Jesus – Page 2 – Faith Meets World

Come and follow – A sermon for 11 November 2018 (Remembrance Sunday)

On November 11, 2018

In Christian life, Culture, Gospel, Jesus, Salvation, Sermons

[This post is the transcript of a sermon I preached this morning at the local Anglican church I attend.]

Today’s Gospel reading is Mark 1:14-20. You can read the text here.

Introduction

I’d like to invite you to cast your minds back, if you can, to the summer of 1985. Ronald Reagan had begun his second term of office as US President; Mikhail Gorbachev had risen to power as de facto leader of the Soviet Union; scientists had recently announced the discovery of a hole in the ozone layer; and the soap opera Neighbours had made its first appearance on Australian television. And there were no doubt many other significant events that happened that year.

But whatever else was happening in the world back in 1985, for me, as a nearly 15-year-old lad from South Yorkshire, one event happened that summer that far surpassed anything else in its significance and consequences. Under the rather grand title Mission: England, American evangelist Billy Graham held a series of rallies at Bramall Lane football ground in Sheffield.

Looking back, it seems like a bit of a cliché, but after listening to Billy Graham talk about God’s love and forgiveness, I was one of hundreds who responded to the famous invitation to “Get up out of your seat”. I went forward, prayed a prayer of repentance, confessed Jesus as my Lord and Saviour, and turned my life over to God. I can honestly say it was an event and a decision that changed my life forever.

What will it cost us to follow Jesus? A sermon for Proper 23B

By Rob

On October 14, 2018

In Christian life, Jesus, Money, Salvation, Sermons

[This post is the transcript of a sermon I preached this morning at the local Anglican church I attend.]

Today’s Gospel reading is Mark 10:17-31. You can read the text here.

Introduction

“Money makes the world go round”.

“Money can’t buy happiness.”

“Money isn’t everything.”

“Money doesn’t grow on trees.”

“You cannot serve both God and money.”

… and I could go on. We have a lot of sayings about money in the English language, don’t we? Only one of those I quoted is from the Bible, but in fact, the Bible contains over two thousand references to money and possessions. (By contrast, it only contains around five hundred references to prayer and a similar number of references to faith.)

Jesus tells thirty-eight parables in the gospels, and sixteen of them deal with how we handle money; in fact, according to the gospels, Jesus said far more about money than he did about heaven and hell combined.

Our gospel text today seems to be about money, but I hope to show you that it’s actually about something deeper than money – something of which money is only one example.

With that in mind, I’d like to simply walk us through the text and see what we can glean along the way, and then at the end we’ll try to pull out one or two conclusions.

Jesus, Bread of Life – A sermon for Proper 13B

By Rob

On August 5, 2018

In Christian life, Jesus, Kingdom, Sermons

[This post is the transcript of a sermon I preached this morning at the local Anglican church I attend.]

Today’s Gospel reading is John 6:24-35. You can read the text here.

Introduction

One of my most deeply ingrained childhood memories has to do with bread. My mum went to work part-time when I was six or seven years old; before that, she would bake fresh bread every single day. So whether I’d been playing out with friends or was coming home from school, as I opened the door I was always greeted by the same thing: the wonderful aroma of freshly baked bread. Even now, the smell of fresh bread immediately takes me back to the house I lived in as a child, and evokes strong feelings of home, care and provision.

In the mid-to-late 2000s, we lived in France for a few years. On our first Christmas in France, we went out for a walk on the morning of Christmas Day, and were astonished to see the local bakery open, and people queuing out the door to get their fresh bread for the day. To us, this was an unexpected sight because in our experience, shops stayed closed on Christmas Day. But fresh bread is so central to French culture that the idea of not being able to get it on any given day – even Christmas Day – was and is simply inconceivable.

Bread is, of course, a key theme in today’s Gospel reading, which culminates in the first of Jesus’ seven great “I am” statements given to us in John’s Gospel: “I am the bread of life.”

But before we think about what it means that Jesus is the bread of life, let’s take a few moments to review the events leading up to this statement.

Jesus’ prayer for his disciples – a sermon for Easter 7B

By Rob

On May 13, 2018

In Easter, Jesus, Kingdom, Prayer, Sermons

[This post is the transcript of a sermon for the seventh Sunday of Easter I preached this morning at the local Anglican church I attend.]

Today’s Gospel reading is John 17:6-19. You can read the text here.

