Trinity Church Scarborough

Have you ever had the experience of missing out on something because you were too far away? Most of us in this room live in Scarborough. I'm guessing that you have therefore had this experience, because Scarborough is a town that is far away from just about everywhere. You can drive to York and hit kind of big roads that way—it takes about an hour. Or you can get bored of that road and think, "Well, I'll go to Goole instead," and discover that takes you an hour and 20 to hit a decent-sized road. Or you can head all the way up the coast to Newcastle, and finally you get there.

Do you ever find yourself comparing yourself to other people? There is an unhealthy obsession today with drawing comparisons between our life and that of others. In part, social media fuels this. You're forever being invited to look at your life and put it on show so other people can look at your life and match up against you. So you're comparing your house with their house, your kids with their kids, your job with their job, your holiday, your food—and you can't go to a restaurant these days and enjoy a good meal without taking a photograph of it first. Why? I don't know.

Let me ask you a question: what do you make of the story of Jesus rising from the dead? This is the central reality of the Christian faith. It is the most important reality of the Christian faith. The Christian faith is grounded not in theories and ideas but in historical events that took place in real space and real time. You can put a date in the calendar; you can put GPS coordinates on the map where these things took place. And of all the events of history around which our faith revolves, the resurrection of Jesus from the dead is the central one.

How do you subdue somebody who is extremely strong? That's a question that cuts in two directions. So, on the one hand, we have arrayed against us some really mighty forces — things like suffering and death, sickness, the atrocities of war, and our own sin and selfishness that is the cause of all those things. How would we subdue those mighty things that would harm and hurt us?

A great deal gets said these days about leadership. It is not hard to find a load of books about how to be a good leader—whether that's a good leader in politics, a good leader in education, a good leader in business. There is a huge publishing industry in what makes a good leader, what kind of people should we appoint to positions of leadership, what characteristics are shown in good leadership, and what is an abuse of leadership.

Well, we've called this series in the book of Judges Hope in Dark Times. We often find ourselves in dark places in life. I mean, the obvious one at the moment is Covid, which has caused all kinds of chaos, anxiety, stress and difficulty—and in some cases, serious illness and even death.

Have you ever had the experience of Christmas of being given a present that you are not sure what it is for? You're not sure what to do with the present that you've just been given, or perhaps more exactly, you're not sure what it does for you—how it would improve your life to have this present that you've been given. Anyone for musical toilet rolls that, as you unravel the sheets, plays you the tune of Jingle Bells? You know what it does, but you're not quite sure how it improves your life. You might—pardon me for saying—it could drive you potty.

Have you ever had the experience of showing kindness to somebody, only for them to repay it to you by being nasty, unkind, or cruel? I guess many of us have known that experience. As we've been working our way through this letter of 1 Peter, thinking about what it's like to live as Christians on our way home to heaven, one truth that Peter's brought us back to again and again is that on our journey to heaven we frequently are still called upon to suffer.

Well, I am English, and we English love our sport. But we're not terribly good at it. In fact, that's my story. At school, I was particularly not good at sport. But for those of you who are not English — a good number of us here from a number of nations much better at sport than we are — let me just share with you what it's like to support England in sport.

Well, what difference does it make in practice being a Christian? For the past few weeks, we've been talking about how being a Christian is like being a foreigner. We are away from home — our true home is with the Lord Jesus — but here we live in a world where His rule is not recognised. So we're like foreigners in a foreign country. We won't fit in, and that means we need to live distinctively.