Sermon 2nd July 2017

Today, one of our Lay Readers, Simon Brindley, preaches. The reading is from

Acts 14: 1-10. 

Paul and Barnabas – thinking of the challenge not so much of atheism but of agnosticism.

The sermon slot this morning is a bit shorter than usual because after the service we have a meeting to start thinking about what is called our Parish Profile, that is the document that will set out where we have come from, who we are today and where we might like our churches to go, which will be an important part of choosing our new vicar.

So I have about 15 minutes and in 15 minutes I want to take us to 3 times and places. I want to take us first to the towns of Iconium, Lystra and Derbe, which were in what is now modern-day Turkey, in about the year AD50 with the apostles Paul and Barnabas.

Then I want to take you to England in the 1740’s, the best part of 300 years ago, with a man called John Wesley, who you may well have heard of. He was the founder of the Methodist Church.

Then I want to take you to the streets of Belfast right up to the modern day, either 2016 or 2017 I am pretty sure, with a man whose name I actually don’t know. All I do know, from Jennie’s cousin Rosemary in Northern Ireland, is that he is the brother in law of a woman called Ida Kee.

So here goes. Not only are we looking at postcards or snapshots of St Paul’s missionary journeys, but today we are doing a whistlestop tour of missionary preaching over the last 2000 years!

Paul and Barnabas had been sent out to preach about Jesus at the North East region of the Mediterranean not all that long after Jesus’ death. They would tend to go into the Jewish Synagogue wherever they got to and, essentially, announce that the Messiah the Jews had been waiting for had come in the person of Jesus Christ and that he had been killed but then raised from the dead. And they would get wildly differing reactions to this good news, both from the Jews they met and the non-Jews, the Gentiles. Some people would urge them to stay or to come back week after week and preach some more and others would pretty quickly feel very threatened and stir up hatred against them and often try to kill them. And in this week’s passage it is pretty much they same.

Paul and Barnabas have been in Antioch but driven out of there by persecution stirred up by their enemies, so they go to Iconium where they go to preach in the synagogue. Many people, Jews and Gentiles, believe, but they also meet opposition, the opposition slowly hardens into persecution, there is a plot by both Jews and Gentiles together to stone them, (that probably means to kill them) so after a lot of time spent in Iconium, they have to escape and they flee to Lystra and Derbe.

But note what is also running through all these accounts about Paul and the other apostles in Acts and that is that God is powerfully at work in the middle of all this turmoil, all this good response on the one hand and persecution on the other. And nowhere more dramatically than in Lystra where there is a man who has never walked because he was crippled from birth. But Paul sees he has faith to be healed and he is dramatically healed. Paul tells him to get up and he immediately stands up and walks. And just note that, earlier in our short passage, it is recorded that back in Iconium, the Lord witnessed to the word of his grace by granting signs and wonders to be done through Paul and Barnabas. So God is clearly and obviously at work…

Now forward about 1700 years to the England of the 1740’s.

About 25 years ago I was in a second hand bookshop in Manchester and I came across 16 dusty volumes like these in pretty poor condition but they are the works of the famous preacher John Wesley. This lot were printed about 1810, about 20 years after Wesley’s death.  I am sure you can get them in much better condition but this is actually a very interesting set, because it belonged to a Serjeant Francis Marshall of the 78^th Regiment of Foot , that was a Scottish Highland Regiment and it includes some of his own spidery writing and even a drop of what might be his own blood! Who knows whether battlefield or nosebleed! I can show you afterwards if you are interested.

The 16 volumes – I have brought along only 3 - include both Wesley’s own writings and a very detailed account of his travels all over this country and occasionally abroad, for decade after decade of the eighteenth century on series of missionary journeys, with a few companions, preaching about Jesus Christ. And it is fascinating to dip into. Because he would usually have somewhere he planned to go to, a meeting place or a gathering place outdoors and people would come to hear him who already knew something of what he had to say but also many who did not. He even sometimes went to preach in the middle of battles on the other side of the channel with bullets flying everywhere and literally hundreds of soldiers dying all round him. And like St Paul, John Wesley would get wildly differing reactions from those he preached to. Some would love it and some would hate it.  

I like the account of his first visit to Newcastle in May 1742. Immediately he arrives in the town he says never has he seen so much drunkenness, cursing and swearing even from the mouths of little children. But a day or two later he starts to preach down by the River Tyne one evening, in the poorest part of town, and says that the hillside was covered from top to bottom and, “I never saw so large a number of people together, either in Moorfields or Kensington Common.”

Time after time on his travels however, things would turn very nasty. Here is Volume II, describing his journeys from 1739 to 1750. And in just those ten years the table of contents includes persecution at Bristol, persecution in Moorfields, at Pensford, in Cornwall, persecution in Staffordshire, at Darlaston, in Cornwall, at Falmouth, near York, persecution at Plymouth, Halifax, Roughlee and Bolton.

And things often turn very nasty indeed. He might be speaking in a building, there is a mob outside whipped up by local opposition, they are throwing stones and breaking windows, they are shouting that he should be killed, they break down the doors, sticks and stones are flying, they try to drag him off and so on.

