Sermon 28th August 2016

Today, one of our Lay Readers, Simon Brindley, preaches. The reading is from Zechariah 10: verses 1- 6

The God who Cares

A few months ago I bought something that is still amazing me with what it can do:

Show smartphone..

I’ve had one of these

Show ipad

for about 5 years, but this was the original version of the ipad and it had slowed down so much that it would crash every few minutes when you tried to do anything on it.

But this  - smartphone - is just amazing…..so much that can be done on one tiny little device that you can carry round wherever you go, anywhere in the world.

We’ll come back to smartphones and ipads or tablets whatever you call them, in a few minutes..

First to the Old Testament book of Zechariah.

Zechariah was an Old Testament prophet. He lived about 500 years before Jesus. Nearly 600 years before Jesus the Jewish people had had to leave their land. Their enemies had defeated them and taken the survivors away to Babylon in slavery. They were exiled from their own land. Their temple was destroyed.

But after about 70 years some were allowed to go back home.

Now 70 years is a long time, it is a lifetime for one person or it certainly would have been in those days. It is still quite a long life now. So those Jewish people in exile in Babylon for 70 years must have wondered if life would ever get better for them.

But even though some of them had managed now to get back to their land they did not seem to have much confidence. They seem to have been reluctant to even try to rebuild their Temple and their faith in God was not strong. You can sort of imagine what they might have been thinking can’t you?

What has God ever done for us? He allowed us to be exiled and enslaved for 70 years. Nearly all of those who were driven from their homes then have died. A few of us have come back but what can we do?  Most of our people are still in slavery. There aren’t enough of us and we have no strength.  Some of us are ill and we have hardly any money. How on earth could we ever build a magnificent Temple again and even if we did, would God really look after us? Look what happened last time..

And instead of relying on God, the people started relying on other things. They tried to work out what their dreams were telling them about their future. They made idols, probably figures made of wood or metal and bowed down to them every day hoping that that would make good things happen for them.

If they were in trouble or worried about the future, they went to see fortune-tellers who would tell them what the future held.  They lived in a sort of man-made but unreliable hope that somehow they would get through to better times.

But it was as if they were looking in the wrong direction. They seemed to have forgotten about God.

And into this scene comes the prophet Zechariah saying:

-       don’t bow down to your idols and ask them for rain. God made the world. Ask him!;

-       Don’t look to those idols and fortune tellers and your dreams to work out what is going to happen to you! You really can’t rely on them. Actually, you may as well not bother. No. Look to God, the one who made you. He does care for you, whatever you think about what has been happening to you…;

-       I know things have been bad but God does have a plan for you. He is going to make your people strong again. There will be leaders and you will be a strong people;

-       In fact God is going to bring all your people back from slavery. He does care;

-       And this message is for each one of you. Turn from your despair to hope, turn from feeling weak to being strong;

-       You need to pray to the living God and He will answer your prayers. He will look after you and He will give you strength.

Remarkably perhaps, despite all that had happened to them and in the middle of all their difficulties a man called Zechariah tells them that God does care and that what they need to do is to turn back to him. Don’t rely on all those things that you and everyone around you thinks are there to help you get through your life. They will sooner or later let you down. No, the only one you can trust is God himself. He is the only one who actually cares.

And now back to our electronic devices!

Question to the children..

Put your hands up, everyone, if you have ever used either a smart phone or an ipad or a tablet or whatever you would call a bigger one like this?

And who would like to tell me what they can do with their phone or tablet? Something you really enjoy or a game you have played or something interesting or something exciting?

Who would like to volunteer to come up and tell us? Have we got 3 volunteers?

Volunteers!

What I can do – four recent examples..

-       Facetime Cath and Ben in Australia;

-       Watch video of John Tayleur running 800m under 2 mins;

-       See the faces of my old primary school friends for first time in 50 years;

-       Watch Alistair and Jonny Brownlee win gold and silver in the triathlon at the Rio Olympics while I am sitting at my desk trying to concentrate on my work!

It really is a remarkable machine..!

But does this little machine care for me?

Can this little machine forgive me?

Can I pray to my little man-made machine?

Can I really rely on this machine to help me to do what is right and avoid what is wrong?

It may try and it may even be able to do bits of those things and be helpful to me up to a point, but can I really trust my iphone to guide me through my life in all its ups and downs. What it actually does is bring together and can tell me everything that mankind has done, good and bad. It can’t ever, I don’t think, be a replacement for God.

By the way just in case you are wondering, I am not at all saying that we should avoid entirely use of our electronic devices. I am just using them as an example of things that we can perhaps trust more than we should and things that can, if we let them, begin to take the place of God in our lives.

This really isn’t intended to be mainly about the use of iphones and similar devices, I am not expert at all but just to note, adults and older children especially, that these things can have a bad side as well as a good side as I am sure you know and we do need to be very careful about the place they have in our lives. A report just this week said that today’s teenagers face the almost constant pressure of social media and the use of smartphones with video cameras that can play a part in everything from bullying to missed hours of sleep and to pressure on friendships and relationships.

Our modern man-made things bring many good things as we have just been thinking, but they cannot and should not take the place of God in our lives.

Because God, I believe, still cares for us in exactly the same way as he cared for the Israelites returning from exile. He longs for us to trust him, to talk to him, to let him show us the way He has for our lives.

He longs to give us the strength we need for our lives in all their ups and downs.

Perhaps we know this deep down, we feel it must be right, we can sense that things that mankind can make can never really take the place of God, but, like those Israelites looking at everything that had happened to them, we see bad things happening in our world or in our lives and we think how can God possibly care? How could a caring God let all this happen? How can he let all those people, young and old die in the war in Syria or those families at a wedding in Turkey? How could he let 5 young friends drown at Camber Sands on a daytrip to the seaside? How could he let all those people die this week in the earthquake in Italy?  How could he let my friend die young and not live to see old age?

Well, these are not easy questions and no one should ever suggest that there are easy answers.

But what I would suggest is that just as those Israelites had been through so much in their exile and slavery and yet Zechariah still shouted out that God cared for them in spite of all of that, so I prefer the answer, echoed in the experience of countless people over thousands of years, that God cares for us through our suffering and comes alongside to give us hope even in our darkest times. That was Zechariah’s message to the Israelites. God still cares. God still deeply cares.

Don’t look in the wrong direction.

So wherever you find yourself, and whatever you have been through or are going through, whatever you face, perhaps the message from this passage today is that God still cares so much for you. Don’t you in return trust too much in other things that will eventually let you down. Trust in Him. Be surprised just when you think the future looks impossible. He is there on the road ahead of you and will make you strong..

Amen