I wonder how many people in recent times have thought that evil seems to be winning or that God has no control in the world… Perhaps some have gone further by asking how can a loving God have allowed such chaos to dominate not just a small part of the world but the whole world…
Lots of people will be asking those sort of questions and now it would be easy to say let’s put the past behind us and move on. We’re back in church, even though it’s different !!
But actually, we need to recognise that things are different and we need to challenge ourselves to consider what in us needs to be different as we move forward and today I want to think of one line from the gospel reading that we just heard (Matthew 13:24-30,36-43) and actually I want to take it in some ways out of context…
It’s the very last line from the gospel we heard, ‘Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father…’ I’m going to use this out of context because it describes a situation that is to come, a situation when God has judged the people of the world, a situation where death and sin and pain are no more… A situation that finally proves to us, if we hadn’t quite always been sure, that God is in control…
But I don’t want to think about judgement today and I don’t want to think about our eternal state with God, important though those things are… Today, I want to think about today and about tomorrow and about next week.
And I think those words from the gospel, ‘Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father’, stand not just as a wonderful promise for the future, but as an inspiration for today…
One of the inevitable consequences of the last few months is that church will look very different at least for a while. Some people will come back, some won’t and hopefully some new people will come as well, but we have an opportunity to make a mark perhaps like never before in our lifetime as the church – an opportunity to reflect and plan ahead and that has to begin with us….
And that means that shining like the sun in the kingdom of our Father isn’t something for the future, but it’s a demand of us today. Each of us are called to shine brightly for God, and one of the things that I’m sure of is that amidst the questions from some people, amidst their doubts, amidst their concerns, there is a longing for something, a longing for something which gives meaning to life…
And I believe, and I hope you do, that we know that meaning in Jesus. He doesn’t magically remove some of our concerns and provide easy answers to every tough question, but he does make that promise to us of an eternal relationship with his people – it is a promise not to leave us alone, but a promise to walk alongside us every moment of every day.
As we move into an uncertain future for the church, we have some options. We can do it pessimistically wondering what the future might hold and shaking our heads at the problems we face…
That’s a natural enough response surely… Things are a bit of a mess. Congregation numbers may be down for a while, the money situation isn’t going well for a lot of churches, we’re not going to get a biscuit and a cup of tea after the service for a while. It’s easy to be pessimistic…
Or we could perhaps just long for the day when things are back to normal. We can wait until we can sing and have that cup of tea. We can wait until we can give people a hug and things will be ok again…
We can tell ourselves it will be worth the wait.
Or there is a third option and that is to look at this as a real opportunity to think about where God might be leading us in this – we can take this as a real opportunity to pray more, to read the bible more, to think about what our churches might look like into the future…
We can actually take this as a positive challenge to accept renewal of our churches and our lives, starting out afresh on a journey that isn’t going to be always easy, but certainly isn’t going to bring us down at every moment, but is going to lift us up as we face challenges together that we can overcome, as we can celebrate God’s goodness always, and as we can learn more and more to depend on him for our future, because there is no other way.
And that is surely the crux of where we have to go in our lives, recognising God, recognising his presence in our lives and recognising both his love for us and his desire for us to enjoy a life of blessing, a life where our only option as we recognise his unchanging goodness and love, is to shine as lights for him out into a world desperately hoping for and needing good news.
A theologian J I Packer, died on Friday. When asked what his final words for the church would be, he replied, ‘Glorify Christ every way.’
As Christians that isn’t just what we’re called to do, but it is our greatest privilege and can be our greatest joy as we seek to serve the creator who loves us and who offers us life, true, full life, always.
Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father, said the gospel. May we be willing to try and shine today, tomorrow and beyond, that our lives may be full and that we may touch others who need to know they’re loved and wanted by God. AMEN
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