PARISH WEEKEND AWAY 26th - 28th June - ASHBURNHAM SERMONS
The second of Andrew Rumsey's sermons for adults on our Parish Weekend Away. Genesis 1:26-31
COME HOME - THE CALL TO BE HUMAN AND HOLY
Well I trust you have had a good and refreshing night’s sleep… You know, they say that if all the people who fell asleep in church on a Sunday morning were stretched out, end to end…they’d be a lot more comfortable.
But it isn’t Sunday morning, and you have a gruelling day of intensive teaching to go before then….
I don’t know if you told people the truth about where you were going this weekend – your work colleagues and so on? I shan’t ask.
Yes, we’re going away for the weekend, for more church – it’s a bit like a two-day long service… Great! But it is, isn’t it. You wouldn’t live like this every day, but a bit of intensive church is a great thing.
We had a notice in church the other week about an all-day tea at someone’s house, which the local churches together were organising as a fundraiser for Christian Aid. That would be just a bit too much heaven, don’t you think? After the sixteenth cup, at, say 3pm…so..(despairing)…another drop?
Thankfully, our first calling is to be human. Our original vocation, as far as the Bible is concerned, is to do and be what people were created to do and be in the beginning.
And so, after last night hearing the call of Christ to come and see, the first thing to do is, if you like, to come home. To look at our origins, our spiritual roots.
Vocation is a word that has become limited to certain careers, which perhaps go a bit deeper than the word ‘job’, which implies something we do just to earn money. But the Bible suggests that it is not just teachers and doctors and priests who have a vocation, but every human on earth.
The very idea of vocation infers that someone is calling us and it presupposes a sense of purpose in life. One of the earliest and most important is the call of Abraham in the book of Genesis. Abraham is called by God to leave his home and go on a journey to a new land, where he will become a great nation, so that all the nations of the earth may be blessed through him.
The idea of God vocation or calling us is central to scripture, and I want to suggest that there are three basic callings which we share as Christians and as men and women, each of which relates to the other.
And I’m going to depict this as three concentric circles, like in a target (draw it?). Today, we’ll consider the first two of those, which are the frame within which our personal vocation can be found.
Draw chart
In this session we’ll deal with the outer and middle rings of the target, then after coffee we’ll go for the bull’s eye.
We discover our original purpose or vocation by returning to the creation stories of Genesis. I love the creation account in scripture. It’s so exuberant, so deliberate. Other creation myths in the ancient world had the gods making the earth for their food - easy to swallow until you get to the indigestible bits, like Croydon - or as a disinterested spin-off from their wars in heaven, the Genesis account is focused and highly personal: it sounds like a peculiarly dangerous sort of fun: divine ice-skating!
And we should return to the creation story very regularly in church life – for it is like coming home – coming back to remember where we start from. So let’s listen again to the first mention of men and women in the Bible:
Read Genesis 1:26-31
I heard someone recently say that this is where we find conclusive proof that God was British – he finishes this remarkable act of abundant creation, steps back, and says ‘very good’. Something of an understatement, isn’t it, really. It’s as if he has just pruned his roses – very good, hm.
Three main things we learn from this passage, which first tell us who we are, then what we are to do:
1) That humankind is made in God’s image
2) That we are given dominion to rule over his creation
3) That we are to be fruitful
God makes humankind in his own image (v26) – he makes us a little like him; this is humanity’s basic dignity and glory – we aren’t just anyone, we are made in the image of God, and this image, though marred by Adam and Eve’s fall still remains. There is an immense amount more we could say about what it means to bear the image of God – some of which we may come to later. But for now we simply need to hear that this is who we are…
This basic vocation for men and women, who are made in the image of God, is to have dominion over the earth, to be Lords to the earth as God is Lord to us – not to hate or abuse it, but to take responsibility for it.
The call to be fruitful and multiply in v28 is directly followed by the call to subdue the earth: man is to fill the earth in order to subdue it, to be the stewards, the landlords of creation, so that both might thrive together.
