Howard Carter is a Presbyterian minister in Whangarei New Zealand. In this blog he reflects on God, life, the scriptures, family, Church and church planting, film and media and other stuff. Join him as he reflects on the Journey.
Tuesday, October 30, 2018
renewal of hope (haggai 2:1-9) Video of sermon translated into korean.
I had the privilege of preaching at "the Lord's Church Auckland' a Korean Presbyterian Church on Sunday and it was a challenge to be translated into Korean by Revd Choi Jung Han...
Thursday, October 25, 2018
Light in the dark: A reflection in pictures... My devotions for today without words... well I've put the words in to explain it.
Just a wee reflection on light and dark.. maybe a bit cheesy but hopefully helpful as it was for me.
The motif of light and dark is pervasive in the scriptures. Jesus calls himself the 'light of the world' (John 8:12). John speaks of the incarnation as being the light shining in the darkness (john 1) We are invited to let our light shine before humanity to the glory of God our Father (Matthew 5:15). God himself is seen as light in 1 John 1:3.
My hobby at the moment is photography the practise of capturing light, and at the moment I'm exploring black and white photography and I carry my camera (not just my phone camera) with me where ever I go...
On my way to work I stopped off at the supermarket and was captivated by the light coming into a walkway from the underground carpark... it was a light well well lit... The architect did a good job... In fact I found myself says well this rocks.. and if it was a rock band it would be the white stripes... (dad Joke).
Then I walked into church this morning, still thinking of light and shadow and at the front of our sanctuary I was drawn to the light from our spier shining down on the cross... once again the architect had done a good job... But I felt God saying in a very visual way... focus on me, on the cross.. this dark place that is in actual fact the light of the world... focus on me I am the light for your life...
I took another photo (trying to be arty) of the church bathed in light and shadow.For me it talks of the ways in which we can knowledge of God's light from creation represented by the palm tree in our sanctuary and also a symbol of a person who delights in the word of God from psalm 1, and the ultimate way in which we can know God's presence and goodness… Jesus Christ, his incarnation and through the cross.
One the way out of the church I was captivated by the light coming through the windows round the top of the walls of the church and the light simply shining through on the very everyday block walls and mechanical window opener... and I thought this is my prayer in response to the Cross... Lord let your light shine in my darkness...
Then into my office and I noticed the light coming through the blinds (and the dirty window) and thought even here Lord let your light shine and guide my work...
The motif of light and dark is pervasive in the scriptures. Jesus calls himself the 'light of the world' (John 8:12). John speaks of the incarnation as being the light shining in the darkness (john 1) We are invited to let our light shine before humanity to the glory of God our Father (Matthew 5:15). God himself is seen as light in 1 John 1:3.
My hobby at the moment is photography the practise of capturing light, and at the moment I'm exploring black and white photography and I carry my camera (not just my phone camera) with me where ever I go...
On my way to work I stopped off at the supermarket and was captivated by the light coming into a walkway from the underground carpark... it was a light well well lit... The architect did a good job... In fact I found myself says well this rocks.. and if it was a rock band it would be the white stripes... (dad Joke).
Then I walked into church this morning, still thinking of light and shadow and at the front of our sanctuary I was drawn to the light from our spier shining down on the cross... once again the architect had done a good job... But I felt God saying in a very visual way... focus on me, on the cross.. this dark place that is in actual fact the light of the world... focus on me I am the light for your life...
I took another photo (trying to be arty) of the church bathed in light and shadow.For me it talks of the ways in which we can knowledge of God's light from creation represented by the palm tree in our sanctuary and also a symbol of a person who delights in the word of God from psalm 1, and the ultimate way in which we can know God's presence and goodness… Jesus Christ, his incarnation and through the cross.
One the way out of the church I was captivated by the light coming through the windows round the top of the walls of the church and the light simply shining through on the very everyday block walls and mechanical window opener... and I thought this is my prayer in response to the Cross... Lord let your light shine in my darkness...
Then into my office and I noticed the light coming through the blinds (and the dirty window) and thought even here Lord let your light shine and guide my work...
Sunday, October 21, 2018
Honesty to God in the midst of dispair: reflections on Psalm 88 (psalm 88, 2 Peter 5:6-9)
We may be more used to the idea of darkness as a
friend from that Simon and Garfunkel classic the sound of silence with its
opening line “hello darkness my old friend, I’ve come to talk with you again”…
than the closing line of a psalm, but that is exactly how psalm 88 finishes ..with
the psalmist saying darkness…darkness is my closest friend. It is according to
EM Blaiklock the ‘saddest and darkest psalm in the whole psalter. IT is one
wail of sorrow from beginning to end.” You could say that from go to woe… well
it’s just all woe. Another commentator says… its uniqueness is in its
bleakness. “Psalm 88 is unmatched in its tone of darkness and despair”. The only glimmer of light is the first line, “Lord,
you are the God who saves me”, kind of like the last comforting rays of the
sunset before the long dark night envelops the psalmist as he waits for God.
Yet, Psalm 88 is as canonical as Psalm 23. One of the
amazing things about the psalms is that within them the whole of human
experience is raised up before God. AS
such it is “proper that it should contain the record of an hour so dark that no
relief comes” (EM Blaiklock). From the introduction to this psalm we see that
it was put to a tune, it was a song that was designed for corporate worship, so
it was meant not only as a personal expression of suffering and waiting for God
to act but as a corporate one as well, drawing together people to acknowledge a
shared pain and longing and disquiet. I could imagine the exiles by the rivers
of Babylon singing this sort of psalm as they wept, as they remembered Zion. It
reverberates with the cry of people who have suffered oppression down through
the ages.
