A month and a half of Sundays - Adrian Chiles' Lent Challenge

So, a mixed bag, as were the priests. A third of them I found to be great, with a handful quite life-changingly brilliant. Another third were sort of OK. The rest were pretty hopeless, not least because I often couldn't actually hear what they were saying. And a handful were grumpy to the point of malevolence.

Spiritually, if I'm to really "connect" at Mass, I need a good priest to help me. And by good I mean, first and foremost, that they should look pleased to be there and pleased that we're there. Often they speak of great "joy" while looking as bored as swimming pool attendants.

Secondly, with the liturgy - essentially the same script which they do day in, day out - the best of them find a way of making it sound fresh. As the inestimable Father Paul Addison of Our Lady of Delours in Kersal put it to me: "The clue's in the word; communion is all about communicating." And the same is obviously true of the sermon. One of the beauties of daily Mass is, frankly, its brevity - invariably less than half an hour. Sometimes the sermon is dispensed with altogether, but often it just takes the form of a thought or two, which I find much easier to get my head round than one of Sunday's lengthy orations.

Adrian Chiles on his 46 days in 46 different churches. Worth reading the whole thing, great perspectives. And encouraging that he concludes it was one of the most rewarding and quietly intense 46 days of my life. 

Chocolate Easter Talk

A retelling of the Christmas story through chocolate bars was quite popular on this blog a few years back, so here's an Easter version, using a mixture of brands of chocolate Easter egg and other sweets. There is even a Marmite flavoured chocolate Easter egg this year, and that's found its way into the talk. All the choccies and sweets are in red, as are the dreadful egg-related puns. Trial run with a couple of school assemblies tomorrow.....

Feel free to plagiarise, if you can stand it! Any improvements gratefully recieved.

Chocolate Easter

What do Easter eggs, have to do with the very first Easter?

What does all this chocolate have to do with the very first Easter?

Listen, and you will hear. It’s quite eggstraordinary.

There was a man called Jesus.

A Kinder man you couldn’t wish to meet

He loved everyone, welcomed everyone, helped everyone

HobNobbed with the very rich and the very poor and everyone in between

He did amazing things: made sick people better, helped blind people see, made storms into calm

And he said amazing things: if you want to know the God who made the Galaxy, get to know me, said Jesus. I can show you what he’s like better than anyone.

If God and God’s love are the Topic, then I can tell you everything you need to know.

The ripples from Jesus went far and wide, thousands of people came to see him, hear him, touch him, be near him, learn from him

But some people didn’t like him. The crème de la crème, the top priests and the top politicians, realised they couldn’t Eggnore Jesus, they couldn’t outfox him, so they Clubbed together and hatched a nasty plan. In the middle of the night they arrested Jesus, Eggsamined him and put him on trial. The leaders didn’t believe in him, and decided he should die.

They put Jesus on a wooden cross and left him there to die. But even on the cross, Jesus love was so Extra Strong, that they heard him Whispa ‘Father God, forgive them’.  You can chocolate (chuck a lot) of nasty stuff at Jesus but he will go on loving you, forgiving you.

Jesus friends looked for somewhere they Cadbury him, and put him in a cave in a rock face with a huge stone rolled across the entrance, then they went away to cry and comfort each other.

On Easter morning, Jesus friends came to the place he was Lion buried. But the grave was open, the great rock across the entrance had been moved, and they wondered who on earth would Rolo way the stone.

Suddenly, there was an Angel. Delight filled them as he told them ‘Jesus isn’t dead any more, he’s alive!’ Then there Jesus was, standing with them. His friends were so Eggcited that they started telling everyone, and soon lots and lots of people heard that Jesus was alive. 2000 years later the story is still spreading, and people are still meeting Jesus. Some people love it, some people hate it, but Easter shows us that Jesus is Marmighty than death.

And the Eggs still Eggsplain the Easter story.   

•          The shape of the egg reminds us of the stone which rolled away from Jesus tomb.
•        The hollow inside the egg reminds us that the tomb was empty because Jesus was alive.
•        And an egg is a place where a new life begins, and at Easter Jesus was given new life, and he promises new life to everyone who comes to  him and trust him and asks for his help.

And that’s a great thing to chew on this Easter. 

Q&A Sermon: all the questions, but probably not all the answers!

