Back to Basics:Meeting the world-a meditiation on Psalm115 & Colossians 4.
{This message was given on 28th. August 2005 at St. David’s Anglican Church Prince Albert.}
Colossians 4: Reaching the world
“Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to thy name give the glory.”
In your series,” Back to Basics” today, I have been invited to speak on meeting the world. I do not have the gift of evangelism, nor even the gift of salesmanship. I do like to be a people watcher and am pleased that God has put me in a job where I can listen to people’s stories and heartaches, and interpret them to others. I hope and pray that in my weakness, you may be made strong.
We have to start, of course with those comfortable words of the beloved apostle- John 3v16: “God so loved the world that He gave us His only son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but should have eternal life.” God loved the world that he gave the life of Jesus for our life, that we might live permanently with Him. The basis for doing this is not what we can achieve in good works, whether religious or philanthropic, nor the size of our sacrifices, nor our birth or culture, but our belief, that is to say, our conscious choices to trust Jesus as saviour and Lord.
It all seems so simple, and that is, quite frankly, because it is so simple. You give your life, in all its imperfections, and Jesus gives His life. The problem is that somehow it doesn’t quite seem to cut it. I picture this as a bridge across a river, like the one you know here only the river has flooded. The bridge still stands, but the floods have come and washed out the trestles leading to the bridge.
Modern man does not understand where “God”, the creator, fits into a universe that is inanimate. To look at a world with increasing natural calamities, where the entire cycle of nature seems to be cruel, at least to sentimental animal lovers, makes it inconceivable that God is at the same time, loving, powerful and involved. These two issues you have already dealt with during this season. Even having accepted the free gift of eternal life, perhaps at an alpha course, it takes a major step to understand how coming here to meet with God’s people frequently is important, and another for this belief apply to day to day life, whether as prime minister or as one of those who have to sit on the wall outside city hall, because the rich people have taken away their seats.
Psalm 115 introduces us to three storms that wash away the trestles, three aspects of the problem, compromisev4-10 covetousnessv14-15, and cynicismv16-18. “We do not worship idols, but they are windows to the spiritual world beyond.” I have heard these words or very similar ones from those who bow down to Eastern Gods, images of the saints and Victorian engineering. All of them, they are dead, indeed less than dead for while a hamburger and fries once had life and will be part of a life again, they never had life.
Why grasp and fret for things when you know that your God is mindful of you? Where John Wesley first came to minister in North America at Fort Frederica, only one or two families would support him in the Anglican Church there, yet now the church thrives and the town is a National Historic site with only the foundation of the shops remaining. John Wesley said that revival could not long continue, because as God blessed his people materially, they would become steadily more negligent of Him.
How cynical to say that God can have heaven if men can have earth (verse16) or that because we do not hear or see them, that the dead do not praise the Lord (verse17). So like sea spray at the coast, or ivy in the south or snow in the north, compromise with idols, covetousness for the things of the world and cynicism to the things of God, first cover and suffocate and then destroy the flow of the Spirit in our lives as the parable of the sower teaches us .
{This is the story which I told the bible study group on Monday. It was deleted from the sermon as preached} One day my parents decided that they needed a shed. My grandfather suggested that they should use driftwood, but instead they purchased a kit, as large as a small station and as well built as furniture. It was laid out on the floor of our garage, and it was noticed that there didn’t seem to be sufficient components. They contacted the company, and received the reply,” You have been sent enough parts to complete this project, yet none the less we send you the same small components package.”
The bible is all that you need. This building and the prayer book exist only to shine a spotlight onto this bible and to amplify what it says, and the authors of both said so explicitly. Come with me to three Anglican cathedrals in three continents. One practises Tai Chi in the basement, one has a Buddha in a nook behind the altar, one gives thanks in its liturgy of the prayers of the people for the role Mohamed plays in bringing people to God in other cultures, a statement equally offensive to devotees of Islam and Jesus alike. You have been given all that you need. {I was asked afterwards whether I regarded all three actions as being equally deplorable, and the answer is no, they are in increasing order of severity: i.e. putting a Buddha in a nook to the side of the altar in the sanctuary, as part of a religious art exhibition is worse than holding Tai Chi for exercise but less severe than altering the liturgy for the main communion service of the week to deny the uniqueness of Christ.}
And now, at last, to the passage in hand, Colossians. In your series, back to basics so far you have visited Athens, where the idol worship invited the breaking of the second of the ten commandments; Rome, where the persecution of the Christians and the events in the circus invited the population to break the sixth commandment, Ephesus where people went to break the seventh commandment and now we reach Colossi, where we go to break the tenth commandment.