It echoes the cries of
people of faith who have wrestled with unanswered prayer. In the midst of
running an international prayer movement, Pete Greig’s wife suffered a serious
medical problem and it seemed no amount of prayer helped. He wrote a book about
this experience called, ‘God on Mute”. In it he includes an appendix called
“heroes of the faith and unanswered prayer”. It lists quotes from biblical and
historical heroes of the faith as they have wrestled with suffering and the
seeming silence of heaven. Missionary to China, Hudson Taylor, on hearing about
the massacre of 58 of his missionaries and 21 children… ‘I cannot read; I
cannot think; I cannot even pray; but I can trust” St john of the Cross…
“the Dark Night of the Soul… in this time of dryness, spiritual people undergo
great trials… they believe that spiritual blessings are a thing of the past and
that God has abandoned them”. Mother Theresa “ I feel that God does not want
me, that God is not God, and that God does not exist.” CS Lewis reflecting on the
death of his wife… “what chokes every prayer and every hope is the memory of
all the prayers Joy and I offered and all the false hopes we had… step by
step we were led up the garden path.’ Time after time, when he seemed most
gracious he was really preparing the next torture.” But these people are
heroes of the faith, they are people of great faith. If we
are honest, as followers of Jesus, in a good but fallen world, Psalm 88 is our
song as well, not that we have lost our faith, that we do not trust God, but
that at some stage in our spiritual journey there is a good chance we have
found ourselves in that dark place of psalm 88.
Maybe that’s not the stuff you want to hear on a long holiday
weekend, but in our season of prayer this year we are looking at surprising
spiritual disciplines, and Psalm 88 invites us to look at honesty in prayer as
a spiritual discipline. It is raw and its real, and I don’t want to do it a
disservice by just turning it as a text book for praying when it’s difficult,
or making it a series of points, dispensing a couple of platitudes and pat
answers. So these are more just
hopefully helpful reflections.
In fact the psalm comes from a place where there seems
to be no simple answer, it’s part of the wisdom literature in the Hebrew
Scriptures that wrestles with the question of evil, why bad things happen to
good people. It has many similarities with the book of Job, the Psalmist is
sick and facing death and disaster, he feels like Job, that God is unjustly
turned away from him and he finds no comfort in friends and neighbors, in fact
they simply add to his suffering. While there are good theological answers to
the question of suffering and evil in the end the people of God resort to
poetry and song to bring out the depth of that suffering.
The psalm is
written by Heman the Ezrahite, and when I read that I couldn’t help thinking
about another He-man. The Maters of the Universe was a range of toys put out by
Mattel in the 1980’s. It was the first range of toys that a comic book range,
animated TV show and film were written around and produced to specifically
market the toys. The key hero was He-man and his catch cry was “I have the
Power” he was unrealistically muscled and was marketed as the “the strongest
man in the universe”, able to battle evil and injustice in his own strength, or
at least with the help of a magic sword. But that is a plastic toy, a made up myth, maybe the first ever myth of
western consumerism, simply to sell product it’s not a reality. We can end up
having a plastic unreal faith, with no real substance and depth. Part of the honesty of prayer as a spiritual
discipline, is to recognize times in our lives, and situations that leave us
perplexed and feeling like our prayers simply echo off the ceiling and go no
further than our voice can carry. We are used to hiding our doubts and
questions, our wondering about the power and goodness of God. We need to be
willing to be like Heman the Ezrahite, not He-man the figurine, and cry out in
those times to God., strength comes from honesty… I think that is what the
recent openness about mental health issues and struggles is teaching us again.
One of the things this psalm does is allow us to know
we are not alone in wrestling with God, we are not alone in facing seemingly
insurmountable difficulties, we are not alone in feeling alone and unloved. We
are not alone in still having faith and trusting in God even in the face of
what may seem like God’s absence.
Eighty eight is what Walter Brueggemann calls a psalm
of disorientation, when what we believe about God does not equate with what we
are experiencing,” as U2 say in their song Peace
on Earth “when hope and history won’t rhyme”. The Psalmist sums it up well in verse 7 by saying that “you have overwhelmed me with all your waves”.
You get the picture of being caught by wave after wave, till you are struggling
for breath and can’t find which way is up.
The second thing is that even in the absence of an
answer from God the psalmist does not abandon his hope. As we said before the
only glimmer of light in this psalm is in the first line “lord, you are the God
who saves me”. What enables the Psalmist to continue in his dark place is what
he knows about the person and the character of God. What he knows from the
scriptures and history of God’s dealing with his people and what he may have
experienced in his own life. That is the call to us as well, what we know of
God’s goodness, what we have seen in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus
Christ, the promise of the Holy Spirit’s presence with us, is not changed by
the situation, it is not voided like a dodgy warranty by our emotions and
feelings, it is not made untrue by our
personal experience. Pete Grieg says that during his time of unanswered prayer
he even tried being an atheist, but he didn’t make a good atheist because he
kept telling God he didn’t believe in him anymore.
What shapes our understanding of the world is not our
experience of it, good or bad, but our understanding of God. Our prayer life
needs to resound with and be shaped and directed by our understanding of God
through the reading and study of scripture. Martin Luther in a letter to his
barber talked about the fact that he does not trust himself to pray his own
prayers but each day his prayer came out of his scripture reading, alongside
that he said that he used the Lord’s Prayer as the model for his prayer. It is
this finding ourselves deeply rooted in the biblical understanding of God that
enables to wrestle with the sense of his absence in the hard and dark times. It
does not lessen our experience or our pain or disorientation rather it allows
us to move through that to a reorientation and a deeper faith.
