo embodies a brand, Jesus is the image of the invisible God. “Anyone who has seen me,” Jesus said, “has seen the Father.”

Secondly, Jesus is light that exposes sin.

Martin McVeigh was an unknown Roman Catholic priest in Northern Ireland until he led an information meeting for parents and pupils at a primary school in his parish in March 2012. When he put his memory stick into a laptop he didn’t realise that Windows AutoPlay was enabled on the computer. The horrified parents and children were shown not a presentation on Holy Communion but a slideshow of pornography. He protested his innocence and denied knowledge of how the pictures came to be there, but the bishop relieved him of his duties.

That’s extreme, but Jesus is a light that exposes sin in my life and yours. Mercifully, he usually exposes our sin to us and not others. He brings to the light of our conscience things now hidden in darkness.

Thirdly, he is light that leads the way. 

A few years ago, I was on holiday in Normandy. One night, I went outside to get some wood from the cellar for the log fire. There was no moon. It was pitch black. But I'd been to the cellar a few times before and I reckoned I’d be OK.

But there was a steep stairway going down to the cellar and, on second thoughts, I didn't want to risk it, so I thought better of it and I went back inside for a torch. When I came outside again, I saw that the steep drop was much closer than I had remembered it. And if I hadn't gone back for some light, I probably would have fallen 7 feet or so down the stone stairway.

Some people have no idea where they’re going in life. But we know what we mean when we say we can see light at the end of the tunnel after a difficult period in life. Because we know how Jesus leads the way through life.

And fourthly, he is the light that drives out darkness. 

...Which brings us to v5. “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.”

Everywhere you go in the world, you find rich and poor. Wealth has never eradicated poverty and poverty has never completely swallowed up wealth.

There’s a lot of misery and brokenness in the world but never so much that it completely extinguishes everyone else’s happiness. In every society there is always a mixture of both.

In almost every area of life, when opposites coexist, we cannot be sure which will come out on top. But light is different. No matter how many experiments you conduct, you never find darkness pushing back light. The one unchangeable property of darkness is that it must give way to light. Always.

That’s what John is saying about Jesus here. He means that Jesus is always greater than evil and will decisively defeat it.

Jonathan Aitken was a Member of Parliament, Cabinet minister and on the Privy Council. You may remember him. He was exposed as a serial liar in court, was convicted of perjury and perverting the course of justice and was handed an 18-month prison sentence. 

He’s written a book called “Pride and Perjury” and he says of that time in his life, “I went through the depths which encompassed defeat, disgrace, divorce, bankruptcy and jail - a royal flush of crises, especially as they all took place within the public eye.”

He had been tipped by some at one point to be a future Prime Minister. But his fall from grace was spectacular and permanent. He never entered politics again and is now unelectable given his past.

The thing is, we all have our darkness and we can all fall from grace. But that is not the focus of Christmas. It isn’t that Jesus has come as a child in Bethlehem to show us how bad we are and tell us to sharpen up our act. We know the truth about ourselves. We don’t need an accuser to rub it in. But light always overcomes darkness.

Jonathan Aitken found that out. This is what he said; “God is a God of new beginnings…  This dawned on me in a police cell waiting for a decision about whether they were going to charge me. For the first time I read Mark’s gospel from beginning to end, and I remember being overwhelmed by the power of the narrative and the Passion chapters. I began to see dimly there my own story.”

He came to faith in Jesus Christ and he now serves as a volunteer in a Christian prison-visiting ministry.

That’s what it means when it says about Jesus in v4 “In him was life, and that life was the light of all people.”

Ending

Jesus is light that points to the Father. Is it time to connect with the Father heart of God this morning? The Father who is there waiting for the prodigal sons and daughters to run back to the Father’s house?

Jesus is light that exposes sin. Is there something hidden that you need to bring out from the shame of darkness – where, undetected, it poisons your soul - into his laser-like healing light?

Jesus is light that leads the way. Are you hesitating about a big decision? Are you looking for direction in life? Are you fearful about stepping out in faith? Have you lost your way? Jesus said, “Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” He said “Follow me.”

