Sermons from Rev David Jenkins in 2007
Sermons on this page:1. POTENTIAL A Sermon first preached on 1 April 2007
2. PRAISE A Sermon first preached on Easter Sunday 8 April 2007
3. LIFE A sermon first preached on 27 April 2007
4. A SHARED JOURNEY A sermon first preached on 26 August 2007 POTENTIAL
A Sermon first preached on 1 April 2007
1. Whenever someone dies young, there can often be a sense of tragic waste. This seems particularly poignant when a child or teenager dies. What potential they had - what they might have done in their lives. And even if a person’s gifts have begun to be shown and they achieve a great deal in their short lifetime, there is always the question of how much more they might have achieved. What music might Mozart, Schubert and Mendelssohn have gone on to write if they had not died in their 30’s?
2. Someone else who died in his 30’s was Jesus of Nazareth. Do we feel about Jesus - how much more he might have achieved, or do we somehow see his dying as the fulfilling of his potential?
3. Jesus began to show his potential at the age of 12, in his meeting with teachers in the temple, when he listened to them and asked them questions. Even at that age, people were “amazed at his understanding and at his answers”. 21 years later, in the same temple, during the last few days of his life, people continued to be amazed at his understanding and answers. During Jesus’ brief but hugely significant ministry people were aware of a man who taught with a unique personal authority and an extraordinarily perceptive insight into human nature. Jesus’ teaching with its highly memorable word pictures, stories and telling, searching phrases penetrated deeply into people’s minds and spirits and emotions – and they still do. The listener who became the communicator, the student who became the teacher had fulfilled his potential.
4. He fulfilled his potential in other ways too. From childhood onwards he would observe the skills and learn the techniques of carpentry by watching Joseph. After Joseph died, it was Jesus who became the carpenter and master builder of Nazareth, using and developing the skills of his hands. And the one, “whose strong hands were skilled at the plane and the lathe”, was to bring healing to many people’s lives-as those same hands reached out to others in such dynamic and sensitive compassion that people experienced profound restoration. To the blind, the dumb, the deaf, the paralysed, the mentally ill, the diseased, the inwardly tortured, the potential of one who was “good with his hands” had been fulfilled.
5. Jesus gathered people around him and acted as the inspiration of their lives. From all they learnt by being in his company they were to go out and change the nature of each society they came to. Jesus had done enough to launch the movement which would eventually spread throughout the world and, at its best, raise the whole standard of human relating and possibility. The churches, schools, hospitals that would come into being would play their part in giving to whole generations of people direction, hope and purpose. In the calling and nurturing of his disciples Jesus’ potential was fulfilled.
6. A premature death? Jesus’ words from the cross included the shout of triumph, “It is finished”. What was finished? His life was over certainly, but had all that he had set out to do been completed? Could he not have given so much more teaching and words of wisdom to guide us? Could he have not brought healing to many more lives? Could he have not stayed longer with his disciples to guide and inspire them more fully? His words “It is finished” are not words of defeat and despair, but of confidence and gratitude in work accomplished. You know what it’s like when you’ve been working hard on something and, at long last, you’ve completed it? And if you’ve done it really well, there’s a feeling of satisfaction and gratitude because it has turned out well.
7. There were two interlocking aspects of Jesus’ potential that were only fulfilled by going forward to the cross. So far from being a tragedy of a life cut short, his was a life of accomplishment - not only because of his wise and memorable teaching, not only because of his life-transforming healing, not only because of his work of guiding and leading his disciples, but because of two other aspects of his work that would never have been so clearly and graphically demonstrated if Jesus had backed away from going to the cross.
8. What were these two interlocking aspects of Jesus’ potential? They were his suffering and his love. They are inextricably connected because Jesus’ willingness to suffer excruciating agony is the fullest possible expression of his unlimited love both for God and for all of us. It is not possible for love to be more fully offered. “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends”. Not to have his life taken from him, but to lay it down. This is why Jesus says “It is finished”; his absolute self offering had been completed. His potential was fulfilled.