The other thing is the psalmist’s sense that God is
not answering does not stop him from praying. He has a regular discipline of
morning and evening prayer. Day and night he cries to God I says in verse
2. “I call to you, Lord, every day; I spread my hands out to you”, in verse 9, “but
I cry for help, Lord, in the morning my prayer comes before you.” In verse 13. Keeping that relationship is of
central importance to him, regardless of the outcome. That is the way that
Walter Bruggeman talks of another type of Psalm within the psalter, psalms of
reorientation, where people of faith have wrestled with the question and the
lack of answer and in it they have found that some peace and comfort is to be
found in the abiding presence of God, weather or not the conflict or problem
has been resolved. In the psalms of ascent, Psalm 130 is a lament like psalm
88, where the writers longing for God to answer his cries is pictured being
like a watchman on the city walls staring off into the dark, waiting for the
hope and safety of the dawn. In the very next Psalm almost as a response, the
writer says he has learned to be still and content like a weaned child on its
mother’s knee. No more the frantic calling out for its needs to be meet but
simply content with its mother’s presence to comfort. In his letter to the
Philippians, paul summarises this reorientation when he says I have learned to
be content when I have a lot or when I have nothing, when I am hungry or when
I’ve had my full because I have learned the secret to contentment ‘I can do all
things through Christ who strengthens me”. While this passage is often quoted
with the emphasis on the “I”, “I can do all things”… “I have the Power”… I’m
sure the emphasis for Paul is on the through Christ who strengthens me… the
abiding presence of Christ.
The motto of
the life boat service on the ragged and storm tossed coast of the Atlantic “Is
we must go out”, they are there for the very times when the rest of us are
wanting to be safe and secure in on shore at home, in the worst of waves and
the worst of storms where they fear for their lives, and others lives are in
danger. It’s not what they do in those times that means they are able to
operate and go about their life saving duties in the roughest of conditions,
rather it is the training and the training and the long hours they out into
doing their routines and their jobs when its calm weather and good seas that
enables them to do what they do. While it says in James that as we face hard
times our faith is made strong, and perfected, the developing of good spiritual
disciplines is what keeps us persevering through the hard.
There is an
element in Psalm 88 as well of emotional release. There is a phycological side
to prayer. Being honest with God is a way that those emotions and that form
that knot at the core of our being can be released. Once they are expressed and
out there they can be addressed and dealt with. Another psalm that I wrestle
with is Psalm 109. The psalmist calls out to God in righteous anger as one who
has been wronged, and he calls on God to bring justice on his enemies in no
uncertain terms. It’s the kind of prayer that makes you think that we believe
in a wrathful and vengeful God. But as I have meditated on it, I see it as the
psalmist praying knowing that God can be trusted with his anger and pain and
trusted to act in a right way. Christian folk singer Barry McGuire, says that
Christians are called to be shock absorbers in the world, to take the anger and
the bad in the world and not to simply pass it back or on. Neither are we to
internalise it and let it fester there, but to be able to pass it God and
return Good for evil. That is one of the things that we are able to do with
Prayer. God’s reply to psalm 109, is not the flash of lightening and a pile of
ashes, but rather we see it that Christ stepped into our world, in Jesus
Christ, he showed us a better way, the way of love, and then died on the cross
to forgive us all, and was raised to life so we could have a fresh start and
new life in Christ.
When we come
to studying the scriptures one of the important things that we need to do is to
view a verse in the context of a passage and a passage in the context of its
wider work, and we can often forget that when we come to Psalms they seem to
stand alone, but the fact is that they are placed in their sequence by an
editor or complier. Psalm 88 comes between psalm 87 and 89…I know that sounds
rather inane, but it finds itself between a short strong affirmation of God’s
abiding love for his people and for Zion, and a long prayer that talks of God’s
faithfulness and sovereignty through all generations and all circumstances. If
we are honest about our lives and our prayer life we recognise that they are
very much bound by the limitations of time and space. The hear and the now, and
we find it hard to see beyond the night to the new day, the hard time to the
hope of fresh days and fresh starts. But that is how this psalm is placed in
the book.
EM Blaiklock
says that Psalm 88 has been seen as a gethsemane prayer, when we look and all
we can see is the cross and death. In fact it reflects the belief in old testament
Judaism that death was final, a belief that was in Jesus day expressed by a
party within the Jewish faith called the sadducees, but that as Christians we
can look beyond that to an empty tomb, that we know that God’s plans go beyond
this little day, that there is a new page waiting to be written, that while we
may find it a dark night for our soul, the hope is that our future is in and
with Christ.
Which brings
us to our new testament reading from 1 peter 5 and how I want to finish this
reflection. Peter tells us to humble ourselves before the Lord, under God’s
almighty hand… to realise that God is sovereign and in control and can be
trusted with the whole of life, both its highs and its lows, and that we should
cast all our anxiety on God… because he cares for us.
Monday, October 15, 2018
Public worship as a spiritual discipline: getting more out of church attendance by what you put in (Hebrews 10:19-25, Psalm 134)
It’s hard to preach and talk about church attendance without
it being seen as sending people on a guilt trip. We live in a time when there
is more and more pressure on time and fitting it all in is difficult. How do we
find time for all this stuff? In fact one commentator has coined the phrase “fastpeople”
and suggests we are no longer trying to keep up with the Jones, but rather just
trying to keep up with the gerbils, on the spinning wheel of life. Reflection,
awe and wonder, community are stuff for the slowpokes out of step with society.