And Jesus is light that casts out darkness. Are you hemmed in by assaults on your soul? Deliver us from evil! Do you have panic attacks? Deliver us from evil! Are you stalked by doubts and temptations? Deliver us from evil!

For the kingdom, the power and the glory are yours, now and forever, Amen!

Sermon preached at All Saints' Preston on Tees, 13th December 2015

In the Beginning Was the Word (John 1.1)

Introduction

A question for the men here, how many of you men at All Saints’ this morning can honestly say you positively enjoy shopping?

Well, isn’t that interesting? You might be interested to learn that a Psychologist called Dr. David Lewis was commissioned recently by a London shopping centre to monitor heart rates, blood pressure and stress hormones in male and female shoppers before, during and after their shopping trip.

Here’s what he found. The research showed that men's stress levels spiked alarmingly when faced with the prospect of choosing gifts and going into crowded shops, while only one in four women registered even a slight change.

Dr. Lewis said, "I was personally surprised by the very high levels of stress we found amongst the men. We were looking at blood pressure and heart rates and the secretion of stress hormones in some cases at a level we might expect to find in combat pilots or riot police officers in action!”

Another survey of regional trends among Christmas shoppers in the UK found that it’s Londoners who find the thought of hitting the High Street the most stressful.

43% of people in the East of England found parents to be the most difficult people to shop for. And more than half had particular trouble choosing a suitable gift for dads.

79% of people in Northern Ireland said they had bought a present for someone and when they opened it, no matter how pleased the recipient looked, the giver could tell that they obviously didn't like it.

And the report concluded that 66% of people in Yorkshire find Christmas gift buying “painful.”

Not stressful, or tiring, or time-consuming, but – with in what can only be a reference to excessive strain on the wallet – painful!

The exact words we choose reveal a lot. Words can be evocative. Sometimes words, because they are tied to a context, mean much, much more than they otherwise might. “That’s one small step for a man.” “I have a dream.” “They think it’s all over.” “Houston, we have a problem.”

These words are greater than a sum of their parts; they have weight and meaning and importance for us because we connect them to a significant event. The American fantasy writer Patrick Rothfuss said, “Words have power. Words can light fires in the human mind. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts.” 

Words

Today’s reading, just a single verse from John’s gospel says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

Why did John say this? Have you ever wondered why he decided to sit down one day and write a fourth gospel? There were three perfectly good gospels already. It’s not as if people were saying, “No one has yet written down a record of what Jesus said and did. Quick, before the last eye witness falls off his perch, someone who knew him, write a book about what he said and did!”

Mark had already written about what Jesus did. Then Matthew and Luke produced two more gospels, adding many of the things Jesus said. John, though, wrote his gospel to tell the world about who Jesus is.

In 20.31, right near the end of the gospel, he says, "These things are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name."

So if I’m going to accurately convey John's purpose in writing this gospel, my aim this morning must be to increase your faith in Jesus as God’s Son so you can enjoy the blessings and the life he came to give. And that is what I have prayed I will do, by the grace of God.

Sometimes people ask, “What is the difference between what you believe as Christians and what all the other religions believe? Aren’t they all the same?” And the answer is “No, they’re not the same at all.”

Every religion tells you what you need to do to move towards God. Only the Bible tells you what God has already done to move towards you.

Every religion has prayer. But the really important thing is not the words you say to connect with God. What counts is the Word God has already said to connect with you. And that Word is living and breathing – it’s Jesus.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

I want to approach this verse from three different perspectives this morning. The first perspective is looking back. What does it say about creation and the origins of the universe? The second perspective is looking up. What does it say about what God is like? The third perspective is looking in. What does God say to the depths of your heart today?

Looking back

Firstly then, looking back. “In the beginning…” That means there was a beginning. That may sound obvious, but it hasn’t always been so.

100 years ago, scientists and philosophers almost unanimously agreed with Aristotle that the universe has always been there. “There is no creator” they said, “because everything we can see and feel and sense just always existed.”