Last Sunday we had a Q&A sermon in our 2 churches, here are the questions asked, and some of the answers (summarised) given on the day. If commenters can expand on any of these, that would be really helpful! If you're a St. James/St. Peters member, please carry on the conversation in your cell groups.

During the communion service why do we have a gradual hymn and what does it signify?
‘Gradual’ is from the Latin ‘gradus’ meaning a step. Medieval churches had a reading pulpit, and a psalm or chant was sung from the step of this as the Gospel was taken in procession up to be read. We now sing a hymn, there are no steps involved, but we still call it the 'gradual'.

Can we have ongoing explanations of symbolism contained in our services, perhaps during the 5th Sunday service, e.g. What is a collect, why does  the vestment and altar cloths change colour, why are the bread and wine brought up from the back of church etc......why does David wear a white robe and Tony a black dress and white top?
good idea! 

What is the structure of the Anglican Church?
I'd better let the CofE answer this for itself, click here. 

What does a usual week as a member of the clergy consist of
There's no such thing as a usual week! The past 7 days has included:
 - meeting with a local family to support them and plan for a difficult funeral, then taking the service itself and spending time with mourners afterwards
 - preparing for this sermon
 - time with lay leaders in the church: deacon in training, Childrens and Families worker, leaders of the H+ course we'll be running in the autumn on getting into the Bible, staff meeting, college chaplaincy volunteers
 - meeting with other local church leaders
 - preparing and leading leavers assemblies for the local primary school
 - preparing families for baptisms and weddings
 - meeting with a small accountability group of fellow clergy for prayer and mutual support
 - planning with community leaders, local councils and housing associations about work on the Wyndham Park new estate
 - the usual round of emails, Facebook etc. (different people like to keep in touch in different ways, including phone, email, Facebook and Twitter. I even got a handwritten letter!)
 - pastoral work - home visits for the recently bereaved, following up with local families, simply being around at church groups, school gate etc. for people to chat
 - supporting our work with children and young people: Tea and Toast, the Christian Club at Preston Primary school
...and next week will be different again.....!

How do we live with the tension between turning the other cheek and laying ourselves open to being taken advantage of? 

In Matthew 5:38-42 Jesus gives 3 examples of non-violent resistance. A slap to the right cheek would be backhanded, i.e. a real insult. Offering the other cheek demands to be treated as an equal. Taking a soldiers pack 2 miles would have landed the soldier in trouble, as they were only allowed to force civilians to carry their load for one. So these are ways for people who are being mistreated to stand up to bullying without resorting to violence.

How do we make sense of Revelation and the other difficult bits of the bible?

 - There will always be bits of the Bible we don't understand, but we don't have to be afraid of them.

 - In the autumn we're going to begin using the Hplus course, which helps people to develop confidence in understanding the Bible, and working out how it fits together.

 - There are lots of commentaries, and online resources, to help us get to grips with tricky bits. Christians have more resources available now than ever,  the problem is knowing which ones to use. 

 - Sometimes it's just about understanding what we're reading: the Bible is a collection of different types of writing (poetry, law, story, rhetoric). Sometimes it's about translating images from one culture to another. If I said of someone ‘he has the personal charm of Alan Sugar, and the humility of Simon Cowell’, you’d understand what I was talking about in 2013, but someone reading that in 100 years wouldn’t. They’d need to understand who Simon Cowell was and Lord Sugar to understand what I meant - i.e. they'd need to find out more about the culture the statement was written in. It's the same with the Bible, some bits make more sense once we understand the background and the culture they're written in.

-          Revelation is written in code, it’s almost like a script for a great Sci-Fi movie – so the sea stands for the source of evil, the beasts with horns are great empires, the numbers all mean something too. A decent commentary can unpack and explain all of that.

-          at the same time, Revelation is very simple: ‘God wins’.

How do we love Jesus more than our own children or family - is it right that we have the impression that we should?