The passage we had read to us from Hebrews chapter 10 come
at the end of the central core of the book, where the author had reflected on
the person and work of Christ mainly as a fulfilment of the Old Testament, and
with the word therefore, now turns to exhort people how to live that out; what
does it mean for us? As one commentator puts it this is the start of a great
rollicking exhortation that will take us to the end of the book. In this
passage he gives us three imperatives, three commands for our life, that go
beyond simply talking about public worship, but that I want to use to help us
explore public worship as a spiritual discipline. I was going to make a pun about
salads and green vegetables and nutrition for our spiritual life, because each
imperative starts with ‘let us’, but I thought that would be too corny. I don’t
like corn in my salads…
The first imperative is in verse 22… let us draw near to
God…In Christ we have access to the very presence of God. The writer to
Hebrews, uses temple worship in the Old Testament to illustrate this. People
would come to the temple to worship and draw near to God, but dependant on who
they were there was a limit to how close they could come. If you were an
invalid or unclean with certain illnesses, you couldn’t come in the gate.
That’s the background to the miracle in Acts 3. The gentiles could only go to
the outer court. You may remember in Acts 20 Paul is ironically accused of
taking a gentile with him into the temple. If you were a woman, there was only
so far that you could go, you were allowed into the court of the women, if you
were a Jewish man you could come closer, an inner court, if you were the priest you could go into the holy place, we had it
in our reading from psalm 134, which is a blessing on the priests at the end of
one of the major festivals for all their work, in the house of the Lord. Then there was the
Holy of holies, the place where God dwelt with his people, only the high priest
was able to go into that place, and only once a year on the day of atonement,
after many animal sacrifices for the forgiveness of sin. They used to go in
with great fear, a rope tied round their leg, just in case they had undeclared
sin and being confronted by the holiness of God would strike them dead, and
they could be hauled out.
But we, says the writer of Hebrews can draw near to God,
because of Christ’s blood, his death for the forgiveness of our sins. We can
all go right into the very presence of God, the holy place, not with shaking
and fear but with confidence, not because of who we are or who we are not, but
that Christ has made a way, a new and living way. Christ our great high priest
has paid the sacrifice for us to be clean before God and opened the curtain
that separated the holy of holies from the rest of the temple for us. The one
the gospel tells us was torn in two when Christ died. We’ve been welcomed in.
It’s not just coming to a place to encounter God, but its
everywhere in life, we have that wonderful privilege, in prayer, this core
section of Hebrews had started with a similar image of us being able to boldly
approach the throne of grace in our time of need. The throne of grace was seen
as where God sat and was the mercy seat the space on top of the ark of the
covenant between the two golden seraphim. Because of Jesus Christ we can get
that close In all of life… My son Isaac and I were walking along Bethells Beach and came upon these three empty pairs of
shoes right in the middle of nowhere. I couldn’t help but think of Moses in
Exodus 3 being told to take off his shoes for this is holy ground as he
encounters God in the burning bush. Mind you if you take off your shoes in the middle of bethels baeach in the middle of summer you encounter not the burning bush but the burning hot west coast iron sand... However, It’s a great image because we can encounter
and know that closeness of God and draw near anywhere. It’s all holy ground…On
a west coast beach, an Auckland school class room, our place of work, in the
wilderness and scorching iron sand of our own lives. But definitely as we
gather for public worship, we come to draw near to God. Douglas Bradley has
just moved from Glendowie to be the minister at Cromwell Presbyterian church
and he said he took this great photo on the day that all the linemen for chorus
used the church for a meeting, the photo was of all the work boots lined up
outside the church door. Take off you shoes this too is holy ground…
George Guthrie helps us understand this drawing near to God
as a spiritual discipline by asking the question ‘What is it you yearn for?”
when you come to church what is it that you are wanting that you are looking
for, do you come with an expectation of encountering and meeting with God, of
somehow being transformed by that encounter. Do you come with a sincere heart,
aware that we are able to come because we have been made clean through Jesus
Christ, and it’s a great privilege we have to worship God together as brothers
and sister with such intimacy and being so loved. At general assembly Graham
Redding a previous moderator of the PCANZ spoke on Isaiah chapter 6, the
calling of Isaiah, Isaiah was in the temple, worshipping, and suddenly it was
like his eyes were open and he saw the reality of what was going on… he saw the
Lord high and lifted up, the whole place was filled with the glory of the Lord,
he is aware of his sinfulness and receives a pardon from God and then is given
the word of God to take out with him into the world to be part of God’s kingdom
coming. That was a foretaste of what you and I have in Christ as we gather for
worship. Do you come to Church with an expectation of encountering God. ‘what
is it you yearn for?’ not yawn for but yearn for…
The second imperative is in verse 23 let us hold
unswervingly to the hope we profess. Our hope found in Jesus Christ, that
death and sin are conquered and on their way out because of Christ’s death and
resurrection, that things can change, that there is a better world coming,
because of who Jesus is and what he has done for us. Not because we simply believe
it but because God is faithful. God keeps his word, he keeps his promise.
Again George Guthrie helps us see this as a spiritual
discipline by asking the question What is it you are committed to? it’s
a whole life question, one of the biggies that defines us, but its helpful to
see that as it relates to public worship as well. By making it part of our
rhythm of life we are witnessing to our hope. Its part of our profession of
hope… Not wishful thinking like.. I hope howard doesn’t speak to long today… I
hope they don’t sing those songs again… But that the gospel of Jesus Christ
will make a difference, in me, and you through us in the society round us. In
the face of what’s going on in our lives, still I will come and give thanks and
hear the gospel proclaimed. It’s defiant and prophetic. I love Psalm 42 and 43,
as the psalmist laments that all he has
known is being stripped away and he or she is being dragged away into exile,
and it feels like the stormy waves Mediterranean sea and the turbulent rapids on the fast moving rivers that flow down from Mt Camel have
combined to smash and crash over them, the psalmist say why are you so down
cast O my soul yet I will still praise you my Lord and my king. Public worship
says we have hope of light when it seems the darkest, it says in the midst of
the business f life that there is time to stop and to contemplate something so
much more important. It says to the worries and sorrows of life, I have hope in
Jesus Christ, it says to the amusements and distractions of life, there is
something more solid and real. What are you committed to…
Finally in verse 24 “Let us spur one another on towards
love and good deeds” the writer from Hebrews carries that on by saying
don’t stop meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing… The Christian
faith is communal, its about being together and building one another up in the
faith. When we think of spiritual disciplines we usually thing of solo alone
stuff, of the hermit away in the wilderness, but its about being together in
community. To encourage each other in ur love and our good deeds, which are the
outworking of our relationship with Christ, we are loved so we love, we are
cared for and shown compassion, so we show compassion and care.
