Sermons

Do you believe that Jesus is alive? Alive like the person sat next to you, or across the aisle, is alive? That kind of alive? Actually alive? A living person, that if you were in the right geographical space at the same time, you could shake his hand?

Perhaps like me you long for good times to return again: the opportunity to take a holiday whenever, wherever you wish; the opportunity to meet with friends, any number of people, indoors or outdoors; the opportunity to forget face masks, to sit closer than two meters to somebody from another household. Perhaps you long for good times to return.

If you do picture for a moment the Jews of Jesus' day. they longed for good times to return.

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Well, just imagine for a moment that you paid a great price for something, only for it all to fall through, and so the result is you paid an expensive price for nothing. Perhaps at work you work for many years, very long hours, in a junior role that is really quite tough, because you’ve been promised that there is a promotion for you after, say, five years, and as four and a half years is up the company becomes bankrupt and you are made redundant. All those long years seemingly for nothing. The thing that you gave up all of that effort for never materialised. What a waste.

One of the things that’s become clear during the pandemic is that people in England long for community. They long for human, loving contact. They long for family. They long for relationships that are real. And for all that social media and Zoom and other tools in technology can achieve, ultimately people want actual friends.

Would you say that you are in need more of reassurance from God's word, or in need of challenge from God's word? I don't ask which you want; I ask which you think you most need. Both can be necessary; either can be dangerous.

In England, it would be very easy to think that most Christians don’t suffer for their faith. After all, most English Christians don’t have to suffer for their faith. It doesn’t seem normal for your faith to cause you suffering and hardship, and therefore if the climate were to change, we could easily be thrown if we were to start to suffer for our faith in this country. In fact, it’s actually normal to suffer for your faith, and the relative comfort we have in the affluent West is actually what is weird and unusual.

Being conned is a sickening experience. I don’t know whether it’s ever happened to you. As well as the financial loss, or whatever it is, there’s the feeling — that’s entirely unwarranted — of stupidity. You think to yourself, well, how did I fall for it? And it leaves you feeling almost guilty that someone was devious enough to have cheated you. Just this last week, the Royal United Services Institute said that credit card, identity, and cyber fraud are the most prevalent crimes now in the United Kingdom, costing on average £190 billion every year.

One thankless task that Anita and I have to do every year is complete a form for the Church of England entitled 'Statistics for Mission'. It's a questionnaire that we get every January that includes some questions that are really easy to answer — how many people were in church on October the fifth last year? — we just look it up. It includes some other questions that are literally impossible to answer, and we just have to put 'don't know'. But it comes around every year, and it's one of those slightly tedious tasks that just has to be done.

I thought we'd spend the next few weeks of our services together looking at this first letter of Paul to the church in Thessalonica. In six months' time I will be leaving here, and I will no doubt after I've gone be wondering how you are all getting on. Do keep in touch — you’re friends. I look forward to hearing your news: personal news, church news, and so on.