Christmas 2008 - A Sermon for Midnight Communion

"Orangutans learn to trade favour" ran the BBC website on Christmas Eve

“Orangutans can help each other get food by trading tokens, scientists have discovered - but only if the help goes in both directions.”

We read that researchers from the University of St Andrews have found that orangutans can learn the value of tokens and trade them, helping each other win bananas. Two orangutans - Bim and Dok - from Leipzig Zoo, Germany, were especially good at helping each other.

Initially, they were given several sets of tokens, and learned the value of the different types. An animal could exchange one type for bananas for itself, another type could be used to gain bananas for a partner, and a third had no value.

Dok, the female, was especially good at swapping tokens to get bananas for Bim, the male. But he was less interested in trading tokens that would win bananas for her.

As she became less willing to help him out, Bim responded by trading more and more, until their efforts were more or less equal.

What fascinated me in this report is the assumption that this suggests Orangutans are something like humans. I don't know about you, but that is sort of the behaviour I would expect from animals (although they are maybe rather better at it than we had realised!)

Of course, there is nothing wrong in trade! We need it – indeed, lots more of it. But trading isn't what makes us human!

I think tonight is about what makes us human. The ability to rise above self interest, selfishness if you like, and to put someone else first. Bethlehem is where it first happened.

God gave his Son, as a gift, pure gift, knowing we would kill him. But because by giving His Son he would be able to welcome His Son's killers into His eternity – heaven we sometimes call it.

Not that people hadn't been unselfish before Jesus. But no-one had taught that it was the supreme good. And certainly no-one had ever lived it out.

Jesus came into the world so that we might look not downwards to Orangutans, but upwards to Him

This last week I spoke with the family of someone who had died. He had had a miserable childhood, rejected and taken into care. The sort of childhood that is used to explain why some of the awful criminals in the news do the awful thing they do.

But this man had lived differently. He had risen to the challenge. He had lived an adult life full of love for the new family he made through marriage. He had risen above his circumstances.

Christ comes into the world and calls us to rise above – rise above all we face, and become truly human. But not just rise above. He shows us how trust in the Father will see us through all things – even death. Indeed, trust in the Father through Jesus is the only way to living a truly human, eternal, life.

There is much to face. Woolworth's speaks for so much. It is being almost demolished in front of our eyes. All that we love and grew up with – Ladybird clothes, etc. - gone. Others are joining them. There is so much uncertainty.

Tonight, we remember and recall that in the midst of all this, what really matters has not changed

When people is dying, no-one ever says, I wish I had worked harder, I wish I hard earned more money. What they say is, I wish I had spent more time with my family. Deep down we know what really matters.

And what really matters – that we are loved by God and who holds out his arms to us to draw us into his family, has not changed.

And God who welcomes us when we turn to him, will then strengthen us into the new year where so much seems to be falling apart, enabling us to, by His Spirit, rise above the things around us, and, full of trust in God, be those who go out to love others, not those who learn to be Orangutans.

Wrestling with God

Just discovered Oswald Chambers 'My Utmost For His Highest'. Have wanted to read it for years but having picked up a cheap edition (updated version) I can we what the fuss is about. There are deep insights of the sort I haven't seen elsewhere.  

Take the entry for December 16th, which begins (commenting on Ephesians 6:13,18 - whole armour of God):

You must learn to wrestle against the things that hinder your communication with God, and wrestle in prayer for other people; but to wrestle with God is unscriptural. If you ever do wrestle with God, you will be crippled for the rest of your life. If you grab hold of God and wrestle with Him, as Jacob did, simply because He is working in a way that doesn't meet with your approval, you force Him to put you out of joint (see Genesis 32:24,25). Don't become a cripple by wrestling with the ways of God, but be someone who wrestles before God with the things of the world, because "we are more than conquerors through Him..." (Romans 8:37)

'In Adam', 'In Christ' - some exploratory thoughts

These words of Paul in Romans often float over us. We find it very hard to conceive what it means to be part of another, part of one another. We are so geared by society to see ourselves as atomized individuals. My own spirituality over the years was so often in roots that began with me and God, others being fitted in later.

Psalm 16 knits things together more than that. It begins 'Keep me safe, O God', but very soon we are hearing that the saints in the land are the glorious ones in whom is all my delight (v 3). He makes the move to the corporate as soon as he can

This strikes me forcibly as I reflect on my ministry at the moment. Everything I do I realise has been a gift to me from someone. It is been thought, pondered, prayed over, tried and tested with others. Even a sermon prepared by myself and then re-visited, has the benefit of the experience of it being preached with others. Yesterday was much more so. I was using a visual aid made for me by a friend several years ago (it has had several outings now). The talk also came from earlier team work, which I got out from the cupboard and polished up. But that is one instance of something I sense far more deeply.

I realise how all I am is God's gift to me. How I hate those moments when I sense myself wanting to take the credit. How downright stupid they are!

This sense of corporateness needs to take hold in many areas. To take just one - I was reflecting yesterday on some thoughts shared by a friend from another culture: that all religions know God's judgment of evil doers and the reward of the righteous (we had been reading an Old Testament psalm, and he was I think also relating it to another major faith), but Christians alone know the grace and mercy of God.

That got me thinking afresh about the link between judgment and forgiveness, one that Christians in my experience always struggle with. One way into this is from the corporate.

Before Christ we as humanity live in a world where God in his dealings with us has the language of judgment and forgiveness. He deals with us as a society (I think of the Old Testament laws).  The needs of society demand that justice be seen to be done, and this is important for the individual to (eg to take responsibility, to understand the seriousness of sin... the list is endless).

But, in Christ, we read that there is 'now no condemnation' (Romans 8.1). The quandry - how to hold this with what I have already said, the quandry of many tomes!

What is not often emphasised (though it is there I think in the puritan tradition, somewhat hiding in the idea of election and foreknowledge), is that we are here stepping into a new corporateness, into a landscape (kingdom) where there is indeed no judgment. That this is a landscape we can enter only because God has come amongst us in history. Historically, everything has changed. I can now know of Christ and what he has done. God deals with humanity in a new way. Everything now looks different. Hence Jesus invites me to the narrow way, warning me that the broad way leads to destruction. But that does not hang over me as a threat. Rather, it is the counsel of a friend who has come alongside me and is guiding me and helping me. The words come as those of wisdom on the way, a reality that dawns in my own heart.

If I remain at the individualistic level, all this becomes much more of a tangle.

These are of course only exploratory thoughts. I stand at the foot of a mountain. But I rather like the look of the snow-covered peaks.