George Guthrie again helps us see this by asking the
question ‘who do we walk with?’ who we commit to journeying with. Whose
shoes are with ours on the beach. When it comes to public worship Paul in 2
Corinthians 14 says we should come to worship, not with the attitude of whats
in it for me, what do I want, but rather, what do I have to give, he says one
should bring a song, another a teaching, a word of encouragement. One of my
other favourite psalms, I think I have about 150 of them, is Psalm 107, which
is the story of peoples epic journeys from exile back to Jerusalem. Epic desert
journeys through stormy seas, from darkness to light, illnesses to health, even
one that seems to talk of God using going from rich pasture to brokenness and
want, but they each finish with people giving testimony to what God has done in
the assembly to build one another up. Are we willing to pray for each other,
Pauls letters to the churches were designed to be read in public worship and in
them he prays for the people he is writing to and asks them to write to him.
When we come together are we willing to use the gifts god has given us to build
each other up. Even the gift of prophecy and discernment, speaking straight,
spur one another on has an almost negative feel to it at one level, of pushing
and prodding each other. Who are you walking with, invites us to look at
worship as a chance to come and to contribute to others, not just to be a
consumer society.
We very often use the analogy of life as a journey even our
faith we speak of our spiritual journey and our spiritual disciplines maintain
us and keep us on that journey. Often its like how you pack your car for that
journey. With six people in our family how you pack a car is a big thing. How
am I going to fit everything into this small space? It’s three D tetras… if you
remember that game on your phone. But you start by putting the big things in
first, the important things and then fill in round them, you find you’ve got
space for the little things the extra things on top of those basics and
essentials. It’s harder to fit a big bag last… Can I suggest for the spiritual
journey we fit in those essential spiritual disciplines first and once they are
in place the rest of life seems to fit round them. Public worship is one of
those things.
… So let us draw near to God, let us hold fast to our hope,
let us consider how we will spur one another on in love and good deeds.
Monday, October 8, 2018
The Power and Hope of Prayer ( Philippians 4:4-9, Psalm 113)
I hope as you were coming in to church this evening I hope
you noticed the sign with our bible reading on it out the front, and the tree and
bird house. The tree is a prayer tree planted in June here at the church. The
idea is to invite the community to bring their cares and concerns and place
them in the bird house and a dedicated team will commit themselves to praying
about them. Bringing them to God.
I’m not a member here at Mt Albert but think it is a great
idea, and I hope people in the community take advantage of it. There is a
wonderful picture in the book of Ezekiel chapter 17 of the coming messianic
king, being like a tree that God plants out of the royal house of David, and it
growing to be a strong and healthy tree bearing fruit and offering shelter and
a place to nest to all the birds of the air. It’s picked up by Jesus in Mark
4:30-32 where Jesus likens the kingdom of God to a mustard seed, the smallest of
all the seeds that is planted, that falls to the ground and dies, but then
becomes the biggest of all the garden plants, and the birds of the air come and
find shelter and nest in its branches. So I see all that symbolism in what
you’ve done out the front. The bird house is like inviting people to come and
find shelter and rest and hope and hopefully home amongst the branches, in the
Kingdom of God, as they experience God in their lives through the power of
prayer and your churches Christ like love and care.
When I came out to Mt Albert to get some idea for a poster
to advertise this evenings service, it was
a cold rainy winters morning, and I
had to keep whipping rain drops off the camera lens and my glasses. But down in
the carpark I saw a tree that seemed to be an answer to the hope of the prayer
tree round the front... It was blooming despite the adverse conditions, and I
thought Wow, what a great picture, not just technically, by symbolically as
well of the hope we have when we come to God in prayer; New life blossoming,
freshness, beauty, health, I’m not sure if it was a fruit tree, but the hope of
fruitfulness to come, even in the face of
the greyness and storms of life.
Now that all may sound kind of flowery, but tonight I want
come in from the carpark and the outside and explore what Paul has to tell us
about Knowing God’s presence and help in that verse from Philippians and what
the wider passage has to tell us, and what at its heart it tells us about the
power of prayer.
The church at Philippi was facing external opposition and
some internal strife and Paul had written to encourage them to keep going and
to be a unified community that would keep on sharing the gospel even in those
tough situations. He was in Prison himself when he was writing and so able to
share with them how he kept himself going.
The passage we read is like a series of three quickfire encouragements
for the believers. In fact Paul would have been chained to a guard and here Paul
says it’s not that guard that keeps me safe, but these things guard my heart
and mind and will guard yours as well.
Rejoice in the Lord always, again I say rejoice!