You know the old joke about the man tending a beautiful garden in the spring, and the vicar walks by and says Good morning, lovely day – and what a beautiful garden! Isn’t God’s creation wonderful! And the gardener says ‘yep, but you should have seen it before I came along’. There is the sense in these verses of a partnership – that the world is a garden which will become fruitful under our care, but which needs to be subdued, to be mastered.
My father was a great gardener and as he gardened there was a sense that both he and the earth flourished as a result. But it’s not just for those who garden or delve the soil: the vocation is for all people, whatever they do.
And this sense of responsibility for the world was summed up in the Hebrew word Shalom, which we often translate as our rather thin word ‘peace’, but better means something like wholeness’. Our Psalm says that the Lord blesses his people with Shalom, and this word means a deep sense of peace or wholeness with our selves, with our neighbour and with our earth. When we say peace be with you, we are doing far more than saying ‘hello’, we are reminding eachother of our calling to be peacemakers – those who restore the earth to shalom, to wholeness.
When the risen Jesus greets his disciples, notice, this is what he says – ‘peace be with you’ and the traditional Jewish greeting takes on a whole new and deeper meaning – now that Christ is risen, all things will be brought to healing and wholeness, all things will be brought out of their bondage to decay.
Now this vocation is not specific to Christians, it is given to all people – it is what humans are for – to reflect the image and glory of God and make something of the world we have been given; to make things good, to make things flourish. So when others in our world are also working for shalom – we can agree with them, work with them and share a common purpose.
And you and I can consider this in everything we do, of course – how we cook and shop and speak. Do I make people shrivel up by what I say or do I make them blossom? Do I look after the things I have or do I waste them? Am I a good landlord or a neglectful one? In all of these ways we answer our call to dominion.
Group work – 20 mins
What does the call to have dominion over creation mean for us?
How has that dominion been abused?
In our parish?
How can our church show this dominion?
Feedback
Second ring: Sent out to make disciples
So our first vocation is to be human – which means to take responsibility for the earth, which we are in charge of, under God.
The middle ring on our target is the specific vocation of the church. Those who have heard the call of Christ – come and see, and who are coming and seeing, and trying to follow him…
There are many places in scripture where our calling to be church is expressed, but perhaps the most important are the three great commissions – those passages in the gospels where the risen Christ commissions his disciples, gives them their task.
The three accounts vary –
1) John 20vv21-23 (sent out in peace and power)
2) Luke 24:45-48 (witnesses)
3) Matthew 28-19-20 (make disciples)
So while the language varies, the commission is the same. Those who obey the call to follow Christ are led out into the world to be witnesses to Christ for the sake of the world.
This is because Christ is the God-appointed way in which the whole earth will be brought back into shalom, into fruitfulness with its creator. This is what we might call a temporary vocation – after all, there’ll be no need for mission in heaven, and presumably we shall be busy tending his new creation. As the prophet Jeremiah writes: read Jeremiah 30v34
a) By holiness
While our first vocation joins us with all humanity, this second one calls us out, calls us to be distinctive and different – even peculiar in certain ways. There are two qualities above all that this requires of us. The first is the Bible’s own word for the distinctiveness of God’s people - holy.
Read 1 Peter 2:9 – holy people, so that you may proclaim the mighty acts…
Read Leviticus 19v2.
I wonder what you think of when you hear this passage. Are you holy? What does holiness mean to you? Ask for ideas?
Holiness is one of those rather daunting churchy words isn’t it. Whatever it might mean, most of us are pretty sure we aren’t it.
But holiness is not glorious isolation from the world, but it is the distinctive way in which Christians are called to live within the world, where, Jesus says, we are meant to be like the salt of the earth, to bring out its true flavour. As one writer has put it, ‘holiness is attained by the spirit in which we fulfil the daily obligations of life in its simplest and commonest details’ (J.H.Hertz). Repeat.
Having just given the daunting OT command ‘you shall be holy just as I am holy’ this is how the Lord goes onto explain what holiness involves to Moses
Read Leviticus 19vv9-16
Holiness is really very earthy – literally earthy – for our Lev passage suggests that farmers can show holiness in the way they plough a field, making sure to leave some wheat at the edges of a field so that the poor can help themselves to it. Holiness is displayed in the way we use money – not dealing falsely or defrauding anyone, including the Inland Revenue. So holiness is there in your tax return, in your gardening, in the way you treat the disabled. Far from being other-wordly, holiness is as practical as potatoes.