9. And what about our potential? Is there more that we can learn? There must be! Is there more that we can find ways of communicating and sharing? We probably feel we’ve hardly started on that road yet. Are there more skills we can acquire and develop? We know there are. Is there more that we can contribute towards the healing of other people? We know that our giving and caring and praying have not reached saturation point - nowhere near it! Is there more that we could offer as disciples of Jesus? Are there further contributions for us to make to promote the continuing growth of the Church? And what about our willingness to embrace suffering, should that become necessary, as an expression of our love for God and for each other?
10. To put that question another way, can our love grow more, offer more, give more -and might that not inevitably involve some sacrifice on our part? Love is costly, not easy. Its fullest expression may well be in what we are willing to do without for the sake of the other. Love and selfishness are opposed to one another and are in a state of perpetual enmity within us. We recognize that there is. much more potential within us than has yet been realized. In particular there is our potential to love —the very reason that we are here in the first place. May we draw on the inspiration and strength of Jesus, who fulfilled his potential and can enable us to fulfill ours.
PRAISE
A Sermon first preached on Easter Sunday 8 April 2007
- If ever there is a day for praising God it is this day.
- We celebrate the God who gives life, who brings new life now and beyond death. We adore the God of unlimited love. We praise the God whose purposes are not ultimately defeated, frustrated and thwarted; but have come to fulfilment in ways that we find utterly staggering.
- We express our praise of God-through the anticipation and the exuberant joy of our togetherness; through the beauty of flowers, which are symbols of the irrepressible life which bursts through the coldness of the earth; through the gladness of our hymns and the confident affirmations of our worship. Of all days on which to worship God this one is uniquely special.
- But there are other ways in which our praise can be expressed, and these ways are not limited to this one day.
- We can express praise by the way we see life and by how we live it.
- One of the hopes of this day is that our way of seeing life may be transformed into Easter ways.
- It may surprise us how much negativity there can be in us. We may be basically positive and cheerful people, but we can still live as if we always expected the worst. This is not to say that we should naively turn our faces away from the horror of the world’s suffering and the possibility of its hurts touching our own lives: it is important that we live with realism.
- But if Easter means anything at all deep down, surely we cannot allow ourselves to wallow in the slough of despond. If the purposes of God cannot be defeated, if love is the last word on life, if there is a greater life to follow this sphere of existence, how can we go around with faces that reflect the doom and gloom of negativity, defeat and despair?
- But does that mean there’s no room for doubt? After all the first disciples of Jesus, even at the moment of seeing the risen Lord, were not beyond doubting what was happening-and they actually had the evidence in front of their eyes that we don’t have!
- If doubt is natural, even on Easter Sunday, is it right that we should be ecstatically exuberant and cheerfully confident?
- If suffering and uncertainty are features of our own lives and the lives of those we love, and if we live in a world of profound problems and blatant injustice, how can we be blissfully blinkered and ignorantly indifferent towards the real agony and the considerable fears of our fellow men and women?
- Wouldn’t there be something shallow, hollow and uncaring about our happy celebrations when so many of our brothers and sisters are threatened by war, oppression and hunger?
- But then, isn’t that precisely the message of resurrection? This is the kind of world Jesus came into- a world of corruption, intrigue and cruelty. What Jesus went through in the last week of his life was the result of a combination of vested interest and greed and moral failure and cowardice. He drained the dregs of the cup of anguish and agony, identifying to the full the worst of what people may go through.
- And within days there is a total transformation of fortunes when the crucified one is alive again.
- This is not some fairy tale with a pretty happy ending. This is the reality of the experience of the first followers of Jesus which gave them the impetus and the dynamic to bring this same message of transformed life to the needy world in which they lived.
- And isn’t that what we can offer too? Isn’t it by our outlook and way of life that we can offer to a world in terrible need what we all need more than anything- a real reason for hoping even in circumstances which appear to be outwardly hopeless?