In his letter Paul had used the word Joy fourteen times. In
the face of persecution Paul wants his readers to know that standing firm is not
just a teeth grinding, white knuckle hanging on for dear life, but rather to
know in their lives and to share the fullness of joy that comes from Jesus
Christ. It is a joy that Transends
circumstance, that is not dependant of situation or emotion or feeling. To
rejoice in the Lord is to find our joy in who God is and what God has done for
us in Jesus Christ. he has made the
world and all that is in it, he is the God who is sovereign in history, who has
shown his faithful love for his people, who send Jesus Christ to be one of us,
Jesus Christ who showed us God’s great love, who died on the cross that we may
be forgiven and reconciled with God, whom God raised to life again, who
promised to be with us until the end of the age, who poured our his promised
Holy Spirit on all of us. Who leads and guides, who is working all things for
good not for harm, who will come again to put all things right. That’s just not
our theology, that is our hope its our source of joy. When its going
wonderfully well, we need to remember it is because of God’s goodness, when its
going bad, we need to remember it is still true.
Paul himself had given the Church at Philippi an example of
this. While in Philippi he had been arrested beaten and thrown into jail.
Instead of grumbling and sulking, he and Silas had sung psalms and given praise
to God. The Church would have been aware that as they were doing that an
earthquake had happened and their chains had been broken and the cells sprung
open. Even if they hadn’t I think Paul and Silas would have kept on praise God
and rejoicing.
I read the testimony of Czech national Petr Jasek in the
August edition of the voice of the martyrs magazine. Petr had visited the Sudan
to encourage the local church and on the way out of the country was detained
and jailed for espionage. He was kept in appalling conditions packed in with a
group of Muslim extremists in what was meant to be a single person cell. He
said his attitude to his imprisonment changed when he called to mind the prayer
of the angelic hosts in the book of revelations “Holy, Holy, Holy Lord God
almighty”, and began using that as his public prayer of praise. It didn’t
improve his circumstances his cell mates objected to it and became abusive
towards him. But just as Pauls says to the Philippians he found that the peace
of Christ was with him. Later in another cell he shared his faith with a group
of people and saw a couple of them come to know Christ. he said this for him
was the reason God had allowed all this happen. After four months in prison the
Czech government arranged his release.
When we rejoice in the Lord it changes our focus from
situation to God, from problem to god’s goodness, from despair to hope. It
guards our hearts and minds.
Let your gentleness be evident to all.
It is easy and maybe natural when we find ourselves in
confrontation situations or situations where we are facing opposition to want
to retaliate, to give as good as we get.
But here Paul exhorts the church to react in a Christlike way. To extend
having the mind of Christ, he talked of in Philippians two not only towards
others in the Christian community but to those outside.
We often confuse gentleness with weakness, but rather it is
the word meek, which has the idea of harnessing ones strength for the common
good and not being distracted by slight or injury, insult or threat from
achieve that common good. The Clydesdale hporse is a great example of that…
they are blinkered to stop themselves from being distracted so they can focus
all their strength in achieving the common goal of pulling a cart.
In Romans Paul speaks
of not returning evil for evil but overcoming evil with good. I was reminded of
the example of one woman in the aftermath of the bloodshed and genocide of
Rwanda, who even though up to fifty members of her extended family had been
killed, looked after the father of a neighbour who was in prison for leading
one of the very mobs that could have killed some of her family members.
I don’t know about you but I find myself needing to hear
this sentence from Paul. It is so easy to simply worry and be concerned about
an issue, to let it sap you of your joy and peace, here Paul says the first
port of call is not anxiety but rather in all situations to pray, with
thanksgiving.
In his testimony that
I mentioned earlier Petr Jasek said that as he began rejoicing and focus on
Jesus Christ he found himself able to pray. He found that instead of worrying
about his family and friends he began to pray for them, he found that his
prayers for persecuted Christians round the world became more insightful and
deep.
It is as we turn to the Lord and bring him our cares and
worries that we become aware of the presence of the God of peace and his
presence can guard our hearts and minds. Shane Clairborne says that Christian
often use prayer as a form of escapism they want God to airlift them out of a
situation, but rather what happens is that Jesus parachutes in to the issue
alongside us. We talk about faith that
can move mountains, its as if there is Jesus with some shovels and he hands us
one and then gets to work right alongside us.
But the God of peace also tells us, that prayer is not only
so that we may become aware of the abiding presence of God, but also that there
is the hope of God kingdom coming as well. That God does answer prayer
sometimes in miraculous ways . Peace in the scriptures comes from the Hebrew
word shalom, which means wholeness and as we pray knowing God’s peace, can be
God speaking wholeness into our lives, a restoration of right relationship with
God, with each other, of justice when we have been mistreated and abused and a
restoration to health, as the
consequences of sin are dealt with in Jesus Christ.
In the midst of these three quickfire encouragements, Paul
gives the reason we can rejoice and be gentle and that we can have confidence
in prayer. Paul is very Jewish in this thought patterns and often the central
and most important thing appears right in the middle of a whole lot of ideas
that are connected and here it is this wonderful short sentence… God is near. We
can rejoice even in the face of tough times, because God is near, God is here,
we can live with gentleness and not be distracted from living for the common
good because God is near Christ is here, we can have confidence in bring all
situations to God because god is near Christ is hear, the Holy Spirit of God
dwells within us.
I love the picture of God that we have in psalm 113. The God
who is sovereign in control seated on the throne above heaven and earth… but
not a distant disinterested deity, cut off, separate and uncaring. But rather
we have this picture of a sovereign God who stands and even more stoops down to
see, to see and know what is going on, then who reaches down and raised up the
poor and the fatherless those in need to seat hem with princes.
It is interesting that the idea of a king stooping down to
see and to connect with the poor isn’t such a shocking idea for us, because we
see it in our royal family, we don’t realise how historically unique it is, to
have royals connecting and bending down to talk with children, or to play
football with orphans. It maybe that the queen has had to learn that it is
necessary to make that connection, or it maybe that it comes from her Christian
faith and the idea of leadership as service. But its a good illustration what the
psalmist says God is like.
