to China as a missionary, and she could feel the power there was in the simple gift of life to a cause, in the huge crowd of people believing and willing one thing and she wanted to share it. But “the difficulty is,” she said, “to what can one dedicate oneself?” I am making one suggestion to you. Do you find it worthwhile to dedicate yourself to this man, this God, to put your trust in him and what he has done, for this moment and for eternity? If you will, you may go on looking for someone, something else, or here and now you may find your faith in Christ, and fall before him in worship. This leads immediately to the third thing.
THEY GAVE
That follows doesn’t it? If worship is not to be an empty thing, it must involve giving. In the last 2,000 years a good many people have found it easy enough to pay lip service to Christ; and they have taken good care to make sure it didn’t cost them much more than their breath they used. It is easy enough, dangerously easy, to come to Church and sing “crown him with many crowns” and then go home and press down a crown of thorns upon the patient, buffeted head; a crown of bitterness, impatience, anger, envy, covetousness, lying. It is easy to worship with your tongue. But real worship means more than that. It may not always be expressed in words. Jesus you will remember was not taken in by long prayers with nothing behind them when he was on earth, and I don’t suppose he is taken in by them now. It may not mean words, but it will mean life, love, and serving his Church, and serving his hungry suffering people, giving our gifts to Christ through them. The gifts very rarely will be words, they will not often be money, because many of us haven’t got money to give; they can be help, love, sympathy, a strong arm, a push up a steep hill.
Tertullian was a stern old Roman lawyer who became a Christian towards the end of the second century AD. A stern old lawyer he remained to the end, and he was always pointing out to Christian people what claims their faith laid on them. They were not all made of the same stuff as he, and some of them remonstrated with him “But Tertullian,” they said, “we must live.” Answered Tertullian simply “Why?” Why? What on earth is the use of living if you are not serving Christ to the uttermost, if you are not giving him, not the trappings of life but life itself?
The odd thing that has been in my mind is that you could turn this sermon around. It is a sort of palindrome. They came. Yes, but he came first. That is the essence of it all, the mainspring. We simply could not come to him if he could not come to us. They worshipped, they believed. But Christian faith is not a thing that we do, but something that God does for and in us. They gave, but he had given first, and their giving was at the same time an acceptance of a gift. “God commends his love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” “We love, because he first loved us.”
“A SHOCKING CHAPTER”—Matthew 3
[Preached fourteen times between 5/21/96 at St. John’s College Durham and 6/8/08 at Esh Winning]
In the list of this term’s college chapel sermons, this one has an odd title—“The Kingdom and the River.” What has the Kingdom to do with a river? But the chapter from which we start, and I had read it through before you heard the New Testament lesson, is surely far worse, a very shocking chapter. In case you haven’t noticed it, let me point it out to you.
First it takes us to the wrong place. The river again. John the Baptist was embarking on a campaign for the moral and spiritual renewal of his people. Good: an excellent thing to do. But the people were not lacking institutions and agencies which existed for the very purpose of such renewal. There was the Temple which called to mind the presence of God himself. He would be there, not that he would not be in other places too, but here there was a promise. If his people prayed there, if they even looked toward it, he would hear their prayer. If they sought forgiveness and were penitent, if they sought deliverance from their enemies, he would hear their prayer and act.
Why did John not use the Temple? He had access to it. His father, Zechariah, had been a priest, therefore he was a priest. Why tramp around in the muddy water of the Jordan, when the Temple was available? Or if the Temple would not serve, there was the relatively new-fangled invention of the synagogue, with its weekly service of Torah, haftorah, prayer and sermon. Why not preach in the synagogue. To flout established religious custom was shocking behavior.
Well perhaps John wanted a water supply. But then—here is a second shocking thing—he proceeds to baptize the wrong people. Judaism as a religion made a good deal out of water, but baptism like John’s suggests at once the admission of proselytes. A man who had come to believe in the God of Israel and the Jewish way of life had to do three things: 1) be circumcised; 2) be baptized; 3) offer sacrifice. A woman had to be baptized. Baptism was the mark of entering the people of God. But John was offering baptism not to proselytes but to born Jews. They needed no baptism. John baptized the wrong people.
That leads to a third thing: whatever else may be said about others, he baptized the supremely wrong person—Jesus. John’s was a baptism of repentance for the remission of sins. So of all humankind, Jesus is the one person who should not have received it. John himself was aware of how wrong this was: “I need to be baptized by you and are you coming to me?” Only under pressure from Jesus himself did John agree to do what surely ought never to have been done.
Three shocking things, and we could find more if we had time to look for them. For (as you may have already guessed) I have not said all this simply to draw the conclusion: “Matthew’s is a shocking book, let’s go out and burn it.” Perhaps there is some value in these shocks, like the therapeutic use of electric shocks.
INSTITUTIONS
Religious institutions have their uses, and it’s not a good thing to get rid of them, but they are also very dangerous and you have to keep your eye on them. Temples, synagogues, college chapels, and the like. Already back in the old days of Solomon’s Temple, the Old Testament was aware of the danger. You remember Jeremiah’s bitter lament in the presence of his contemporaries: “The Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord, the Temple. You have no notion of God’s commands. You steal, murder, fornicate and you come here to the Temple and say ‘We are all right; we are delivered from our enemies’, ‘the good God he will pardon me, it is his job’.” So, says God, you’ll love your Temple, your institutions. And they did. John is perhaps less radical than that. He does not say that the Temple will be destroyed (though it was). He simply says “stay out of it; we are going down to the river and you will learn to listen to God’s Word instead of gagging them with religion.” Out of the Temple, and down to the Jordan.
I could not but be reminded of one John Wesley, who for himself would have happily stayed in the parish church and college chapel, but knew that he could not that way get the Gospel into the ears of heathen England. So, “I consented to become more vile” and he preached in fields, and marketplaces, and city squares. Would the crowds have gathered as they did if John had gone on bringing incense into the Temple as his father had done? Would there have been a revival in eighteenth-century England if Wesley had continued to enjoy his college fellowship and the regular services at Lincoln College? I think not.
I am not saying there is only one way, and at that an eighteenth-century way, of commending the Gospel in 1996. But I do know that when Christians come out of their churches and into the open they may make themselves look fools, but they also make people say “these Christians have got hold of something that means a lot to them, and they do take it seriously. Maybe there is something in it.”
Over the last fifty years, I have seen open air preaching, open air services, die out (as far as I am aware) in Durham. If we have put anything in its place I don’t know what it is. For the most part we attend our religious institutions at 11 and 6 and that’s it. Who is going to give us the shock that John the Baptist caused? Trying to answer that question brings