- Our needy world desperately cries out for what we can give- the living message that light is stronger than darkness and love is stronger than hatred.
- The mission of the people of Jesus is that we allow ourselves to be transformed by what happened this day and to carry that transformation into the world, expressing our praise by the way we see life and the way we live it, striving for justice, seeking to improve life for one another and holding firm to the greatest news the world has ever heard.
- No wonder we praise God today! But may we continue praising tomorrow and the days after that by how we see and think and act-as the people of resurrection.
LIFE
A sermon first preached on 27 April 2007
In a new sermon series on life and death issues, we start today with life.
So what is life? It is the gift of the Living God, source and creator of all life. A picture painted early in the book of Genesis is of God breathing into the nostrils of the first man, who became “a living being”. God is the life-giver.
Jesus is depicted in John’s Gospel as the one who is life-giving. “In him was life and the life was the light of men”. “I am the bread of life”. “I am the resurrection and the life”. “I have come that you might have life and have it in all its fullness-superabundant and overflowing.”
The activity of God’s Spirit is also described as being life-giving. Through every aspect of God’s being there is the creation of life- of energy, vitality and fullness of being. The best way to “get a life” is in relationship with the giver of life. So do you have a life? Is your life connected in a vital way to the ultimate life-giver?
A woman describes an experience she witnessed in a geriatric hospital- “They were all sitting half dead in their wheelchairs, mostly paralysed and just existing. They watched some television, but if you had asked them what they had watched they probably not have been able to tell you. We brought in a young woman who was a dancer and she put on records of Tchaikovsky’s music and started to dance among these people, all in their wheel chairs, which had been set in a circle. In no time the old people started to move. A lady of 104 said, “This reminds me of when I danced for the Tsar of Russia”. An elderly man stared at his hand and said, “Until now I haven’t moved this hand in 10 years”. Even in a lifeless, half-dead situation, new life can begin to awaken.
Whenever we encounter the dead hand of inertia, may we be catalysts who cause movement, the beginning of the blossoming of life. We cannot control the gift of life. We can take hold of it and be led by it to free others from the slavery of non-life, the deadness of mere existence.
Christian Aid’s slogan is “We believe in life before death”. Of course as Christians we believe in life after death, and that will be a theme to which we will be returning in May; but life before death for the millions caught up in refugee camps in Darfor and Chad, in continual violence in Baghdad, in the worst ravages of hunger and poverty, has to be our overriding concern.
While we have life we must share with those who are scarcely living now, to bring them the quality of life which they desperately need. One of the major principles by which Albert Schweitzer lived was what he called “reverence for life”. Such reverence compels us to work to secure the best for all living beings, to combat all the forces which militate against life and justice.
According to the dictionary definition I looked up life is “the condition which distinguishes active animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, functional activity and continual change.” According to that definition, life does not stand still. Cardinal Newman once said, “To live is to change”. Life involves the process of continual change. A living person is one who is growing; a living church is not one which is static, but one that is evolving.
In what ways are you developing as a person? In what ways are we evolving as a church? What can we offer here? The encouragement and stimulus that enable people to move on towards true spiritual maturity? The reaffirmation of the value each person has as someone created in the image of God, someone who is eternally loved, someone for whom Christ died? The repeated conviction that we all matter to God and so we must do to one another?
If God’s purpose is to bring life to the world-life with a capital L, life with an eternal dimension, then our role, as the followers of Jesus, the supremely responsive and aware, is to be ourselves so responsive and aware that we, too, are involved in bringing newness of life to others. Our role is to bring to others breathtaking freedom and vivid aliveness; to bring the power of restoration, of healing, of rejuvenation.
What we each need to decide is “Where does this translate into my situation? What can I do to receive the gift of life, and to share that gift? Where can I be a catalyst for change? Where can I be involved as a life saver and a life giver?”
Let us think around these questions and opportunities now in the conscious presence of the energizing, life-giving God, who created all things, who raised Jesus from death and who offers to us all the gift of life everlasting.