This God who stoops and sees and lifts up the poor and needy
and seat them in places o honour is at the centre of the scriptures. It’s the
God Moses encounters at the burning bush, who says I have seen the mistreatment
and sorrow of my people and I have heard the cries of my people and I am going
to sent you to bring them out of their captivity so they may worship me, and I
will take them into the promised land and they will be my people.
It is the posture of God that is at the centre of the
gospel, God sees and hears the plight of humanity enslaved to sin and death and
stops down even further and in Jesus Christ becomes one of us, and to die on a
cross for our forgiveness, that we may be lifted back to being in relationship
with God, we may know new life and fullness of life in Christ.
That is the power and hope of prayer, not our words, not our
action, not even our level of faith, but the God who is near, who sees who
cares who stoops down to lift up and restore and bring God’s peace.
So tonight can I encourage you to hear and to put into
practise Paul’s encouragement that in all circumstance and situations, with
thanksgiving we bring it all to God in Prayer.
If you ar here tonight and you don’t know Jesus and you feel
that while God is near and Christ is here, that you are still out in the cold
and dark, or caught up in captivity. We’d love to pray for you and lead you
into finding peace with God. That God would guard your heart and mind…
If there is stuff going on, if you are finding yourself
slogging through the greyness and the storms of life and you are longing for
that spring bloom of hope come forward and we will pray with you. God is near.
Christ is here.
If you are faced with illness and unwellness, we’d love to
pray for you that you might receive a healing touch from the God who raises up
and brings wholeness.
Monday, October 1, 2018
Consider the Birds of the Air: God's Providence and God's Puprose (Ezekiel 17:22-24, Matthew 6:25-34)
We are really blessed to live in New Zealand, with its
unique and wonderful array of amazing birds.
I had a wonderful afternoon a couple of months ago down at
the reclaimed Taumanu reserve in
Onehunga. I spent forty minutes sitting on a cold hard rock by the boat ramp as
this pair of Royal spoonbills (Kotuku Ngatupapa) basically wadded right up
close to where I was sitting. I’d only seen them once before and then off in
the distance.
They Shock their heads scything those wonderful beaks
sideways through the water to catch small fish. Some ducks even sailed by just
to give me the chance of getting a photo so people could see how big these
spoonbills are.
The Gannets at Muriwai, but also down the east coast,
watching them circle majestically and then the lightning fast plummet and
splash as they go fishing, then later having them dip and come along a wave
face one wing tip touching the water… as if to say now this is surfing.
Stopping at homer tunnel in the South Island to take photos
of Kea and having them jump on the car and start to eat windscreen wipers and
the rubber of our door seals. When Kris tooted the horn to make them stop the
only creature startled was … well me, crocuhed down by the bonnet for a better
angle. The Kea on the screen behind me is from Auckland Zoo.
I’ve told you many times about the way in which God has usedthe wood pigeon or the kereru to speak into my life, as for me it is a symbol
of the Holy Spirit, and every time I see one I thank God for his presence with
us.
Today as Part of the season of creation it’s been good to
acknowledge and give thanks for these wonderful birds and when
we had our
greeting time I’m sure there were many stories of different birds and
encounters. Even our church grounds here are full of bird life, the Tui’s swoop
in and rule the roost when the bottlebrush is in bloom out the back and the
sparrows seem to have taken to heart the passage we had as our call to worship
and nest close to the worship area. The cover for our AGM reports is one of
those sparrows sitting in the kowhai tree we planted last year as part of our
season of creation.
Today I want to look
at two ways in which scripture looks at the birds of the air and see what they
have to say to us as a church
specifically as we look at the coming year. Because in the two passages we had
read to us today the birds of the air are used to speak of the providence of
God and the purpose of God, both important for us. God’s provision and God’s
purpose.
In our reading from Ezekiel, we are presented with a picture
of the coming of the messianic king. God will take a branch from a cedar and
plant it on a hill in Israel. That tree will grow big and strong and providing
shelter and nesting sites for all different kinds of birds of the air. It’s an
image that is echoed in Daniel chapter four where Nebucanezzar ahs a dream of a
giant cedar tree providing shelter for the birds of the air, then the tree
being cut down and the birds scattered but regenerating and once again being a
home for the birds. Daniel tells Nebuchadnezzar that he is that tree, in Daniel
there is a sense that Nebuchadnezzar has come to admire the God of Israel, and
as he humbly walks in a relationship with him, his kingdom can be a place of
shelter and home for the people of the world, but as he reverts too thinking it
is all about him and is filed with pride that kingdom vision is taken away. At the end of chapter 4 we see that Nebchadnezzar has a seven-year period of what we would
call mental illness, but once he reignites his relationship with God he is
restored to the throne.
Jesus himself picks up this image in Mark 4:30-32,
to talk about the kingdom of God. He tells the parable of the mustard seed, the
Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed that is planted and grows into a mighty
tree, the mustard seed is the smallest of the seeds and the mustard tree the
largest of the garden plants, and it will provide shelter for birds of the air.
The picture is of the purpose of God for his kingdom, for
his people and his church that in Christ we would be a place where people can
come and find a home and a place to rest and have shelter. It is a picture of a
welcoming and loving community rooted deeply in Jesus Christ and his death and
resurrection, where people without those things
will find hope and purpose and rest and new life.
One of the things about living in New Zealand is that we
don’t have an understanding of the significance of such a picture. We are a
green nation there are so many trees, its as if the birds can pick and
choose. Maybe we catch a glimpse of what
the biblical picture is like when you see a large tree in an urban landscape
and as the day starts and finishes it is alive with bird song, as they all come
to find rest there. I used to pick Kris up from work in Tauranga and Napier,
and where I’d wait in both places was a solitary tree in an area of buildings
and roads and the tree would be defeaning loud with bird song, and of course
you parked under the tree at your own risk.