For Colossi was a great port, with a statue, one of the wonders of the ancient world, between whose legs ships could sail. Copper from Cornwall, Ivory from Congo and silk from China could all be bought in Colossi, the mall of the ancient world. Legend would have it that when St. Thomas set out to found our partner diocese in India, he passed this way. In short, a very modern city, a London or New York of its time, and we will now go there to see how to respond to the very modern pressures of compromise, covertness and cynicism.
In verse 2 of Colossians 4, we are told to continue steadfast in prayer. Before we talk to men about God, we should talk to God about men. It is easy to start to pray, and yet fail to continue.
“Be watchful with thanksgiving,” it continues. Thankfulness will help to counter both covetousness and cynicism and will remind us of God’s blessings. Before you talk to an angry man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, you are a mile away and you have his shoes, great reasons for thanksgiving indeed.
Verse three reminds us that, even having prayed and successfully conveyed the truth, bad things can still happen, as they did to the Apostle Paul, and that our should still be clear rather than trying to compromise and come up with a form of words that somehow makes everybody happy. Yet, in the long term, what seems bad at the time may turn out to be good later, for if the prayers of Paul and Titus had been immediately answered as they would have wished we would not have this scripture in front of us today at all.
The third word which follows is practice. Paul ask his readers to pray for open doors for declaring the mystery of the gospel, and makes clear in verse 4 that like any other important skill, to improve and become competent takes multiple repetitions that is practice.
The forth word is prepare, and is summarised in verse 5. Build good relations with outsiders (and with those in the church as well, although that falls a little outside the limits of today’s reading) by our conduct and our words. Christians may not know how to behave but non Christians will be delighted to tell them; there are jokes you cannot tell, even though they are really, really funny, and places you cannot go. But, be yourself for you cannot fool God, or your close friends, or those who are around you for long. One of the gifts we have is the ability to have fun without being a chemistry experiment or destructive of things or reputations.
The next word is preserves. Salt preserves from decay and adds flavouring to bland but healthy food.
Salt prevents exhaustion and acts as a disinfectant. But surely here, what salt does is to make our hearers thirsty.
{Donna Willer's suggestions during coffee afterwards have been incorporated here.}
Praise, Prayer, Practice, Prepare, Preservation,Prevents,and now for our final word-Proceed. Verse six says, “That you may know how you ought to answer every one.” There is no one in your life that is exempt from your influence for the gospel.” You can even pray for the people on the posters in your children’s bedrooms, or for their on going influence if they are dead. As the early Prayer Book included a prayer for the Lord Chancellor, that was the impresario for the court entertainment and the censor of the theatre outside, we have good Anglican precedents here. But this also goes for the people that you meet and talk to every day. Try to use people’s names and make transient eye contact.
{In the sermon as delivered, but not as written, there were references made to Luke 17 because this had been read as the gospel. These were the importance of thankfulness after healing, the fact that some thing bad had happened (catching leprosy) which leads to something unimaginably better (meeting Jesus) and the fact that Jesus tells them to be obedient to the high priests, even though those priests are trying to undermine his teaching and are plotting to kill Jesus. This also fulfils scripture in Leviticus on what to do when leprosy is healed which must have seemed ludicrously irrelevant in a society where leprosy was never healed.}
Yet, I am afraid even now, that you will go out from here thinking that every word and every action must be preaching. You came here rightly expecting peace and equipping and I will not send you out vaguely feeling guilty and tense trying to be what God is not calling you to be. At times, in fact for some of us most of the time, we are called to be like John the Baptist to be in the desert, preparing the way of the Lord. James Ryle would say “Don’t punt for goal every play,” but I would say “Don’t try to dig up potatoes every time you go into the garden.” And in the words from Psalm 115 with which we started this message “Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to thy name give glory.”
In 1878 the first railway in the West between what would become Minneapolis and what would become Winnipeg was complete. It had been built by demobbed soldiers from the civil war, emancipated slaves, refugees from Norway and Ireland. But after several dignitaries daughters had unsuccessfully tried to hammer in the last spike, one fifteen year girl in a frilly dress hammered it in, for she was the daughter of the foreman. Many of us are labourers in the gospel, like the men who worked on the railway, not knowing who might finish the task.
{This account comes from the book” Van Horne’s Railway” by Omer Lavallee,for many years the chief archivist at Canadian Pacific.}
I am a Londoner, and my wife has greater claims to that name. I have lived in and know this city in all its moods, from its most refined to its most vibrant, from its happiest to its most grim. None have been more zealous in riding its buses and underground. “Outright terror, bold and brilliant” so said the poster on the number thirty bus, blown up outside the British Medical Association. Yet, for no human reason, the second wave failed to detonate. As a Londoner, I thank you for your prayers and support over this summer, prayers that have made truly made a difference. In its weakness, be assured that the tiny but not insignificant church in London is praying for us in our present trials too. ,” .