DEATH
A Sermon first preached on 13 May 2007
I thought I’d cheer you up today by speaking about death!
To start with some graffiti- A sign in a maternity unit said, “The first 3 minutes of life can mean all the difference between dying and living”. Underneath someone had scrawled, “The last 3 minutes are pretty dodgy too.”
More graffiti-“Death is nature’s way of telling you to slow down!”
And from a letter to the Daily Mail-“The most dangerous thing in the world is living. There’s 100% mortality rate”.
Of people’s last words, one of my favourites is Lord Palmerston’s, “Die, my dear Doctor? That’s the last thing I’ll ever do”.
A young girl grasped the hand of her Doctor. She knew that she was dying and she said, “Doctor, I’m afraid. You see, I’ve never done this before”.
That’s the trouble about dying-we haven’t done it before; we don’t know what it’s like; we don’t know where it leads.
There are people who have been through what are called near –death experiences, who say that what happened at the moment when the heart had stopped beating was highly pleasurable and positive, and such experiences create a hope that dying may possibly not be as fearful as we have often anticipated.
It may be comforting to consider what one of my Professors at Birmingham University, John Hick called “eschatological verification”-It can work only one way and that is positive. Either the hope of life beyond death will turn out to be true or we shall not be there to find it proved false!
At one stage in this country when death was much more prevalent-when there were many more deaths in infancy and when life expectancy was decades below what it is now, the fear of death may have been a much sharper focus for most people than it is now.
Today it may not be the fear of death that strikes us so much as the intense surprise of its immediacy when we had thought it was remote. It is the absurd but astonishing feeling that this can’t be true, because, we may imagine, although death is something that will happen to me one day, it’s only to other people that it comes here and now.
We may even have the ridiculous notion that because my diary is full of important things I’m going for weeks and months ahead, I can’t possibly die now.
Mind you, there are people like the 95 year old who has pioneered cures for TB who is still active in working for further cures to different strains of the disease, or the theologian, who in his late 90’s, seems to have been so fully occupied that he didn’t have time to get round to dying! And maybe the best possible way of preparing for death, as well as making sure our things are in order and our will is made, is the make the very most of the gift of life while we have it.
At one time people would talk about “the art of dying”, but our modern society may have not developed much background for that.
People may tend to live for themselves alone and to die to themselves alone, and for many the loss of a meaning to life involves the loss of meaning to death. There is a clear connection between the meaning of death and the meaning of life. A Christian Bolivian prisoner, imprisoned because of living out the implications of his faith, wrote from his prison cell, “No one’s death is meaningless if his life has been charged with significance.”
That has a lot to say about why the death of Jesus has come to have such importance for the world-because of the connection between his death and his life as well as the resurrection which followed his dying. It is also that here is not one man dying alone, but one man dying in a solidarity, on behalf of others, which somehow turns his living, dying and resurrection into having a unique meaning for us. Attitudes towards death and dying have been transformed out of all recognition for millions of people because of Jesus’ resurrection.
The New Testament is full of imagery about dying with Christ and rising with Christ, about us not living to ourselves or dying to ourselves, but “if we live we live to the Lord and if we die we die to the Lord, so, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s”.
This is the thinking of Paul, who also spoke about “dying daily” and “dying to self”. To die to self is to die to all that is worst in us, to die to all the selfishness and pride which alienate us from God and from other people. In this sense dying to self could well be one of life’s greatest goals. It is presumably what Jesus meant in saying “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me”. The way to life at its deepest and truest is through the small daily deaths to our self centered ambitions.
Coping with loss of one kind or another affects our lives at many levels and throughout life. At birth we are separated from our mother-we emerge from her womb, the umbilical cord is cut and we pursue a separate existence.
When we first go to nursery, both mother and child may feel an acute sense of loss, and this living with loss continues throughout life for all of us.