-          Mark 10:28-31 and Mat 10:34-39 are the key texts here: Jesus saying that we need to love him more than anything, even our own lives, but at the same time whatever we give up for his sake will be honoured

 - Jesus is not an add-on, if he is not Lord of all, he is not Lord at all. If Jesus is the one who made heaven and earth, who died in my place on the cross, who rose again and waits to judge all of heaven and earth, then we can’t be half-hearted in following him

 - In the story of Abraham and Isaac, A is willing to sacrifice his son and Isaac is spared. God loves us, so whatever we give up for him, it's not as though he'll make our lives, or theirs, a misery as a result. It's in putting God first that we truly love our families. Seek first God's kingdom, and everything else will be taken care of. 

 -  Our  culture has made an absolute value out of families: e.g. Christmas ‘it’s all about family’. We just need to be careful here that we don’t swallow what seems good, and lose out on the best.

Why does the church not talk more about the concept of heaven and what happens when we die, or are taken up in rapture, as we discovered last week in our cell group.

-          possibly some cultural stuff here: back in 1850, life expectancy at birth was 39. Lots of children died young, mothers died in childbirth, men died in war. By 1930 life expectancy was 60, and now it’s around 80, and with each day that passes, our average lifespan grows by 5-6 hours, a baby born tomorrow will, on average, live 5-6 hours longer than one born today.

-          The older prayer book has the phrase: ‘in the midst of life we are in death’, that was daily reality. It isn’t now, and we also use more recently written liturgy which isn’t as ‘in your face’ about death and heaven and hell as it used to be. It's a subject that our culture shies away from, and perhaps the church shies away from too. 

-      There's maybe some nervousness about talking about hell, it’s not a ‘nice subject’.

-   Perhaps it's because we have more to go on in the Bible about this life and how to live it, than we do about the next one. But what we think about life after death will affect how we live this one, our values, priorities, attitudes to death and dying etc. So yes it is an important subject and one we should tackle more

Did Jesus get married
Three things possibly behind this question

-          Interest in the wider media, books, e.g. Dan Brown on Jesus and Mary

-          Celebrity culture, where the most interesting thing about a person is who they’re having sex with. A Melvin Bragg documentary on Mary Magdalene at Easter, which was almost all the BBC did on Jesus, was promoted on this basis. Out of all the things that Jesus said, did and claimed, is this really the most important or interesting fact?

-          More positively, there’s a question here about Jesus himself: was he really, truly, fully, one of us? If Jesus is the Son of God, what kind of human being is he? Is he fully human, or is he just a good actor?

-         Only if Jesus is fully God can he reveal God fully to us. Otherwise he's the latest in a long line of messengers, and no different to the other prophets. Only if Jesus is fully human can he take our place on the cross, and fully identify with us in death and resurrection. Lose one or the other, and you lose the uniqueness of Jesus. Jesus can only be a substitute if he is human. Can only be a saviour if he is God. 

The Christian message teaches that there is a clear distinction between 'saved' and 'unsaved', yet as you look around the world and indeed the church there seems to be many shades of grey

Sad but true. Sometimes it comes down to persecution: Brother Yun in China ('The Heavenly Man') has written that the West in its current state will not be able to send many missionaries to the Muslim world, because we are too comfortable. It's only nations where the church has been toughened up by persecution, like China, that will be able to go to those places where persecution is at its most fierce. 

And the church is composed of people on a journey, we don't become saints overnight,  we are a body of forgiven sinners. Having said that, the normal Christian life is growth in grace, in holiness, in character, in the fruits of the Spirit, in spiritual gifts, in love, in gracious witness to our faith. 

A few which were asked, but there wasn't time to deal with on Sunday: discuss!

 -We have introduced hearling prayer into the life of our church, but how do we introduce/operate the other gifts of the Spirit in the 'formal' services of the CofE?

 - How do you reconcile the scriptural universal invitation of the gospel to all people, agains the Bible saying that we ave been chosen/called?

 - Why is healing prayer important?

(There's lots of other things that were said on Sunday that I've not written up here, either because I can't remember them or because this post is long enough already!!)

update: audio of the Q&A at St. James is available here. 

About to Finish Your Sermon?

This should probably be posted on a Saturday night at 11.50pm. Or for those who really live on the edge, 7am on Sunday. There's nobody about to finish a sermon on Monday afternoon. Or if you are, how on earth do you manage that?

More superb stuff up recently at Anglican Memes, this made me laugh.

