NT Sermons

It’s easy to start to believe that Jesus is insignificant. Maybe some of our friends think he’s not worth much bother. Maybe it’s the media. But it’s easy to start to get worried. Perhaps he is nothing special. Perhaps he is just a figure from 2000 years ago, who had a few good ideas, and lived well, but doesn’t have much to offer for today. It’s easy for that to start to niggle you.

Do you ever feel that Christianity is a relatively small thing.

If you live in this country, in this decade, you could be forgiven for feeling that at times.

The Telegraph recently reported that numbers attending churches are increasing, but that was only news because it’s been decreasing for so long.

It can seem that lots of people used to fill our churches. Our laws used to be framed on Christian principles. But that was then and this is now.

It seems to me that our society today is driven by the 3 Rs. Rights Revenge and Relations. That’s to say, we’re driven by a concern to hold onto our Rights, we want to hold onto what is ours. We’re driven by a need for Revenge, we want to take back what should be ours. And we’re driven by loyalty to our Relations, we all have an inner circle of family and a few friends and our main task is to be loyal to them. Rights. Revenge and Relations.

I don’t know about you, but I find it depressing that honesty is so hard to come by today.

Let me give a few examples.

We’ve just come to the end of the annual party conference season, when it often seems that the leaders in all the political parties just say what they think we want to hear, and a large part of the conference is them justifying why they haven’t done something they said they would do just one year earlier.

The world we live in can be a very angry place.

This is part of what lies behind the riots of recent months. People were angry. Angry at the government. Angry at large businesses. Angry at who knows what. But when given the opportunity to form a crowd and take that anger out on something, they do so.

Sure, I know there’s more to be said than that. The looting was caused by greed, which is a different subject entirely. And we have to ask what has caused the anger. But one of the things behind the rioting was anger.

Those words of Jesus we just heard are hard words to hear. They are hard to think about. They are hard to preach on.

They are hard because Jesus is talking about two subjects that cause us more pain emotionally than just about anything else. You don’t need me to tell you how much pain there is because of adultery and divorce. The divorce rate in this country is going down. But each year, the proportion of married people who divorce is still over 1%. And each time it happens, it hurts, and the ripples of people who are hurt spread very widely.

“What’s the catch?” That’s one question I ask myself often when someone offers to give something that seems too good to be true.

Sadly, many people today don’t ask that question about the Christian faith because they think that being a Christian is the catch. Instead of saying “what’s the catch”, they ask “what’s good about that?”

Living with uncertainty is hard, is it not?

And we have a lot of uncertainty in our lives at the moment. Inflation is heading towards 5 %; unemployment is rising; oil prices are crazy, and VAT has just put up the price of almost everything. There’s a lot we don’t know about the future – our own personal future, or what the country will look like for the next 5 years. And it’s hard living with uncertainty.

Many of you will know that I try to talk to people who don’t come to church. I love to try and find out: What do they think? What do they believe? What questions are they asking?

One issue I encounter fairly regularly, as a barrier to the Christian faith, is the Old Testament. It seems a number of people find the Old Testament difficult. Perhaps the Old Testament half of the Bible is one of the things that puzzles you. If we’re honest, most of us who are Christians find it hard from time to time as well.

Do you ever wonder what it would take to make the world a better place. Less rotten? Less foolish? Less stupid? Less tasteless? Less dark? Less base?

I do. People at large would come up with a range of suggestions. Some people put their confidence in the political system. The government is there to improve things, and once a decade we change who is in power because we’re not convinced the current lot are fixing things well enough, so we try somebody else.