In the teachings of Jesus and the laws of the Old Testament, holiness appears in acts of everyday selflessness and generosity – in short, in the way we love our neighbour, and treat them as we would wish to be treated ourselves. So simple, and yet actually so very, very demanding.
Read v18 – you shall not bear a grudge against any of your people – how many of us are right now harbouring grudges towards others?
And because the Lord knows we cannot be holy as he is holy without his help, his essence, his spirit at work within us - that is what he gives us. His holy – spirit, who is the power given his disciples so that they may be witnesses for Christ.
The spirit is mentioned in all three great commissions – he is the only way they are going to be able to fulfil this impossible vocation.
And we need to ask for the spirit’s help on a regular basis – for the very practical and everyday things of life. As you encounter a situation where you think you might need to act differently from the world around you, just utter a quick prayer inside – ‘Lord, help me to be holy as you are holy’. That’s all you need to do.
Ask yourself, even in the simplest tasks, how can I do this in a holy way? How can you mow the lawn in a holy way? – it may sound bonkers, but that is basically what Leviticus is asking you to do.
You know when you’re washing your car, you can count on at least one waggish neighbour saying ‘you can do mine as well if you like’. How about next time they say that, instead of replying ‘you must be joking’ you say ‘if you like’. That’s holiness. It’s distinctive, it’s different, it may make you look slightly nuts, but it can also change the world around you.
Holiness is about what you and I do each day. The Bible often uses examples from farming because that is what most people did all day. You and I aren’t likely to be ploughing fields next week, but we may be in Sainsbury’s, or Gatwick, we may be writing a report or looking after our friends’ children. How can you transform those commonplace things by simple acts of holiness, where we love our neighbour as ourselves?
b) by love
Holiness is distinctiveness, for God’s sake – so that we may witness to who God is. And basic to this call, according to Jesus, is the way in which his followers love eachother.
This is his new commandment, specifically given not to the whole world, but to his followers. By this shall all people know they are his disciples.
Our witness should be obvious by our love – they’ll know we are Christians by our love, goes the old chorus. How does that make you feel? Is that what most people think of when they think of the church, I wonder?
Jesus appears to ask the impossible of his followers, that they should direct people to Christ and make disciples of all nations, by living out the life that he has lived, and, if necessary, dying for him. And again, because this is an impossible task, he promises the Holy Spirit.
Read Luke 24vv48-9.
The Spirit, it seems, will enable us to love the things and the people we should love, he will enable us to do impossible things – indeed he says in John 14v12 that we will even do greater things than he because of the Holy Spirit’s presence.
So we have two callings: to ‘make shalom’ in God’s earth as stewards or landlords of creation. This we share with all people. The second is a distinctive call, which sees us set apart in order to be witnesses to Christ in holiness and love, so that the first calling may be fulfilled – and each person come to know their true identity and role as people made in God’s image.
So then, these are our tasks in the midst of our secular society: and they are a good pattern for our decision-making as a church and as individual Christians. They mean that there are many things in which we will find common ground with others, plenty that we support and which we can work together on. They mean that there are also ways in which we have to part company with the world, even for the sake of the world. Where we need to be different - even difficult, sometimes.
The fact is, of course, that we spend much of our lives doing things that may not seem to fit into either of these vocations. All sorts of things we do may seem to fall outside the target. If, for example, at the children’s bathtime, I said to Rebecca, I’m sorry love, I really don’t feel called to help tonight. It’s not really gospel work…’, then I would get short shrift - and quite rightly.
But, as we shall see after coffee, everything we do can and should be done for God’s glory, and can bear witness to him, by the way in which we carry it out.
In the next session, then, we’ll look next at the inner ring of the target – the calling that is specific to us as individual Christians.
But for now we recognise that each one of us is called by God, not just the obviously holy or gifted ones among us – you are chosen by God and called by him to lead a fruitful life – that is your job! ‘You did not choose me’, says Jesus to his disciples, ‘but I chose you to go and bear fruit. Fruit that will last.’