Pentecost, the Sequel

It's quite striking to compare Peters Pentecost sermon with the one he preaches a few days later in Acts 3. There's a lot of common features:

 - Peter deals with misconeptions: this time of the beggar. He is clear about what he can offer, and what he can't. What he can offer is healing in the name of Jesus. The apostles are not to be one in another long line of benefactors, they have something different, something better.

 - Peter explains what's going on: Jesus has made him walk

 - Peter keeps the focus on Jesus - he recounts pretty much the same as he did in Acts 2, how God had set Jesus apart, God's people had killed him, and God has raised him to life, and the apostles are witnesses of the fact

 - Peter gives them a clear way to respond: again, pretty much the same as Acts 2 'repent and turn to God' for forgiveness, and for 'times of refreshing' (a way of talking about the gift of the Holy Spirit?). Interestingly, he doesn't call for people to be baptised, as he does in Acts 2. Is that purely pragmatic (2000 extra men, and only 2 apostles, it might have taken some time)? Or do we take it as read?

It's looks very much as though Peter has rehearsed and clarified what he is going to say before he goes into these situations, he has the same focus on Jesus, the same clear and concise story of Jesus special status, death and resurrection, the same call for a response of repentance and commitment and the gift of divine grace.

At the Diocesan church growth strategies conference last week, I heard of a group of 18 ordinands (potential vicars) who were asked what they'd do if someone came to them and said 'how do I become a Christian?' Only 2 gave a remotely adequate answer. This is criminal. We need a church where every member can do what Peter does - know the story, know it well, and be able to tell it and show people how to respond. That means that for church leaders, we need to take time and effort to train ourselves, and others, so that this comes as naturally as us as it did to Peter.

Is it Possible to Preach about Maundy Thursday?

The more I think about doing a sermon on Jesus washing the disciples feet, the more obvious it becomes that a simple sermon won't do to recreate the impact or the meaning of what Jesus did.

After all, if Jesus had merely spoken for 20 minutes about mutual service, it would have just got noted down alongside all the rest of his teaching. But the sheer discomfort of the disciples, the dramatic role reversal of master becoming servant, the sheer grace (though nobody has washed his feet, Jesus the divine Word is washing theirs), the best way to recreate all of that is to do it.

which applies to blogging about it too.

The Sermon Burp

Excellent post by Steve Tilley on how to avoid indigestion in teaching settings:

A colleague of mine used to say that discussion groups after a talk were a good opportunity for people to 'burp'. He drew the analogy of a baby being fed - after a while the infant needs to be winded and then some more food can be inserted into the gap. Without being winded a small child will feel full before it is.

It said a lot about that teaching style. The speaker has the food and people need feeding; almost force-feeding.

I have always been a great enthusiast for teaching in a dialogue. I am not anti-input. I do have some resources, training and skills which equip me with stuff to pass on. But the assumption about dialogue (Greek: dia logos = through word(s)) is that I will be as helped by the listener as the listener by me.

Worth reading the whole piece. I find it very challenging as a preacher/teacher: there's usually far more material for a sermon/teaching slot than I've actually time to deliver, and it's hard enough sacrificing chunks of a sermon to trim things down to the usual 20 minutes. But maybe we need to be a bit more joined up, and instead of the traditional launch straight into the Nicene Creed, or whatever, to think about the 5-10 minutes after the sermon as processing time. Or even to split it into several chunks throughout the service, all-age style .

#Occupy Christmas - a sermon idea

"The Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us" (John 1:14)

For the #Occupy Christmas sermon you will need:

 - the above Bible text
 - a tent
 - a suitable banner ('what would Jesus do?' etc.)

and a sermon incorporating some or all of the following ideas:
 - the Incarnation as a protest camp
 - the Incarnation as a public conversation about change and justice
 - attempts to evict Jesus by the ruling powers as he was getting in the way of normal commerce and politics
 - Jesus' plan to Occupy everything and everyone
 - the question of how many of us have pitched our tent next to Jesus, but then gone back home because it's more comfy there.

I have the first two items on this list, still working on the rest. Any thoughts welcome!

Here We Are Now, Entertain Us....