But in 1929 an astronomer called Edwin Hubble (he wasn’t named after a telescope by the way; it was the other way round)… he made a discovery that almost no one before had ever imagined or conceived; he proved that the universe is actually expanding.

He calculated the rate of expansion and then, working his figures back, to point zero, he established that our universe is about 13.75 billion years old. So it wasn’t always there. It must have had a starting point. The Big Bang. But here’s the thing; cosmologists since then have come to agree that, at the point of creation, the raw materials for everything that now exists were... nothing. Everything that is, just appeared, by itself, like a rabbit out of an empty top hat. As if by magic.

Scripture of course has always affirmed that there was a beginning. And the Bible says goes on to say not only that there was a beginning, but also that God already existed beforehand.

Try and get your mind round that. This takes us all out of our depth. Can any human mind imagine what existence was like when there was no matter, when there was no time, and when there was nowhere? It’s inconceivable. It’s incomprehensible. It’s unfathomable. It’s inexplicable.

But the Bible states that the universe of time and space has not always been here - and science now concurs.

The Bible goes on to say that God made everything and therefore you are significant, you are loved, you have purpose and value. Atheism says nothing made everything and therefore your being here at all is just an accident, and your life is totally meaningless.

Have you ever wondered what lies beyond the edge of the universe? If the universe is expanding like an inflated balloon, what’s on the other side of the membrane? Nothing. What does nothing look like?

Or if you could travel back in time through millions of years and get to the point of creation, you’d go back, and back, and back – what would you find? You’d find that Jesus is already there. That’s what John 1.1 affirms; “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”

He was always there. He always will be. He spans the whole of time and space - and beyond. He is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. He has complete sovereignty and total authority over all history; past, present and future. He knows where it all came from and he knows where it’s going.

Looking up

This is why John wrote his gospel. He wanted to show that Jesus is not just human size – he is God size. He is eternal. And if there is not eternity in Jesus, he can’t give you everlasting life.

I say “Jesus” but of course the name Jesus was only given to him when he was born in Bethlehem. The name Jesus describes what he came to do as a man. The angel Gabriel said to Mary “You will call him Jesus because he will save his people from their sins. That’s what his name means. But before he was born in Bethlehem, Jesus wasn’t his name. Because it does not describe what he did before he was born.

He changed his name when he came to earth. In 3G the other week an Iranian man came to speak about his life. He changed his name by deed poll from Mehdi to Daniel to represent his new identity. It showed he was leaving behind his past and taking on something new.

Jesus did the same thing. Before he came to earth he had a different name. The Word is the first of many titles given to Jesus in John’s gospel. Each one has a significance and tells you something about who Jesus is and what he’s like.

Why was he called The Word? Because words form a connection between two people. You probably can’t read my mind. But if I talk to you, my spoken words express thoughts from my mind which are then received and processed by yours. And vice versa. Words connect us. They form a bridge between us.

Jesus is the Word because he perfectly expresses God’s ways, his thoughts, his ideas and his heart. If you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus. What has God got to say to us? He’s said it all in Jesus.

“In the beginning was the word. The word was with God. The word was God.” “Word” there is our English translation of the Greek word logos, but logos means much more than “word.” It’s where we get the words logic, logical, logistics from and there is a history behind it.

We know John wrote his Gospel, in Greek, in Ephesus in the first century. Five centuries before Jesus was born, before Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, lived a philosopher called Heraclitus, who also wrote in Greek, in Ephesus, about the logos. In fact, the logos was his big thing. It was central to his quest to understanding what made everything work. In his thinking, the logos meant the principle, or the basis that explains why things are the way they are.

The logos is the reason why things are the way they are. What’s the reason behind the patterns in sunshine and rain and wind? It’s meteo – logos (meteorology). What is the reason why people behave the way they do? It’s socio – logos (sociology). What is the reason why planets spin round the sun and stars collapse into black holes? It’s the cosmos – logos (cosmology). Every discipline of human understanding and learning comes back to its logos, the reason why it is like it is.

So when John wrote this Gospel, he deliberately picked up this language from Heraclitus – he said that Jesus is the logos, the Word, the reason why.