Lyn Baarb, who lectured in pastoral theology at Otago
University, got an understanding of the scriptural story by living in the city
of shiraz in Iran. In an article on the spirituality of preachers, She
describes the place as mountainous desert and in the six months they lived
there it only rained twice, which had the affect of simply turning the roads to
mud. The hills were barren of vegetation
and everything was beige brown: all hillsides and rocks and dust and dirt. You
were aware of any water as the blue was so strikingly distinct against the
brown.
One day She and her husband were taken on a roadtrip by a
church member, and he stopped the car by a small stream with a walking track by
it in the middle this barren land. He told them he wanted to show them
something amazing, so they followed him up the path, and came upon the source
of the stream, and beside it grew a large tree, she said “the greenness of the
tree amidst all the brown was “totally unexpected, astonishing and refreshing”.
She said she had found the tree of Psalm 1, planted by a water source that does
not run out, that the psalmist talks of someone who basses their life on God’s
word is like. She didn’t mention if there
were any birds, but it gives the idea of
how important and special such a tree for the birds would be.
Our vision as a church is that we maybe an authentic,
vibrant and sustainable community, growing as followers of Jesus Christ,
inspiring others to join us on the journey. It’s an image of being like that
tree planted by the water source of the living word, Jesus Christ, and of us
growing and being that vibrant, sustained green of a tree with a good water
source, and producing fruit, also that God’s purpose and plan for us is to be a
place where the birds of the air, birds of all kind, multi generations, multi
cultures, can find a home and shelter.
In John 15 jesus uses the metaphor of a grape vine and says that he is the vine
and we are the branches. We lived at Laidlaw Bible College out on Lincoln road when it
was in the middle of vineyards, and you soon came to realise that vines attracted
birds. When the fruit was ripe, all day
long the place resounded to the bang of bird scarers, every ten minutes or so
boom, we don’t want the scarer thing we want to see God able to draw those
birds here. God does not bring new people into a church that has a tendancy to go boom, with disunity, criticism and grumbling, those thing stop a Church from growing and thriving. Our hope is that people will come to find rest and shelter, to find new life which the idea of
nesting speaks of. That people would find rest and welcome, and here find their
lives sourced and feed by the water of life.
Not wanting to mix metaphors but it is also a call for us to
stretch out those branches be about offering room for people to land, of
growing our community facing ministries, to children, youth, in families or by
themselves. and of all ages. That the broken may find wholeness, that the poor
of spirit may find the richest of fare as it talks of Isaiah 55. That is the
purpose of God for his church.
In our Matthew reading from the sermon on the mount, Jesus
also invites us to consider the birds of the air in terms of God’s priorities
and God’s provision. We should not worry about what we eat because if we look
at the birds of the air we see that they don’t plant or reap, but their
heavenly father cares for them, and are we not more valuable than they are.
If you are more into flowers than birds, Jesus goes on to
invite us to consider the flowers in the
field, they don’t sow or weave, but not even Solomon, the height of Israel’s
glory as a nation was dressed as wonderfully as they are. Just to prove the point, a couple of weeks
ago, as I was leaving Church it was magic hour, when the sun is low to the
horizon and I saw the flowers round our car park and went and grabbed my camera
and took some images.
The passage speaks of God’s ability to provide, not so we
can sit back and not do the work that needs to be done. It’s the birds that
don’t sow and reap and the flowers that don’t labour and or spin, we need to do
what we can to provide what we need, however we are not to worry about those
things, they are not to consume our time and effort and energy, they are not to
deprive us of sleep or rest. Jesus says “Don’t worry” rather be able the the
kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added unto
you.
It’s a call to trust in God’s ability to provide as we are
willing to put the kingdom of God first in our lives. As a church we work hard
to make ends meet, we are blessed by a good resource in our property and are
blessed by people who give generously and sacrificially, the call and the
challenge is to seek and find where God is calling us to do his work and invest in those things.
Churches often speak about the difference between setting maintenance budgets
and mission budgets, that is a budget that is focused on the ministry of the church,
not just on keeping things going. We need to look and consider the birds of the
air and the flowers of the field and trust in God’s provision as we set out to
fulfil more and more our vision and our mission. One of the maxims that people
quote to me is that Money follows mission, and money follows vision, as we seek
first the kingdom of God as we put first God’s purposes for us as a church,
that is when we will see God’s ample provision more and more. Here at St peter’s you’ve seen that, making a commitment
to full time ministry and saying well we’ve got enough for four years, here we
are seven years later… it hasn’t been easy costs are going up and we’ve got
some big ticket items coming up in the next few years with our thirty year old
building, but through careful management, wise decisions we’ve seen God’s
provision.
We are really blessed to live in New Zealand with our
wonderful array of unique and beautiful birds. Sadly as a nation with human
habitation, we’ve destroyed various habitats and we’ve introduced predators and
competitors to our native birds. But also its been great to see the energy and
care and a concern that has gone into conserving what we have. One sign of hope
for me this year has been spotting Dotterel’s, Tuturiwhatu doing their dance on
the beaches of the Manukau and west coast.
For us as a church this year as we face the AGM, I believe
God’s word for us is to consider the birds of the air. AS a metaphor and image
of seeing God draw people here to dwell amongst the branches, our call our
vision our hope is in Christ to grow in Christ and numerically. Like our kowhai
tree out the front, we’re in a fragile state, but It needs to be the focus for
our prayer and our efforts and like the birds of the air to trust in our
heavenly father to provide the resources we need. Amen…? Amen