Pete at Postmodern Bible has blogged some more on the CODEC survey on sermons, and what people expected, and got, through the preaching in their church:

Respondents were asked what they wanted a sermon to do and also what they thought preachers actually did. The top results across all denominations for what congregations want were:
Challenge 77.4%
Encourage 74.2%
Motivate 66.8%
Educate 44.7%
Entertain 12.1%

When we asked them what preachers actually did the numbers shifted a little:
Challenge 67.9%
Encourage 76.1%
Motivate 52.2%
Educate 53.8%
Entertain 25.5%

What's going on here? Apparently, three quarters of respondents felt that preachers manage to encourage their congregations, with a similar number challenging them. However, despite 2/3rd of respondents expecting sermons to motivate them, only about half think that this is achieved.

So the message is: fewer jokes and Greek verbs, more challenge and motivation. Which all begs the question of what the sermon is actually for in the first place, and whether people's views of what to expect have been formed by being in a certain context, or by thinking through issues of communication, discipleship, and Christian teaching.

more at Pete's blog. He summarises: What is absolutely clear is that people across the denominations want challenging, provocative preaching that encourages them and moves them on. If they can be entertained as they receive this, then all the best.

I've been meaning for a while to devise a brief response form for sermons at our church. It's probably a question of courage, more than anything else....

More on those much-anticipated sermons

Following the brief flurry in the blogosphere earlier this week, which greeted the news that over 96% of churchgoers looked forward to the sermon, (Times report here), Pete from CODEC (the research body which published the findings) has blogged at greater length about what the survey did and didn't say. He notes, after reading the comments on the Times piece:

There seems little surprise - even to the ridiculously high 96.6% approval rating. Actually the figure is not quite accurate (it should be 96.9%) or as good as this suggests because the actual report says that 63.7% 'frequently' look forward to the sermon, with another 33.2% 'sometimes' looking forward to the sermon. So, if you feel among the 4% (or rather the 3.1%) who don't look forward to your regular sermon slot and that lots of your friends don't either, then it might be that you and your friends identify more with that 33.2% who look forward to the odd highlight or special occasion - 'sometimes' looking forward. Startingly, the other 3.2% (rounding up issues?) 'seldom' look forward with absolutely no one (0.0%) saying that they never looked forward to the sermon.

My first thought on reading this that the figures might be down to many of the sample being in the Durham area, and therefore looking forward to the sermon on the off-chance that it might be Tom Wright guest preaching this week. More seriously, the research notes that sermons don't seem to have much impact on those who hear them. Moreover more of the impact seems to be introverted (e.g. sensing the love of God) rather than having an impact in how people live their lives or treat others.

Pete comments:
the survey does give us some questions:
Why aren't sermons changing people's lives?
Why are people happier to reflect internally than to change their behaviour in response to a sermon?
What's the interplay between contemporary events and issues and the pulpit - and whyever has the church not got this right yet?
How come so many people seem to like preaching when the anecdotal evidence says that people find preaching boring?

My thoughts at the moment:
1. What is preaching trying to achieve? The primary task of the church is to make disciples (Matthew 28), but Jesus uses a number of means to do that, not simply teaching. If churches are relying simply on monologues to bring about life change then, short of an Obama or MLK in the pulpit, how much is really going to happen?

2. The revival of stand-up comedy as a popular public form of entertainment is a sign of where the sermon is perhaps going. The likes of Jeremy Hardy and Ricky Gervais can hold the attention of an audience for a couple of hours whilst developing an argument -it's the monologue form, a sermon if you like, but delivered in an entertaining way. The survey finds that Anglicans more than anyone else look to be 'entertained' by a sermon. Maybe we watch too much comedy on TV.....

3. It's a great opportunity for preachers, but easily squandered. You can almost hear the hiss of a deflating congregation when the preacher goes off into the clouds, or starts telling them off, or retreats into cosy phrases. Each sermon is an opportunity. I imagine the figures are also skewed by the fact that people stop going to church. How many people would carry on going to a church where they never looked forward to the sermon?

I've been reading a few books on 'home church' and base communities recently, where the sermon seems to be replaced with something much more interactive and applied. The danger of preaching a prepared text is that it never connects with the real lives of the people who are listening. Having said that, that's what I do most weeks, so I might have questions about the efficacy of preaching but perhaps I don't have the nerve to follow those questions through in practice to their logical conclusion.

Strange but true? 96% of churchgoers 'look forward to the sermon'.