All things find their true sense, their ultimate meaning in him. He is the reason why you were born and have life. He is the reason why God loves you. Life, the universe and everything has a purpose; Jesus is the reason why.

Looking in

We’ve looked back (in the beginning) and we’ve looked up (the eternal Word of the Father, who always was, is now, and will be forever).

Now, we’re going to look in. What word does Jesus, the Word of the Father, say to you today?

People have invisible tapes that play in their soul all the time. Not literally. But people hear words that have been spoken over their lives again and again. And it’s like a tape that replays over and over again, words that have been said at significant moments in life.

Words like: You’re no good. I always wanted a boy. You’re ugly. I always wanted a girl. I’m leaving you. I wish you’d never been born. You’re fat. You always mess things up. You’ll never amount to anything. You’re a waste of space (I’m sorry about him, he’s from Barcelona). We don’t need you anymore. We’re letting you go. Can’t you do better than that?

Do you ever hear tapes like that?

As a teenager growing up without a father figure in his life, Richard Taylor’s existence revolved around crime and drug addiction in South Wales for which he served several sentences in H. M. Prison Swansea.

One night, in jail awaiting conviction and sentencing, he picked up the Gideons Bible that had been placed in his cell and tore out a page to roll a cigarette. This is how he explains what happened next:

“I opened the Bible randomly and tore out a page and made myself a roll-up. I struck the match, but suddenly, I found that I had an inner voice that I wasn’t used to hearing. It said ‘This is all wrong, I should be reading this, not putting a match to it.’

I blew the match out, unrolled the page, and began to read it. It was the Gospel of John chapter 1 [what we’ve been reading today]. I read the page… and then read most of that Gospel, about twenty chapters, before I put it down. I found it captivating. I was lying on my bunk with the Bible resting on my chest and fell asleep.

Sleeping in prison is not easy because of the noise and I wasn’t on any drugs – my usual way of drifting off to sleep. But, I slept the deepest and most peaceful sleep that I could remember. From early afternoon, right through to the next morning, I slept.

It was as if the weariness of years of turmoil, crime, drugs, aggression and fighting was being rolled away through peaceful sleep. My subconscious mind was being cleared of the nightmares of my life up to now. The Bible talks about the peace of God that passes anyone’s understanding and perhaps this was my first experience of it.”

Richard was then inexplicably spared a heavy sentence on condition that he spent some time in a Christian rehabilitation centre which he agreed to do. His life turned around and he is now one of the country’s most dynamic and influential church leaders.

The Detective Chief Superintendent of Gwent Police who had no control over Taylor in his days of spiralling crime can only admit that he is a reformed man and happily wrote an endorsement of Taylor’s autobiography To Catch a Thief.

A life turned around by the Word of God. And yet some people want to outlaw the distribution of Gideons Bibles in schools, hotels and prisons for fear either of offending people from other faiths or upsetting touchy atheists.

Jesus has the power and the authority to press “stop” on the tape playing back all those messages. Those words may have shattered your past. But they are not the words that need to shape your future.

Because so many feel unloved and rejected, Jesus is the Word who says, “I have loved you.”

Because so many are racked with guilt over the past, Jesus is the Word who says, “Father – forgive.”

Because so many are lonely and bereft, Jesus is the Word who says, ”I will never leave you nor forsake you.”

Because so many are sick, Jesus is the Word who says, “I am the Lord, who heals you.”

Because so many are tired, Jesus is the Word who says, “Come to me and I will give you rest.”

Because so many are in bondage to their addictions and compulsions, Jesus is the Word who says, “If the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed.”

Because so many are under a cloud of heaviness and judgment, Jesus is the Word who says, “Neither do I condemn you, leave your life of sin.”

Because so many just can’t find any peace, Jesus is the Word who says “My peace I give to you… don’t let your heart be troubled or afraid.”

Because so many feel that everything is meaningless and there’s no point going on, Jesus is the Word who says “I have come to bring life in all its fullness.”

Let’s stand to pray…

Sermon preached at All Saints' Preston on Tees, 6th December 2015

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