Friday 30 September 2022

Freedom must be demanded by the oppressed

A Harvest Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
2nd October 2022
 

Exodus 14.5-7, 10-14; 14.21-29
 
Call to Worship
From slavery to freedom, from darkness into light;
From despair and depression to wholeness and hope:
Out of Egypt you have called your people.
 
From compliance and complicity to subversion and resistance;
From hesitation and distrust to exploration and adventure:
Out of Egypt you have called your people.
 
From stagnation and apathy to journey and pilgrimage;
Through wasteland and wilderness, through hardship and sadness:
Out of Egypt you have called your people.
 
You call us to journey through desert and Jordan;
With sacraments of water and manna to keep us:
Out of Egypt you have called your people.
 
Through Miriam and Moses, through prophets and pastors;
To fulfil the promise of Canaan and Kingdom:
Out of Egypt you have called your people.
 

Finding a meaningful way to celebrate harvest
            in the centre of one of the world’s global cities
            can be a bit of a tough assignment.
 
I mean, I know we’re technically in the parish of St Giles in the Fields,
            but the reality is that it’s been a few centuries
            since anyone gathered in the sheaves around here.
 
But this doesn’t mean, of course,
            that we are cut off from harvests.
Everything we eat, the very things that keep us alive,
            are the produce of harvest.
 
Someone, somewhere, harvested the grain
            that makes up the bread we will share shortly.
Someone harvested the grapes
            that produced the not-wine that we will drink together.
 
Just because it doesn’t happen here anymore,
            doesn’t stop us being deeply, intimately, and existentially connected
                        to harvests around the world;
            harvests which, through the complexities of global supply chains,
                        help keep our cupboards stocked and our stomachs full.
 
But of course, such mechanisms of global supply are fragile.
            It doesn’t take much to disrupt them.
 
One of the impacts of the invasion of Ukraine
            has been that this war torn country, often called the ‘breadbasket of Europe’,
            is no longer able to send as much of its grain to the market.
 
The consequential rise in food staples has been a significant contributor
            to the rise in the cost of living that we are seeing,
            and which so many in our city are struggling with.
 
And another facet of the globalisation of food supply
            has been the almost ubiquitous practices of exploitative farming.
 
From the exploitation of farmers in the two-thirds world,
            who are forced to work for subsistence income or worse,
to the exploitation of the land
            through intensive farming and habitat destruction.
 
Harvest is an issue of justice,
            and it is an issue of global justice.
 
From those who live in poverty in our own country,
            unable to feed their own families;
to the ways the wealthy empires of the west
            exploit and oppress the poor in other parts of the world,
to deforestation in the Amazon basin,
            there is a deep injustice
            built into the economics and practices of harvest.
 
And my question for us this morning,
            is what does God say about such injustices?
What would God have us do?
 
Well, as a way into this,
            I’d like us to spend a few minutes thinking about the hymn we sang
                        at the beginning of the service,
            and then we’ll turn to our scripture passages
                        and hear some insights from Israel’s story of old.
 
But first, the hymn.
            I’m sure you know it well;
but I wonder if you’ve ever stopped
            to think about what you’re really singing?
 
            Come you thankful people, come, raise the song of harvest-home! 
            All securely gathered in, safe before the storms begin; 
            God our maker will provide for our needs to be supplied:  
            come with all God’s people, come, raise the song of harvest-home.  
 
It starts quite innocently, doesn’t it,
            a rural song of thanksgiving for a successful harvest.
 
You can imagine the autumn sun shining on the grey stonework
            of a typical English village church,
the farmers and their workers coming to worship at the end of another week
            of gathering the wheat into the barns.
 
It’s idyllic.
            But then we get to verse 2.
 
            All the world is God’s own field, bearing fruit God’s praise to yield;  
            wheat and weeds together sown, unto joy or sorrow grown;  
            first the blade, and then the ear, then the full corn shall appear:  
            Lord of harvest, grant that we wholesome grain and pure may be.  
 
Things have changed gear a bit, haven’t they?
            The writer of the hymn has introduced Jesus’ parable
            of the wheat and the weeds from Matthew’s Gospel (13.24-30, 36-43).
 