From the Times today

...some ember still seems to burn in Britain’s 3.6 million regular churchgoers, for almost all of them feel a sense of expectation for the Sunday sermon, according to researchers at Durham University.

Fully 96.6 per cent of those surveyed “look forward” to the sermon, with 60 per cent saying it gave them a sense of God’s love.

At a time when churches are agonising about how to move to a “digital” from an “analog” age, the results suggest that there is life in the old forms yet.

The College of Preachers of Durham University admits that the results are “counter-intuitive” — particularly in an age where “sermonising” is seen as a deadly sin. The college plans to carry out a larger study to discover why people like sermons so much.

The most recent survey, carried out by Durham’s Codec research centre to mark the 50th anniversary of the College of Preachers, offers preliminary suggestions.

Nothing obvious on the CODEC site, there's a brief mention of it on the College of Preachers site but no obvious link to the research itself. Without knowing a bit more about the sample size, questions asked etc., I'd be reluctant to draw any firm conclusions...

Update: the Director of Research at CODEC comments below:-
The research was carried out by CODEC at St John's College on behalf of the College of Preachers. You can obtain a copy for only £5 from St John's College - theresa.phillips@durham.ac.uk - sadly we can't publish the complete copy online as research costs money and we need to recoup some of the costs. By the way, its a PILOT survey - small scale .

3 Kings: 2 Impostors

Christmas sermon preached at our Carols by Candlelight on Sunday night, with major nods to this sermon by Tom Wright for some of the inspiration.

The two narratives of Jesus birth present radically different points of view. Apart from the birth of Jesus himself, there's scarcely a detail in common. Matthew tells the story from Josephs point of view, and brings in Herod and the Magi, Luke tells it through Mary's eyes and brings in the census and the shepherds.

Both gospel writers mention a king: for Luke it's Augustus Caesar, ruling from Rome, for Matthew it's Herod, the local tyrant. Let's start with Luke.

Imagine an empire which controls the known world. It runs a global financial system, which everyone has to buy into. It is at the heart of a war machine which takes credit for bringing peace to all men, but only brings peace through the threat of armed force. It styles itself as the saviour of the world, the bringer of good news, and the favour of this empire rests on those who will dance to its tune.

What are we describing? The world in 2008, or the world in year Zero? This is the empire run by the Caesars, and all of its imitators right down to the present day. It’s an empire which raises a finger, and whole groups of people are thrown into turmoil.

You see this clearly in Luke’s story of the birth of Jesus, which we heard a moment ago. Tom Wright puts it this way: Luke takes the trouble to tell us about the Roman emperor Augustus, and his desire to take a census of more or less the whole known world. This isn’t just background information, or local colour to spice up the story. Empires, censuses and taxes were hot topics in the Middle East in the first century. When we have a census, we just fill in a boring form and send it off. They’re going to tax us anyway. Every time they had a census there were riots and people got killed: censuses then raised the sharp and dangerous questions of who runs the world, how it’s run, who profits by it all, who gets crushed in the process, and, perhaps above all, when is it all going to change? And what should we be doing about it?

So this Caesar orders a census, and thousands of miles away a young couple are forced from their home to travel 100 miles on foot, resulting in the birth of a baby. Not just a baby, but a new king, announced by God’s messengers the angels. And Luke puts the question to us: which is the true king? Who is really in charge? Are you a subject of Caesar, playing by his rules: the rules of finance and war, and bureaucracy and control, or are you a subject of king Jesus and his rules?

Well, you may say, I didn’t expect to be told about empires and money and wars when I came to church tonight. I expected to hear lovely things that would make me feel good inside. But that’s the trouble with how we’ve treated Christmas these many years.

It’s time we gave Christmas its baubles back. This story is not an invitation to an escapist spirituality, which gets lost in dreamland and snow whilst the world goes to hell in a handbasket. This story is a story of a God who infiltrates the sad, unjust, corrupt, painful mess of the world to change it.

We are insulated from so much of the mess, though with the credit crunch that’s started to change for many of us. But something is deeply wrong. For example, it would cost just $40bn to provide clean drinking water for the hundreds of millions who currently lack it, yet somehow we can’t find that but we can find 20x that amount to bail out our banks and 15x that amount to fight a war over oil. At what stage did this maths begin to add up?