But is God at work in all this turmoil? Well listen at this. It is 1743 and Wesley is in Staffordshire when he is attacked by a mob from Walsall (apologies to anyone from that fine part of the world). The mob are shouting, “Knock his brains out! Down with him! Kill him at once”. There is complete chaos and then this happens. Wesley starts praying again and the man who just before was leading the mob against him turns to Wesley and says, “Sir I will spend my life for you, follow me and not one soul here shall touch a hair of your head.” The rest of the mob tries to get him again but eventually he gets away having lost only one flap from his waistcoat and a bit of skin from his hands. And Wesley writes, “I never saw such a chain of providences before; so many convincing proofs, that the hand of God is on every person. And he lists them one by one including, in a very long list “a lusty man just behind me who struck at me several times with a large oak stick. Had he stuck me just once on the back part of my head it would have saved him further trouble but each time the blow was turned aside, I know not how.” And another man who comes rushing through the mob, lifts his hand to strike Wesley but instead just strokes his head, saying, “What soft hair he has” and so on..

Just like Paul and Barnabas, many people listen and love what they hear, many get very angry indeed and try to kill John Wesley, but God is powerfully at work in it all.

Forward now to the present day and a Youtube video shared with me this week on Facebook by Jennie’s cousin Rosemary in Northern Ireland.  A man, almost certainly a Protestant, who I know only as the brother in law of Ida Key, according to cousin Rosemary, goes on to the streets of Belfast with a camera and asks people a simple question “Who do you think Jesus was?” Now we are not shown whether this was one of a list of questions – or what the other questions were - but the answers are both interesting and challenging and it is this that is at the heart of what I want to focus on for the remainder of my 15 minutes. Because the questioner, who without doubt if you watch the video through to the end, is wanting to share his personal faith, is not preaching openly on the streets. He is not at this point overtly challenging like St. Paul or John Wesley would have been, (although he might be more so when he shares the film of his questions on social media). Rather, in our modern society, he is probing and asking and more subtly challenging: ”Who do you think Jesus was?”

And the answers include the following:

“I’m sorry, I don’t want to go into the whole religious daft side here my man… it’s not my thing”;

“He definitely existed but he was not the Son of God”;

“The Bible blows out of proportion what he done”;

“He was the Son of God because that is what we were told at school, but I don’t really believe it myself, I am agnostic”;

“He was just some regular bloke doing magic tricks”;

“I guess I believe he was the Son of God but it does not make any real difference to me. I believe in God either way.”;

and, “I think it’s consciousness. Jesus came down from the 4^th dimension and had 32 years to achieve Christ consciousness, which he did. That’s what I believe.”

Interestingly the ones who probably get closest to Christian teaching are almost certainly Hindus. “He taught about love and forgiveness. He was the living proof of it and that is why he is worshipped as a god. And if we follow him we will all be gods.” That is much deeper thinking than most of the dozen or so others in this film.

Because rather than outright violent opposition, what Christians are perhaps more likely to get today is just disinterest or rather vague uncertainty or unwillingness to commit either way. This could be seen as a more difficult environment than one where you at least know who is certainly for you and who is certainly against.

So what can we say about that? What do we do faced with just lack of interest or what is called agnosticism – which is essentially uncertainty - as opposed to the clear opposition of outright anger or atheism. And the answer I am going to offer, in the limited time I have left, is this.

What without doubt motivated Paul and Barnabas and certainly John Wesley and I would imagine probably also the brother in law of Ida Kee, is a desire to share what they have experienced and know to be a living reality to them. Faith is a mixture not just of accepting that what we hear about Jesus makes sense to us but also our growing personal experience of the living God at work in our hearts, in our consciences and in our lives and the lives of those we know.

My view is that what we increasingly need to be prepared to do in our modern society is both to understand clearly what it is we believe – and here we may all take lessons I think from people of other faiths whose clarity about what they believe may sometimes be better than many people in the so-called Christian West - but also to be able to talk about our own personal experience of God at work in our lives, whatever that might be for us. I can’t think of a better way myself to communicate our faith at a time when faith is, arguably, in crisis.

And should we expect God to work mightily like he did for Paul with that healing and in the remarkable ways he protected John Wesley? Well what I say  is that God will work as He knows best but we should not be surprised if He does, as He has not changed. God knows what He doing and, in dramatic ways or small ways, watch out for Him at work in the middle of all our modern day turmoils, whether caused by outright opposition or disinterest or uncertainty, watch out for Him to be at work on the streets of Belfast, the streets of Cardiff, the streets of Glasgow, the streets of Manchester, the streets of London, North, South, East and West!

You may have seen the recent poll by ComRes for the Sunday Telegraph in which 21% of 11-18 year olds describe themselves as active followers of Jesus and 13% say they attend church regularly. I know you have to treat surveys with care, but our faith is not on the way out. It is going very much to be part of the life of our society for this century and way, way beyond and we need to know what to say in the turmoil.

Amen