Belonging, Believing, Being

If you’ve listened to the news over the last few days, three words you will inevitably have heard are ‘No overall control’. Councils throughout Wales and England have been left with deals needing to be done in order to decide upon who will lead those Councils for the next term. And as I heard these words for the umpteenth time I started to think of how true that statement is for so many people. In their lives there is ‘No overall control’.

Today I want to think briefly of a Saviour who offers to control our lives, not in a domineering, dictatorial way, but in a way that expresses concern for every aspect of our lives. A way that shouts out to every one of us who is listening, ‘I love you and want the best for you.’ That is the God we worship, the God who in Jesus accepted all of the humiliation of rejection and torture, even death, and who still shouts, ‘I love you whoever you are and whatever you do.’

And so I want to think of another 3 words which help with these thoughts – belonging, believing and being.

One of the phrases that took a bit of getting used to when we moved down to this area was ‘He belongs to her’, meaning of course that they were related, sometimes very distantly, but that’s another thing altogether ! This wasn’t a phrase I knew, but actually it’s quite an interesting phrase because it gets to the very heart of what it means to be part of a family. We belong…

Many people talk of belonging to a Church, and that’s how people should feel, part of a family, a community, a fellowship. In the readings today, particularly in the gospel (John 17:1-11), we very much have the sense of Jesus talking about his people as belonging to him, not to a Church, not to any organisation, but to a creed, to a belief in him who has given everything for us, and who has promised to be with us every moment of every day.

And that is where belonging must lead. It is wonderful to feel part of a Church. As I said earlier I hope that is what people feel when they come here, part of a family, part of a fellowship, united under the love of Jesus, but belonging must lead us to think of belief.

C S Lewis wrote about belief, ‘You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong as long as you are merely using it to tie a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn't you then first discover how much you really trusted it?’

In order to grow as Christians we need to consider our belief. We need to challenge our beliefs as we seek God more clearly through prayer, worship, fellowship, through the Bible, and many people never really do that. There a story about a man preaching to a group of miners. He asked one man, "What do you believe?" "Well, I believe the same as the church." "And what does the church believe?" "Well, they believe the same as me." Seeing he was getting nowhere, the preacher said, "And what is it that you both believe?" "Well, I suppose the same thing !."….

Jesus didn’t ask us to make a commitment of belonging, but of believing…

And then we must ‘Be’. Somebody once wrote, ‘With nothing but a promise and a prayer, those eleven disciples consented to be the church, and nothing was ever the same again, beginning with them. The followers became leaders, the listeners became preachers, the converts became missionaries, the healed became healers, and the disciples became apostles, witnesses to the Risen Christ… and so, they stopped looking up towards heaven, and looked at each other instead. And then, they got on with the business of being the church.

‘Being’ as a Christian, must be trying to be like Jesus. Not looking up at the sky, not looking heavenward, not simply expecting that God will automatically provide all the answers, but being like Jesus. The path he trod was often difficult and painful, it often seemed to be leading nowhere positive at all, but he knew that it was leading to the establishment of his kingdom, and committed to his work we too can be sure that that is what we are involved in.

This week I had a discussion with someone about prayer. Prayer is the most powerful gift we can have but it is not an abdication of our responsibilities. There are times when praying is all we can do in a situation, but there are other times when we are called to work for our prayers to be answered.

And so we seek to ‘Be’… to live as Jesus lived, a prayerful, loving, compassionate, hopeful life centred on God. A life of understanding, forgiveness, and a determination to point people to God’s wonderful kingdom, a kingdom that will be fulfilled in the future, but that is also all around us today.

Many of you will know the wonderful poem ‘Footprints’. It talks brilliantly and movingly of God’s sustaining and ever present help. But as we think of footprints we recognise also that they can sometimes get us into trouble… and they can also be very helpful… you can follow footsteps... In Jerusalem you can visit the place where Jesus apparently left his last footprint here on earth.

Some say you can see the shape of Jesus' foot in the rock. The place has been a special and holy place for nearly 2,000 years, and there have been various buildings at the site - originally a small chapel with no roof built in the 4th Century, then a 12th Century Crusader reconstruction with additional fortification, then, and to present day, a Moslem mosque… Muslims also observe the ascension of Jesus.

It is interesting to know about the places where Jesus was… places where people can say - "Jesus was here". The place of the ascension reminds us that Jesus was taken up into heaven, but he can still leave his footprints, marks that say, "Jesus is here". And those footprints that he leaves today are our footprints. All the things that we do leave a mark, sometimes a bad one… hopefully many good ones… and other people will see our footprints and say, "Jesus is here".

We belong to a huge family, we believe in a God who loves us without limits and we must be the people that reflect the nature and love of God all around us. AMEN