A man called Jim Hopewell used to work as a lecturer for trainee ministers and priests. And he used to describe to his students a phenomenon he called the Thunk.
He said the thunk happens when you are talking to someone (usually for the first time) and they suddenly find out that you are a priest or a minister.
Suddenly – “thunk”!
Their mouth may start to hang open.
They look at you different.
They treat you different.
They start to talk to you in a different way.
Most ministers (in fact all ministers) will have their own thunk stories to share. But nowadays the thunk is actually a lot more common. Because it is likely to happen to people who aren’t just ordained priests or ministers. It is likely to happen to any one of us who actually admits to being a Christian or being part of a church.
“You what…!?”
Thunk! That look of astonishment.
Ask the person on the street what they think of Christians, the answer would probably be negative. Our public image is not great these days, which is partly our own fault, and partly the fault of a distorted and hostile society. (There is a lot that could be said about this, but I am not going there today). Instead, I’d like to highlight an irony.
The irony is that we who are Christians claim to have good news – great news - wonderful news - to share with our neighbours.
Is it true? Do we really have Good News to share?
And if we have, what exactly is it?
What if someone asked you say in a nutshell – what is the good news of Christianity, how would you respond? How could you sum it all up?
Clearly you could summarise the Christian faith in many different ways. There are many possible answers to that question.
Today I’d like to suggest three statements which I think go some way to
putting the Christian good news in an easy to remember form.
Three simple statements.
Three quite different statements.
Three statements that need to be taken together – one following on from the other in order to show the full picture…
We are loved by God
Now that seems like an unbelievably simple statement, and not especially powerful. Jesus loves me this I know. So what? What difference does that make?
Ask people if they believe in God and a huge majority will say yes. Yet this belief in God is not a life-changing thing.
It’s like an opinion we hold.
Imagine you are walking down Buchanan Street and someone accosts you to do a survey…
Would you vote for David Cameron?
Do you believe in the Loch Ness Monster?
Should there be a referendum on Independence?
Should the troops pull out of Afghanistan?
Do you believe in God?
And you trot out your answer to the question – whatever the question may be. It’s an opinion on a subject that probably doesn’t matter all that much. It almost certainly doesn’t make much difference to how you live your life. You might feel strongly about one or more of these subjects – but they are not exactly changing your life day by day.
Now when it comes to the question of do you believe in God, as I said, even today, the vast majority of people say “yes”.
Yet if you were to press further you would find in most cases that this belief is very vague, doesn’t have any real affect on their daily living and just seems to float about in the back of people’s minds.
Christians don’t just believe there is a God in a “back of our minds” kind of way. We believe that God has created this world for a purpose – that this God has given us the gift of life and that this God loves us and cares for us no matter who we are.
This God may not like everything we do, and everything that we are – but this God loves us and cares for us and wills our best – no matter who we are and what we have done.
And this God longs for us to know that love and for us to enter into a relationship with God.
And in all the places we might look to find this love – it is in the life of Jesus that we see it most clearly. It is Jesus who reveals the love of God and the care of God for every person. And through the teaching and actions of Jesus we are invited to make a response to that love, and to recognise that we too matter to the God of all creation.
How important is this to grasp? More important than anything else in the whole world.
If we do not get this we have missed the whole point of life. We can achieve all kinds of tributes, we can have many friends, make a lot of money, we can succeed in so many levels - but if we do not know God’s love then we are failing to see what matters more than all else.
When we get it – when we understand it – when we discover it – this love of God, it leads us to make a response.
It always will if we let it sink in.
Knowing that there is a God who loves and cares for us changes our lives. It is not something that just hangs about at the back of our mind.
It actually supplies us with meaning and purpose that we didn’t have before. It gives us hope for our future. And knowing that we are loved (with all our faults) enables us to show love to others in turn. It also allows us to love ourselves - because if God loves us it means that we are worth loving – that we matter – that our lives are important and significant.
A great theologian of last century, (some would say the greatest) Professor Karl Barth, who wrote thousands of pages and a great many books on Christianity, was asked near the end of his life to sum it up.
One day an interviewer asked him: “Professor Barth, you are responsible for so many insights and you have written many books which can be hard to understand for many of us. Is it possible you could sum up what it is you believe in just a couple of words or sentences?”
Barth thought about it for a moment and then he replied: “Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so!”
We are loved by God. That is the first thing everyone needs to know. And it is vitally important to realise this truth.
Here’s the second thing…
We are called into God’s family
We are called to be part of the church.
God’s family, the church, is far from perfect – partly because people like me are in it.