But there’s another way of understanding it:-we are growing towards maturity. Frequently experiences of loss and moving on occur together. As we move from one area of the country to another, we experience the loss of all that was familiar, and, at the same time, move on to what is new. Loss and moving on are connected. Not every loss can be compensated for by a corresponding experience of moving on, though. Some losses are devastating to the degree that, although we may eventually adjust to them, we will always be strongly be affected by them. Each loss could be called a “mini-death”. Perhaps it might also be a sign of where life is moving on even beyond this sphere of existence?
Professor Geoffrey Lampe, a theologian, wrote these words shortly before he died-“It really isn’t good enough for us happier people to be simply satisfied with life as we’ve lived it. Is there no room for regret and can there be no scope for improvement? What about that curious sense, which I think grows much clearer with the years, that in so many of the important things in life, especially in one’s relations with other people, one is always just beginning, just now unlearning mistakes, just being led to see things differently, making a fresh start? Isn’t it the case that in spite of all the continuities that we can trace right through from childhood and in spite of all the obvious ruts we get into, we are continually becoming aware that we are different people now from the people we used to be, and we can confidently hope to be different people in the future from what we are now, different and hopefully better people! There is a constant incompleteness about our response to God and our capacity to love other people. This is what Paul describes as our inner selves being renewed each day.
The transformation of ourselves into the image of God cannot be completed in these few years of life”.
Because we haven’t been through it before, we mustn’t suppress our emotions or deny our feelings. That wasn’t how Jesus faced death, as his struggle in Gethsemane makes very clear.
We needn’t deny our own fear and trembling, but in the midst of it we can know ourselves encompassed by the God who is love and from whose love we can never be separated.
To prepare against the fear of death we need to make the most of life: to enjoy life and thank God for it; to do our best to make it possible for other people to enjoy it more; to move through the enjoyment of life into the enjoyment of God and to begin to experience that renewal of ourselves through God’s love which gives us the promise of fuller life to come.
We can live, even with an anticipation which includes excitement.
The Russian novelist Dostoyevsky said, “my life is drawing to a close. I know that, I feel it. But I also feel every day that is left to me how my earthly life is already in touch with a new, infinite and fast approaching future life, the anticipation of which sets my soul trembling with rapture and my mind glowing, and my heart weeping with joy”.
One of my favourite last words is from a priest, who when asked on his deathbed how he was feeling, said, “Excited”!
A SHARED JOURNEY
A sermon first preached on 26 August 2007 at Cheddington after a LABYRINTH experience set out on the Green in front of the church. This resembled a maze but was in one direction. Along the route were aids to encourage reflection on life in general and the challenges which face our Circuit of churches in particular.
1. Each of us is on our own individual journey. We walked the labyrinth on our own and made our own private reflections.
2. But we are also on a shared journey. We have come together in worship this evening because we recognize our need of each other in walking the life of faith. Our individual journeys intersect with each other. There is meeting. There is recognition –“Here is someone else on the same journey that I am on.”
3. Each church represented here is on a journey; and together as a Circuit we are travelling towards the future.
4. One thing which the Labyrinth made clear is that we don’t travel in a straight line! The life of faith is not a neatly ordered predictable progression. It involves many twists and turns. It may take us in directions we had not anticipated when we started out. As we turn each corner we make fresh discoveries.
5. Any journey, however meticulously we have planned it, involves some element of uncertainty. Who knows what traffic we will meet on the road? Who knows what turbulence there will be in the air, or what storms there may be on the voyage? Although the life of faith does involve some measure of certainty, it is a certainty in God rather than in the direction we must follow.
6. Faith needs to accommodate uncertainty, the unknown, the unpredictable, the way that is less sure, when we walk through marshland in a thick fog or traverse a mountain pass when the cloud descends.
7. Something that the Labyrinth made very clear is that there are stopping places on our journeys. We are not continually on the go; we are invited to rest. The stopping places on the Labyrinth are ones in which we have been encouraged to reflect on some aspect of our travelling. How much do we use the moments of resting to reflect? It is so easy just to travel without thinking of the purpose of doing so or of our destination. We need the stopping places and we need to take the opportunity for thinking and being.
