Sermons

I wonder if you have pictures, photos around your house. And if you do, whose pictures do you have? Do you have pictures of yourself, pictures of family members, group photos, pictures of friends or family members who live far away? If so, you have to decide which picture is the one you want to put up. Are you going to put up a picture from a beach holiday a couple of years ago, or a picture from a few Christmases back, a graduation photo? Which is your favourite photograph that you’re going to display for each person you want to have around?

Terms and conditions apply. If ever you listen to an advert for something on the radio, maybe for a holiday or a free trial or something, they've only got ten seconds, because they pay by the second. So they speak twice as fast as they need to. And at the end they say “terms and conditions apply,” which basically means, “We've covered ourselves. There are a few things you ought to know about this offer before you take it up, and you ought to find out what those are, but we didn't want to waste our time and our precious advert slot to go into the small print.”

Well, as I grew up, it was the era when the sitcom Friends was the thing to watch. For those of you who haven't met it, which is probably not very many of you, the setting for this particular sitcom was six young adults in their mid-twenties, trying to navigate the joys and the distresses of life in New York — frequently those distresses caused by their own misadventures — and then seeking to find strength and equipment to navigate those challenges with the help of the friendship of one another.

We live in a culture that values things that are instant. Perhaps it's the appeal of instant credit — you seem to be buying a pizza, would you like to pay for this in three instalments, and with one click you can say yes, and you've just opened up another line of credit for yourself. Or instant messaging — a way to keep in touch, share photographs and text messages with people on the other side of the world in under a second. Or even instant coffee — now, at that point, I just say no, there are some limits to the scope of the culture of the instant.

We live in a world that loves money. I think that’s fairly self-evident, but here is one little illustration of that. Consider this phrase, and what someone is most likely to mean when it’s used: “John is better off than other people.” What do we mean by that? It probably refers to the fact that John has more money than other people. Or if we describe somebody as not quite so well off, we mean they have a little less money than some other people do.

It is the custom in the movies to give someone, before you kill them, the opportunity to do one final thing, or maybe say some final words. Or perhaps you want to offer someone the opportunity to choose what they will have as their final meal. Do you have a dying wish? Well, apologies for sounding a little macabre at this point in the summer, but if that was you in that position, what would be your single dying wish — the last thing that you would like to do before you die?

John Bunyan was a Baptist minister in a town called Bedford, a town which is in the news this week for all the wrong reasons. In the year 1678 he published a book called The Pilgrim's Progress. If you've never met it before, it proved to be hugely popular as soon as it was published, and indeed has been translated into multiple languages, and since it was published in 1678 has never once been out of print.

It is a joy if you find yourself in the privileged position of giving someone good news. You know that the person you're speaking to is going to want to hear the news you have for them, and so it is a pleasure to be the one to say it. If you work as a midwife and you get to say the words, “Congratulations, you have a healthy baby boy or baby girl” — what a joy to be the person to deliver that news.

It is increasingly the case that Britain is not an easy country within which to be a Christian. Now, sure, I realise there are far harder countries to be a Christian. I would rather be a Christian in Britain than in North Korea, for example. I’m aware of that. But compare us to some countries where it is the expected thing to do that you would go to church. If you’re anywhere else on a Sunday morning, people will start to wonder why were they not in church that day. Is something wrong with this person’s life?

One question that we are used to asking regularly is, “What do I get out of it?” Every shop, large and small, these days seems to have a loyalty card scheme. And as you go into yet another shop and you’re invited to sign up, you’re weighing up in your head: is it worth it to install yet one more app on my phone, or — if you’re old-fashioned and like a credit-card-sized piece of plastic to weigh down my wallet or purse even further so that I can’t find anything — the question that you want to know is, what do I get out of it?