COME HOME - THE CALL TO BE HUMAN AND HOLY
Well I trust you have had a good and refreshing night’s sleep… You know, they say that if all the people who fell asleep in church on a Sunday morning were stretched out, end to end…they’d be a lot more comfortable.
But it isn’t Sunday morning, and you have a gruelling day of intensive teaching to go before then….
I don’t know if you told people the truth about where you were going this weekend – your work colleagues and so on? I shan’t ask.
Yes, we’re going away for the weekend, for more church – it’s a bit like a two-day long service… Great! But it is, isn’t it. You wouldn’t live like this every day, but a bit of intensive church is a great thing.
We had a notice in church the other week about an all-day tea at someone’s house, which the local churches together were organising as a fundraiser for Christian Aid. That would be just a bit too much heaven, don’t you think? After the sixteenth cup, at, say 3pm…so..(despairing)…another drop?
Thankfully, our first calling is to be human. Our original vocation, as far as the Bible is concerned, is to do and be what people were created to do and be in the beginning.
And so, after last night hearing the call of Christ to come and see, the first thing to do is, if you like, to come home. To look at our origins, our spiritual roots.
Vocation is a word that has become limited to certain careers, which perhaps go a bit deeper than the word ‘job’, which implies something we do just to earn money. But the Bible suggests that it is not just teachers and doctors and priests who have a vocation, but every human on earth.
The very idea of vocation infers that someone is calling us and it presupposes a sense of purpose in life. One of the earliest and most important is the call of Abraham in the book of Genesis. Abraham is called by God to leave his home and go on a journey to a new land, where he will become a great nation, so that all the nations of the earth may be blessed through him.
The idea of God vocation or calling us is central to scripture, and I want to suggest that there are three basic callings which we share as Christians and as men and women, each of which relates to the other.
And I’m going to depict this as three concentric circles, like in a target (draw it?). Today, we’ll consider the first two of those, which are the frame within which our personal vocation can be found.
Draw chart
In this session we’ll deal with the outer and middle rings of the target, then after coffee we’ll go for the bull’s eye.
We discover our original purpose or vocation by returning to the creation stories of Genesis. I love the creation account in scripture. It’s so exuberant, so deliberate. Other creation myths in the ancient world had the gods making the earth for their food - easy to swallow until you get to the indigestible bits, like Croydon - or as a disinterested spin-off from their wars in heaven, the Genesis account is focused and highly personal: it sounds like a peculiarly dangerous sort of fun: divine ice-skating!
And we should return to the creation story very regularly in church life – for it is like coming home – coming back to remember where we start from. So let’s listen again to the first mention of men and women in the Bible:
Read Genesis 1:26-31
I heard someone recently say that this is where we find conclusive proof that God was British – he finishes this remarkable act of abundant creation, steps back, and says ‘very good’. Something of an understatement, isn’t it, really. It’s as if he has just pruned his roses – very good, hm.
Three main things we learn from this passage, which first tell us who we are, then what we are to do:
1) That humankind is made in God’s image
2) That we are given dominion to rule over his creation
3) That we are to be fruitful
God makes humankind in his own image (v26) – he makes us a little like him; this is humanity’s basic dignity and glory – we aren’t just anyone, we are made in the image of God, and this image, though marred by Adam and Eve’s fall still remains. There is an immense amount more we could say about what it means to bear the image of God – some of which we may come to later. But for now we simply need to hear that this is who we are…
This basic vocation for men and women, who are made in the image of God, is to have dominion over the earth, to be Lords to the earth as God is Lord to us – not to hate or abuse it, but to take responsibility for it.
The call to be fruitful and multiply in v28 is directly followed by the call to subdue the earth: man is to fill the earth in order to subdue it, to be the stewards, the landlords of creation, so that both might thrive together.
You know the old joke about the man tending a beautiful garden in the spring, and the vicar walks by and says Good morning, lovely day – and what a beautiful garden! Isn’t God’s creation wonderful! And the gardener says ‘yep, but you should have seen it before I came along’. There is the sense in these verses of a partnership – that the world is a garden which will become fruitful under our care, but which needs to be subdued, to be mastered.