Just across the road in ASDA you can walk through the door and buy fruit, from South Africa. Just think where that’s come from. It has flown over the starving of Zimbabwe, the refugees of the Congo, the militia zones of Sudan, over the heads of millions of people who have no food, no clean water, no hope and no future, it has flown over their heads so that we can buy it. At what stage did this start to make sense? This is the world of Caesar, of the system which doesn't care for the little people, where money and power and celebrity talks and everyone else has to lump it. And God is born into this system, like a virus, to change it from the inside out.

King Caesar: the global system, the rule of power and money which we see starting to disintegrate on an almost daily basis. The world which makes us feel so small – an American crook steals $50bn over here, and thousands of people lose their jobs at MFI and Woolworths. A bunch of overpaid city types get the frights on the stock market, and our pensions vanish overnight. And we feel powerless. Yet Luke himself focuses on the powerless: Jesus born to a homeless couple in a stable, the angels coming to the shepherds: security guards on a nightshift, a pretty low status job. Here is where the action is. Here is a new king, with the poor and weak, the small, the normal people. God with us.

But there is an alternative to Caesar, and to Jesus, and Matthew introduces us to him. The third king is Herod: a more local, petty power than Caesar, but just as brutal. Herod murdered family members whom he thought to be a threat. Yet he surrounded his brutality with a religious veneer: building a great temple in Jerusalem and trying to pass himself off as a rightful Jewish King. (A temple, incidentally, that God was so unimpressed by that, despite it's size and quality, he had the Roman army knock it down within 70 years of its construction. He had a different kind of Temple in mind.)

Maybe it’s not the system that’s our problem, but something closer to home. I met someone the other day who is off work with depression because of bullying. Or its within our families, our streets, our community, where we feel vulnerable to those who throw their weight about. Some of them even use religion to support their power games. Those people we make an extra effort to keep happy, because we all know what happens when they get unhappy. Many people are afraid: afraid to be out on the streets after dark, afraid of their boss, afraid of the threat to them, or to their children.

The local tyrant. By the time we meet him in Matthew, we already know Herod is an imposter - Matthew sets out the genealogy of Jesus, which puts him in direct descent from King David. He gives Jesus the title 'Christ' - the Messiah, the promised king. And then the shock: "during the time of King Herod" (2:1) - who on earth is Herod? Jesus is clearly the rightful king, so what's this impostor doing on the throne in his place?


Which of the three kings do we want be ruled by? Which is the true king? Caesar: the system. Herod: the tyrant. Or Jesus. Not a king who rules by rules and forms and a faceless system, not one who rules by violence and threat. The true king is different.

what happens where Jesus is king?
- Wilberforce: fought for decades to abolish slave trade
- St. Peters: built a chicken shed into a church hall, now full to bursting with groups for all ages. It seems quite fitting that an animal shed should be a centre of hope for a community, just as it was once, and still is, the centre of hope for the whole world.
- Street Pastors; over 2000 people now, aged 18 to 80, on the streets on Friday and Saturday night, looking after the drunk and the depressed and the lost and the lonely.

Can I say to you, we need you. If God has blessed you with life, health,
and prosperity, then we need you.
There is so much to do, there is so much that still needs to change. Christmas is not the time when we escape from all this, it’s the time when we see that God himself has put his shoulder to the wheel of world history, and we say ‘yes’ to Christ, our king and 'no' to these impostors and pretenders. Jesus doesn’t want your vote in a phone poll, he doesn’t want you to buy his merchandise and branded items, he wants you and me to get up and work alongside him in the new world that God wants to build. The shepherds left their work, the wise men left their homes, Mary and Joseph took the risk of saying ‘yes’ to God’s call. Because there is a new king.

This is the surprising news of Christmas: you have a choice. You can live by the old rules, under the old ruler, or you can live a new life under a new king, a life under God’s favour, a life worth living.

Podcasts on Depression and mental health

Just stumbled across Holy Trinity Cheltenhams sermon podcasts, and fascinating to see that they've been doing a series on 'Singing the Blues', covering depression and mental health. Podcasts of the last 3 talks in the series were up when I visited, don't know if they drop off the bottom when more recent ones become available.

Worth a look, and torpedoes the stereotype of New Wine churches as happy clappy bless-ups with no time for reality and the tough side of life.