And so people say: don’t bother about the church. Believe in God, trust in Jesus, live a spiritual life, but keep away from the church and all its faults and failings and hypocrisies and mistakes.
But we are not called to be part of the church because it is so wonderful or so perfect.
We are not called to the church because we think church is so brilliant or because we believe that all the good the church does outweighs the bad.
We are called to be part of the church because this is where we learn more of God,
this is where we can worship and grow spiritually (where else?),
this is where we learn to love other people – a skill God wants us to acquire. (You can’t do that if you don’t mix with others - and given all the vastly different people in any church we have a great school here for us all in learning how to love).
this is where we can achieve more for God – because together we are stronger (and can pool our resources and do more than we ever could on our own),
and this is the group that God works through more than any other – this is the physical expression of Jesus’ body that the world can see.
And we all need the support of the church.
We all need the support of others as we seek to follow Jesus.
There are those people in the Bible who stand out as the heroes of faith. What is encouraging about them is that they weren’t unreal people – but very real people who made mistakes - sometimes huge mistakes - as they lived their lives. These heroes needed to be forgiven, accepted and encouraged by other people like everyone else.
In our Prayers for Others we usually think about the weak, the fallen, the ill, the sick, the poor, the oppressed. And it’s right that we do. But we also need to pray for one another and encourage one another when we are trying to be strong.
The support of a fellowship isn’t just for when trouble comes. We need to have that support for ourselves and offer that support to others as we seek to follow Christ and live his way.
We need one another.
We are loved by God.
We are called into God’s family.
And…
We are sent on a mission
One of the big mistakes in church life is to think of mission as some kind of specialised work for a certain few – we think of the couple who go and work and live in Africa for a couple of years.
We have this tendency to assume that mission is something for certain unique people – but the truth which we need to recover is that every single Christian has a mission that is unique to them.
That couple in Africa may well be doing mission. That may be their particular mission. But if we are part of God’s family in any way then we too need to be engaged in mission.
It may not take us to another corner of the earth. (For most of us it won’t). But for all of us, for every single one of us - our job is to make the world better than it otherwise would be – and that means working to make things fairer and kinder, tearing down dividing walls between people, making a difference for good and telling others about the love of God.
When, in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus prayed for his friends, he said:
“In the same way that you have given me a mission in the world, I give them a mission in the world.”
(John 17:18 The Message)
How do we work out what we should be doing?
By looking out for Gods call, in prayer, in worship, in teaching, in fellowship, in conversation with others.
Our reading today from Ephesians 4 illustrates that we all have different gifts and different abilities.
I used to misunderstand verse 11. It speaks of the gifts that God gives and it lists apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers. And I used to look at that and think – this is our choice. Each and every Christian has to be either an apostle, a prophet, and evangelist, a pastor or a teacher. Seems like a very specific, (yet limited), list.
But I hadn’t read the thing right.
Because the next verse goes on to say that these particular people are there to help encourage all God’s people to find their mission – their service. And later in verse 16 we read that the church is like a body made up of all different parts – and each person has his or her own part to play.
In other words, every single person has a calling and a contribution they can make to the church – to the work of God’s kingdom.
We all have something to offer – something to give. And in turn we are blessed by the gifts of those around us.
And as time goes on and our circumstances change and our experience moves, what we do (and what we offer of ourselves) in mission may change. So we always need to be on the lookout for the prompting of God’s Spirit to discover what God is asking us to do.
Our mission may be something that is very clear to us for a long period of time. On the other hand, what we did last year may not be what God wants us to do this year.
The church exists to help us discover our mission and yet sometimes churches don’t do all they could. Sometimes churches set up a structure and look for people to fit into this structure that may be 50 years old, (or lets face it - maybe 150 years old) instead of starting with actual people and their gifts and interests.
Churches need to be more flexible to appreciate this, and we ourselves need to be always looking to God to see where we are being called to serve and help out and to reflect on our mission as followers of Jesus.
There is always a great adventure in following Jesus.
What I do may be different from what you are doing, but God’s plan for your life and my life involves us doing the things that are most suited to us.
One of the great things about being a part of the family of God is that we are in an environment where together we can discern the mission that God is calling us to.
Here in a nutshell is the message that we are to get across to the world around us.
It is a message of good news – great news - life changing news.
We are all loved by God.
We are all called to be part of God’s family.
We are all part of a mission to share this news and to make the world a kinder, a fairer and a better place.
Is that good news?
It sounds like good news to me. I hope it sounds like good news to you.
And if it is, then let’s share it.
The world needs to hear this.