‘They are a team of Neville
nobodies’ that’s how I heard one person describe Leicester City football club,
and the amazing news he was commenting on is that this week those Neville
nobodies won the English Premier division. At the beginning of the season they
were 5000:1 outsiders. In football terms
the club paid peanuts for their players, in fact there are clubs who have paid
more than Leicester City paid for their whole team just for one marquee player.
How could little ol’ Leicester City beat all these other star studied top line
clubs? Well the same commentator who called them Neville nobodies said…”they
didn’t have the star players, but each player knew what part they needed to
play for the team to fulfill its vision and goal and they played that part. They
were not in it for themselves but played for each other, their manager and the
club”, their manager was able to unify this group of rejects and misfits that
he’d given a second chance, and focus them on the common goal and the common
good. It’s not often you turn on the
radio or switch on the TV news and the lead story is such a great sermon
illustration about being God’s Spirited people.
Between Easter and Pentecost which is next week we’ve been
working our way through the scriptures in the New Testament that deal with what
we call the gifts of the Holy Spirit. We’ve seen that God has given gifts to his
people in Christ to empower, enable and equip them…Or more correctly that God
has given to empower, enable and equip us… to witness to Jesus Christ, to
serve, to be built up together into maturity in the fullness of Christ, that
God speaks and moves through us in a diversity of ways, and that we are the
body of Christ, embodying Christ in the world. Each of these passages have had
a list of gifts of the Holy Spirit, each list is different, they are not designed to be definitive or exhaustive,
they are there to tell us about the gifts in the context of important teaching
on what it means to be the Church together.
Today we get a fresh perspective on the gifts of the Holy
Spirit, all the other times the gifts are mentioned it is Paul who is speaking,
but here we have Peter mentioning them. In the other instances Paul is writing
to a specific church dealing with a specific issues, whereas Peter still
writing to deal with specific issues is writing a more general letter, to
Jewish Christians scattered throughout the provinces in Asia minor. The passage
we had read to us this morning comes in the last part of Peter’s letter as a
general exhortation and so acts well for us as a general summary and
encouragement. Like we saw with the football team it puts the gifts of the Holy
Spirit in terms of a common vision for the church and a call to use them for
the common good.
Let’s start with common vision… because Peter starts and
finishes with vision; we just might not see it when he starts because he starts
“The end of all things is near.” So we are more likely to see a picture in our
minds of a scraggly street person, slightly wild eyed, definitely unhinged and
out of touch, standing on a street corner, with a sandwich board, proclaiming
‘the end is nigh’, and it puts us off. Wayne
Grudem puts it into perspective when he says that Peter is thinking in terms of
redemption history rather than just world history. By that he means with the
coming of Christ, his death and his resurrection and the sending of the Holy
Spirit, God has done all that is needed for his salvation plan to be completed
‘Jesus words on the cross were it is finished’, God’s kingdom is come,
theologians use the technical term, it’s been inaugurated, the same word we use
for the swearing in of a new president, the reign of Christ has begun… but Christ
also said he ‘would come back’, and we live with the tension that God’s kingdom
is still to come, in the Lord’s Prayer we pray ‘Thy Kingdom come, they will be
done on earth as it is heaven’. We look for what has started to be finished, or
fulfilled, and the technical word is consummated, like we talk of peoples love
and unity being completed in marriage. One of the metaphors in the New
Testament talking of Christ’s return is that of a bride groom Christ coming for
his bride the church. They are betrothed to each other this marriage has been
inaugurated, but it awaits the consummation, when the two become one. But between those two times, the bride
readies herself for that time.
That vision does not mean that we are ‘All heavenly minded
and of no earthly use”, or that we live in some sort of out of touch fantasy
world just waiting for that train to glory to take us out of here. Peter says
that it should cause us to be alert and of sober mind so that you may pray.” Perhaps
when Peter says be alert here so we can pray he is remembering back to the
garden of Gethsemane when he was invited to stay awake and pray with Jesus,
because the hour had come, but he had fallen asleep. It’s easy for us in the
on-going life and millennia of time passing to lose focus and faith in Jesus
Christ and thy kingdom come. We are to live in a way that shows the world what
it looks like to live where Christ reigns, and let that overflow into the world
around us, to overcome the destruction of sin, and lostness in people’s lives
and to transform the injustice and brokenness in our world.
Peter then calls his readers to live that vision out as the
church in terms of the common good. Remember as you look behind me that the
symbol of our Presbyterian church is the burning bush, and it’s an image from
our stain glass windows I’ve used that image to reinforce that Peter is speak to us as well as his first
readers.