My father was a great gardener and as he gardened there was a sense that both he and the earth flourished as a result. But it’s not just for those who garden or delve the soil: the vocation is for all people, whatever they do.
And this sense of responsibility for the world was summed up in the Hebrew word Shalom, which we often translate as our rather thin word ‘peace’, but better means something like wholeness’. Our Psalm says that the Lord blesses his people with Shalom, and this word means a deep sense of peace or wholeness with our selves, with our neighbour and with our earth. When we say peace be with you, we are doing far more than saying ‘hello’, we are reminding eachother of our calling to be peacemakers – those who restore the earth to shalom, to wholeness.
When the risen Jesus greets his disciples, notice, this is what he says – ‘peace be with you’ and the traditional Jewish greeting takes on a whole new and deeper meaning – now that Christ is risen, all things will be brought to healing and wholeness, all things will be brought out of their bondage to decay.
Now this vocation is not specific to Christians, it is given to all people – it is what humans are for – to reflect the image and glory of God and make something of the world we have been given; to make things good, to make things flourish. So when others in our world are also working for shalom – we can agree with them, work with them and share a common purpose.
And you and I can consider this in everything we do, of course – how we cook and shop and speak. Do I make people shrivel up by what I say or do I make them blossom? Do I look after the things I have or do I waste them? Am I a good landlord or a neglectful one? In all of these ways we answer our call to dominion.
Group work – 20 mins
What does the call to have dominion over creation mean for us?
How has that dominion been abused?
In our parish?
How can our church show this dominion?
Feedback
Second ring: Sent out to make disciples
So our first vocation is to be human – which means to take responsibility for the earth, which we are in charge of, under God.
The middle ring on our target is the specific vocation of the church. Those who have heard the call of Christ – come and see, and who are coming and seeing, and trying to follow him…
There are many places in scripture where our calling to be church is expressed, but perhaps the most important are the three great commissions – those passages in the gospels where the risen Christ commissions his disciples, gives them their task.
The three accounts vary –
1) John 20vv21-23 (sent out in peace and power)
2) Luke 24:45-48 (witnesses)
3) Matthew 28-19-20 (make disciples)
So while the language varies, the commission is the same. Those who obey the call to follow Christ are led out into the world to be witnesses to Christ for the sake of the world.
This is because Christ is the God-appointed way in which the whole earth will be brought back into shalom, into fruitfulness with its creator. This is what we might call a temporary vocation – after all, there’ll be no need for mission in heaven, and presumably we shall be busy tending his new creation. As the prophet Jeremiah writes: read Jeremiah 30v34
a) By holiness
While our first vocation joins us with all humanity, this second one calls us out, calls us to be distinctive and different – even peculiar in certain ways. There are two qualities above all that this requires of us. The first is the Bible’s own word for the distinctiveness of God’s people - holy.
Read 1 Peter 2:9 – holy people, so that you may proclaim the mighty acts…
Read Leviticus 19v2.
I wonder what you think of when you hear this passage. Are you holy? What does holiness mean to you? Ask for ideas?
Holiness is one of those rather daunting churchy words isn’t it. Whatever it might mean, most of us are pretty sure we aren’t it.
But holiness is not glorious isolation from the world, but it is the distinctive way in which Christians are called to live within the world, where, Jesus says, we are meant to be like the salt of the earth, to bring out its true flavour. As one writer has put it, ‘holiness is attained by the spirit in which we fulfil the daily obligations of life in its simplest and commonest details’ (J.H.Hertz). Repeat.
Having just given the daunting OT command ‘you shall be holy just as I am holy’ this is how the Lord goes onto explain what holiness involves to Moses
Read Leviticus 19vv9-16
Holiness is really very earthy – literally earthy – for our Lev passage suggests that farmers can show holiness in the way they plough a field, making sure to leave some wheat at the edges of a field so that the poor can help themselves to it. Holiness is displayed in the way we use money – not dealing falsely or defrauding anyone, including the Inland Revenue. So holiness is there in your tax return, in your gardening, in the way you treat the disabled. Far from being other-wordly, holiness is as practical as potatoes.