Introduction

To tell you the truth, when I saw the text for today’s Gospel, I felt a bit intimidated about preaching from it. Of the four Gospels that we have in our Bible, John’s is easily the most complex; and this particular section of John’s Gospel is arguably the most theologically dense and, in some ways, the most cryptic of all.

So you’ll probably be relieved to know that I’m not even going to attempt to give you any kind of blow-by-blow exposition of the text. What I want to do instead is to give you a bit of context about the text itself – what kind of text it is, and where it fits into the overall gospel story – and then we’ll briefly see whether we can pull out one or two key points from this prayer that Jesus prays for his disciples and explore how they might apply to us today.

Context

So, what kind of text do we have in our Gospel reading today? Well, this passage from John 17 forms part of an extended monologue by Jesus that starts at the beginning of chapter 14 and runs right the way to the end of chapter 17. Scholars refer to this part of John’s Gospel as the Farewell Discourse, and this kind of farewell speech is a well established genre in Jewish literature. So one of the functions of this long discourse is to signal to readers that Jesus is saying his last and most important words to his friends before he moves into what he knows is going to be the final act of this great drama that is his life, death and resurrection.

How Jesus comes to us – a sermon for Easter 2B

By Rob

On April 8, 2018

In Easter, Jesus, Kingdom, Sermons

[This post is the transcript of a sermon for the second Sunday of Easter I preached this morning at the local Anglican church I attend.]

Today’s Gospel reading is John 20:19-31. You can read the text here.

Introduction

Picture the scene. A week ago, joyous crowds thronged the streets as Jesus rode into Jerusalem, hailed as Israel’s king. Expectations were high: surely this would be the culminating moment when Jesus would finally make his move and go from being a backwoods preacher to restoring Israel’s greatness and visibly ushering in the kingdom! But now, a week later, he’s dead and gone and the disciples are in hiding. Where did it all go wrong?

The state the disciples were in

From our twenty-first century vantage point, we can easily misjudge what the disciples must have been thinking and feeling at this point. Because we know how the story ends, it would be easy for us to assume they were hopeful and full of eager anticipation. But that would be a very misguided assumption.

Metaphysical Jesus

By Rob

On July 22, 2016

In Christian life, Jesus, Religion, Theology

The farther I proceed on my theological and experiential journey, the more convinced I am that one of the most fundamental mistakes many churches and believers have made is to turn the Jesus of the Gospels into a kind of abstract spiritual persona.

Let me explain.

For many evangelicals in particular, the important thing is to have a “relationship with Jesus”. That might sound very earthy and real, but in practice what it usually amounts to is believing that Jesus somehow lives inside you, having conversations with him, either out loud or in your head, singing to and/or about him with other believers at church and, most importantly of all, believing that he is the Son of God who died to free you from the curse of sin, death and hell. Do all this and you can be assured of your ticket to heaven.

I realise that one might easily conclude from the above paragraph that I am deriding huge and important aspects of Christian practice, namely faith, prayer and worship. However, that’s not my purpose. I’d simply like to ask one question about this approach to Christianity: just who or what is this Jesus with whom one has a relationship?

The cross: religious self-projection or radical discontinuity?

By Rob

On February 23, 2016

In Cross, Gospel, Jesus, Religion, Sin

3832056730_e1775658e2_o Most Christians agree that the central, defining feature of Christianity is the cross. I think it’s fair to say that no other religion has such a universally recognised identifying symbol.

However, when it comes to what we understand the cross to mean, things get more complicated. And what we understand the cross to mean is of huge importance, because it shapes our entire understanding of God and what it means to be a Christian.

If I were to put it to a roomful of Christians that God is most perfectly revealed in the crucified Christ, I’m pretty sure I’d get a lot of hearty amens. But the fact that we could all agree that God is most perfectly revealed in Christ upon the cross emphatically does not mean that we have a shared understanding of the cross or what it tells us about God and our relationship to him.

Let’s try to unpack this a bit by exploring two alternative understandings of the cross.

Faith Meets World

Reflections on faith in a messed-up but beautiful world

Category: Jesus (Page 2 of 11)

Come and follow – A sermon for 11 November 2018 (Remembrance Sunday)

Introduction

What will it cost us to follow Jesus? A sermon for Proper 23B

Introduction

Jesus, Bread of Life – A sermon for Proper 13B

Introduction

Jesus’ prayer for his disciples – a sermon for Easter 7B

Introduction

Context

How Jesus comes to us – a sermon for Easter 2B

Introduction

The state the disciples were in

Metaphysical Jesus

The cross: religious self-projection or radical discontinuity?

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