8. The most important discovery we make on our journey is that we are not alone. Not only are we on a group-supported road in solidarity with other pilgrims of faith; but this is a road travelled by the Son of God himself. Has anyone here ever been to Israel? You know how thrilling it can be to walk in a place where you know for certain Jesus would have walked –into the synagogue at Capernaum, along these steps in Jerusalem, along the Via Dolorosa. Perhaps it is even more thrilling to realize that where you are walking, he has walked too. The joy, the sorrow, the anticipation, the fear, the reassurance-he has known from the inside what we are experiencing today. You are not alone on your journey. Jesus, as he promised, is with us always
9. On our individual journeys and our shared journeys; where those journeys intersect with each other; through all the twists and turns of uncertainty, make space for stopping points and reflection times in order to discover and rediscover that we do not travel on our own. John Wesley’s last words remain true for today’s Methodist people –“The best of all is God is with us”. A surer guide than any map or satellite navigation system is the Spirit of Jesus within us and among us guiding us forwards. So “be strong and of good courage, because, wherever you go, the Lord your God goes with you.”
HOPES AND FEARS
A sermon first preached 16 December 2007
“The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight”.
What might be among the hopes and fears of the people of the town of Bethlehem tonight?
What hopes and fears do you have for the future?
Our fears for ourselves might include
· unforeseen disasters affecting those we love
· a significant deterioration in our own health or in that of those who are close to us
· not having the energy or time to do what we intended to do.
Our fears for our nation might involve
· more terrorist attacks
· a more polarized and less tolerant society
· people in power providing short-term solutions to long-term problems
Our fears for our world might be around
· irreversible environmental damage
· severe water shortages
· mass famine
· infectious pandemics
· nuclear warfare
If these are among the fears which sometimes surface from our subconscious or which are thrust at us by what we see and read and hear, where do our hopes lie?
Are our hopes often the opposite of our fears? So might our hopes for ourselves include
· being in committed relationships in which we find ourselves being emotionally sustained?
· developing our skills and creatively meeting each challenge we encounter?
· living useful, productive lives which make a positive difference to other people?
And what might our hopes be for our nation and our world:-
· the healing of the earth
· the elimination of poverty
· expanding human potential and advancing civilization
The fulfillment of our personal hopes will depend, to a great extent, on our determination and focus in pursuing them, through, or despite, our circumstances.
For the hopes for our nation and world to be realized all kinds of factors will need to come into play-improved global education, continued technological advances, good governance. We need to see peace, justice and prosperity for all being at the top of the political agenda and being rigorously pursued with clear vision and concerted effort.
But our hopes cannot simply rely on our fellow human beings, when we know that even the best are fallible and inconsistent. Our hopes need a deeper focus still.
“Our hopes and fears are met in thee tonight”. One of the many reasons why we celebrate Jesus’ birth with a sense of gladness and of awe is because the birth of this child is in itself connected with our ultimate hope.
In what ways does the being of Jesus, the baby born in Bethlehem help us in rising above our fears and actualizing our hopes?
Jesus’ birth tells us that this world is not abandoned but profoundly loved-“God loved the world so much that he gave his only son”.
Jesus’ birth underlines our Creator’s commitment to human beings, God’s willingness to work with us and through us. So Mary, Joseph and other people are significant in the contribution they make. And so can we be. Our hope is not based solely on human beings, but it doesn’t completely bypass human lives either. Hope is centered in people working in co-operation with God.
Hope finds its rationale in one who comes
· to lift our lives as Saviour,
· to act as our inspiration as teacher,
· to stand alongside us as brother and friend
· and to lead us towards the future as Lord.
“Our hopes and fears are met in thee tonight”. May we place Jesus more at the centre of our own lives and seek, in his strength, to live out his way more completely in each day of life we are given; and so may the whole world discover its true hope.