In the teachings of Jesus and the laws of the Old Testament, holiness appears in acts of everyday selflessness and generosity – in short, in the way we love our neighbour, and treat them as we would wish to be treated ourselves. So simple, and yet actually so very, very demanding.
Read v18 – you shall not bear a grudge against any of your people – how many of us are right now harbouring grudges towards others?
And because the Lord knows we cannot be holy as he is holy without his help, his essence, his spirit at work within us - that is what he gives us. His holy – spirit, who is the power given his disciples so that they may be witnesses for Christ.
The spirit is mentioned in all three great commissions – he is the only way they are going to be able to fulfil this impossible vocation.
And we need to ask for the spirit’s help on a regular basis – for the very practical and everyday things of life. As you encounter a situation where you think you might need to act differently from the world around you, just utter a quick prayer inside – ‘Lord, help me to be holy as you are holy’. That’s all you need to do.
Ask yourself, even in the simplest tasks, how can I do this in a holy way? How can you mow the lawn in a holy way? – it may sound bonkers, but that is basically what Leviticus is asking you to do.
You know when you’re washing your car, you can count on at least one waggish neighbour saying ‘you can do mine as well if you like’. How about next time they say that, instead of replying ‘you must be joking’ you say ‘if you like’. That’s holiness. It’s distinctive, it’s different, it may make you look slightly nuts, but it can also change the world around you.
Holiness is about what you and I do each day. The Bible often uses examples from farming because that is what most people did all day. You and I aren’t likely to be ploughing fields next week, but we may be in Sainsbury’s, or Gatwick, we may be writing a report or looking after our friends’ children. How can you transform those commonplace things by simple acts of holiness, where we love our neighbour as ourselves?
b) by love
Holiness is distinctiveness, for God’s sake – so that we may witness to who God is. And basic to this call, according to Jesus, is the way in which his followers love eachother.
This is his new commandment, specifically given not to the whole world, but to his followers. By this shall all people know they are his disciples.
Our witness should be obvious by our love – they’ll know we are Christians by our love, goes the old chorus. How does that make you feel? Is that what most people think of when they think of the church, I wonder?
Jesus appears to ask the impossible of his followers, that they should direct people to Christ and make disciples of all nations, by living out the life that he has lived, and, if necessary, dying for him. And again, because this is an impossible task, he promises the Holy Spirit.
Read Luke 24vv48-9.
The Spirit, it seems, will enable us to love the things and the people we should love, he will enable us to do impossible things – indeed he says in John 14v12 that we will even do greater things than he because of the Holy Spirit’s presence.
So we have two callings: to ‘make shalom’ in God’s earth as stewards or landlords of creation. This we share with all people. The second is a distinctive call, which sees us set apart in order to be witnesses to Christ in holiness and love, so that the first calling may be fulfilled – and each person come to know their true identity and role as people made in God’s image.
So then, these are our tasks in the midst of our secular society: and they are a good pattern for our decision-making as a church and as individual Christians. They mean that there are many things in which we will find common ground with others, plenty that we support and which we can work together on. They mean that there are also ways in which we have to part company with the world, even for the sake of the world. Where we need to be different - even difficult, sometimes.
The fact is, of course, that we spend much of our lives doing things that may not seem to fit into either of these vocations. All sorts of things we do may seem to fall outside the target. If, for example, at the children’s bathtime, I said to Rebecca, I’m sorry love, I really don’t feel called to help tonight. It’s not really gospel work…’, then I would get short shrift - and quite rightly.
But, as we shall see after coffee, everything we do can and should be done for God’s glory, and can bear witness to him, by the way in which we carry it out.
In the next session, then, we’ll look next at the inner ring of the target – the calling that is specific to us as individual Christians.
But for now we recognise that each one of us is called by God, not just the obviously holy or gifted ones among us – you are chosen by God and called by him to lead a fruitful life – that is your job! ‘You did not choose me’, says Jesus to his disciples, ‘but I chose you to go and bear fruit. Fruit that will last.’
posted by Parish Administrator at 12:22 pm
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home