Firstly that it is a call to love each other deeply, because
love covers a multitude of sins. A Kingdom of God vision, a Christ vision calls
us to be a community together: To love one another. Peter is real enough to
acknowledge that it’s not easy just like it’s not easy to get a group of
football players with their own ego’s, foibles, ambitions and failing together
it is hard for us to come together for the common good because we too are all
broken and sinful people. So we need to offer the same radical grace, love and
forgiveness to one another that we have received in Christ. We belong together
we are team. There will be hurts and wrongs and things that really, really hurt
and get in the way and threaten to derail us, but we are grow deeper in our
love so we can work through those things. Again I wonder if Peter here isn’t
remembering a question he asked Jesus recorded in Matthew 18. How many times
must I forgive my brother, Seven times? To which Jesus replied ‘no seventy
times seven’. Now before you whip out your phones and go look at the calculator
app, In pre calculator days it was supposed to be a ridiculous number to
remember all those slights and hurts, and keep an account of them, it would
consume us. Just like in 1 Corinthians 12 that we looked at last week we should
seek the better way… love.
Alongside that Peter calls for offering hospitality to one
another without grumbling. In the ancient near east as is often the case today,
you expected to get something for what you gave, hospitality was a way of
getting status. Here Peter calls us to open our homes and our lives to one
another. One of the great barriers to genuine Christian love is the doors to
each other’s houses, if we limited our involvement with each other as church to
Sunday worship is that loving one another, it’s as we get into the reality of
each other’s lives that genuine love happens. That gifts develop and flourish
because we need God’s enabling to share his love with each other. That’s why I
believe small groups are important in a church… On a very practical level the
best place to start using your gifts and see them develop is in the setting of
a small home group or life group. They are a safe place to develop and
experiment. The first time I spoke in tongues in front of anyone else, and I
sensed I had a word for someone and taught people and lead was in a small
group. We actually try and have the level of fellowship and pastoral care that
can happen in a small group be expressed in a larger group like this… What it
does is often limit the size a group can be to feel that. Churches that grow in
size need small groups to be the glue factor.
Once Peter has got those two things sorted common vision and
common good he then turns to talk about how we use our gifts. In very general
terms he again says that to live out of this vision of the Kingdom of God is to
use what we have been given to glorify God. To use them out of Deeping love and
generous hospitality is to use them in a way that does bring praise to God. The
list he gives isn’t very large or descriptive, but of all the lists is the most
comprehensive. If your gift is to speak do it, if it is to serve then do it. Can
I have a commercial break here and say just maybe this team is sponsored by
Nike. We have been given these gifts by God so we should use them for God. The parable of the tenants comes to mind
where the servants are given amounts of money, and the faithful servants invest
it and use it to make more, the unfaithful servant who does not know what his
master is like, hides it.
To Speak covers all the gifts of divine utterance we’ve seen
apostleship, prophecy, evangelism, teaching, encouraging, words of wisdom,
words of knowledge, tongues and their
interpretation, remember this not exhaustive. Pater says we should do these
things as if we are speaking the word of God, these things come from our
knowing and being shaped and changed by encountering God’s word by ‘listening
‘to Jesus and putting it into practise.
To serve covers all the other gifts, healings ,
administration, pastoring, leadership, caring, mercy, again not exhaustive, but
again in all we do as well as all we say we seek to glorify God. WE are to do
that in the strength that God gives. We may see a lot of these gifts as our
natural talents, but as we are new creations in Christ, the Holy Spirit takes
those things and recreates them in us. If we rely on our own strength it hard
for them to achieve that God wants, but if we use them trusting in God he can
use them to the glory of Jesus Christ. I think that is one of the reasons Peter
starts his exhortation about common vision and common good by talking about
prayer, because it is in that relationship with God that we are equipped and
energised to serve.
Peter finishes with common vision in a way that we can
understand, with what we call a doxology, a short hymn of praise ‘in all things
God may be praised through Jesus Christ. To him be the glory and the power for
ever and ever Amen.’ The gifts of the Holy Spirit are given to be used for the
glorification of Jesus Christ, sometimes the teams with the most gifted players
don’t win because players might think their gifts belong to the individual,
that it all about them. Not so in the kingdom of God, in the Church as we’ve
worked our way through the different times they are mentioned in scripture we
see the focus is on serving, on the common good, they are there so that God
maybe praised through our witness to Christ. If we all play our part then it
turns us into a winning team. Just like with English Premier league it’s not an
easy road, although you’d think Peter’s letter might finish on that triumphant
Amen, he goes on to talk about the
churches having to deal with suffering and persecution.
This passage starts
with a vision of Christ: God achieving his salvation plans and purposes in
Christ and his immanent return, and finishes with a vision of Christ: that in
all things, encompassing the whole of life, no sacred secular split, no work
life, home life, church life compartmentalization, that God would be praised
through Jesus Christ. The church starts and finishes with a vision of Christ,
now as if in a glass darkly, then face to face, it is our purpose… being
witnesses to Christ, it’s what calls us to be about serving… it’s what calls us
on to play our part to use our gifts is that vision of Christ… that is the real
challenge for us… it is what changes us as group of misfits and Neville nobodies, given a second chance and new
life in Christ, into God’s spirited people.
as a response to this message we finsiehd our service with the hymn 'thine be he glory risen conquering son' a communal call to affirm our common vision of Christ glorified. This isn't us by the way...
No comments:
Post a Comment