Suddenly we’re no longer talking about the harvest of Little Snoring on-the-wold,
            we’re talking about the great harvest of the whole earth,
a vision of God’s judgment being enacted
            against all that is unfruitful, all that is unjust,
                        all that is exploitative, all that is wicked.
 
And so the verse ends, perhaps understandably, with a prayer that our lives
            will be found pure and wholesome when they are judged by God.
 
And then we get to verse 3:
 
            For the Lord our God shall come, and shall take the harvest home,  
            from this field shall in that day all corruption purge away,  
 
The judgment theme is intensifying,
            there is a recognition that the world as it is
            is not the world as it should be.
 
Our world is one of corruption,
            of destructive weeds out-competing the fruit of the kingdom of God.
And there doesn’t seem to be any earthly solution to this problem,
            so the hymn prays to God,
            echoing again the words of Jesus’ parable:
 
            give the angels charge at last in the fire the weeds to cast,  
            but the fruitful ears to store in God’s care for evermore.  
 
This hymn is a longing for a better world,
            for a world where the fruit of the Spirit are borne unhindered,
            and where the weeds of injustice and oppression are burned away.
 
And so we get to the final verse:
 
            Even so, Lord, quickly come, bring your final harvest home;  
            gather all your people in, free from sorrow, free from sin;  
            there, together purified, in your presence to abide:  
            come, with all your angels, come, raise the glorious harvest-home.  
 
There is a recognition here that all of us, each of us,
            at a personal - and not just at a corporate - level
            are a mixed bag of wheat and weeds.
 
Ultimately this hymn, as with the parable it’s based on,
            isn’t about them and us,
it’s not about the purification of society,
            as God purges the sinners to redeem the righteous.
 
Rather it’s about recognising that each of us needs purification:
            there are weeds in my life that need to be burned away,
            as I am sure there are weeds in all of our lives.
 
The judgment of God becomes, by the end of our hymn,
            good news for the earth,
because it is a vision of the freeing of humanity
            from all that oppresses, from all that enslaves,
                        from all that creates injustice,
                        from all that destroys and diminishes life.
 
The idealised and idyllic vision of the first verse,
            becomes the goal and objective of the last verse,
as the consequences of human sin are defeated,
            and humans are freed from the weeds
            that would otherwise choke the life from their lives.
 
And I think this is a message we need to hear today, in our society,
            as people flock to political ideologies of exclusion and othering,
            where foreigners, migrants, and refugees are blamed and victimised.
 
It’s a message we need to hear in our world
            where the global food supply chains in which we are all complicit
            are exploitative of the vulnerable and the impoverished.
 
And it’s a message we need to hear in a world
            where despots take what is not theirs,
            and wreak violence upon the innocent.
 
All these, says our harvest hymn,
            stand under the judgment of God,
and the vision of a freed and renewed humanity
            is predicated on the burning away
            of such systems and symbols of oppression.
 
Which brings us to the story of the exodus
            and the crossing of the Red Sea
from slavery in Egypt to the journey through the wilderness
            on the way to the promised land.
 
The image here is not fire, it is water,
            but it is in many ways the same image.
 
People sometimes question this passage as depicting a violent God,
            but I think this is a superficial reading of what’s going on here.
 
Rather, the people of Israel have become enslaved,
            Abraham’s children went to Egypt fleeing a famine, as refugees,
and as the generations went past, they became a feared minority,
            on whom could be blamed all the ills of ancient Egyptian society.
 
I can imagine some ancient Egyptian politician,
            some early version of Enoch Powell,
predicting that if these Jewish immigrants aren’t controlled,
            there will be rivers of blood. [1]
 
So the Pharaoh took his stand,
            and did what oppressive rulers and despots have done
                        time and again in human history,
            and he sought to oppress the minority.
 
But as is so often the case, even in our own world,
            the empire’s economy had become dependent,
            on the exploitation of the minority.
 
So whilst victimising the minority was a strong populist move,
            it would have been financially ruinous to obliterate them.
 
And so the cycle of oppression was created,
            and it existed in ancient Egypt against the ancient Israelites;
and it existed at the time of Jesus,
            as the Romans exploited the provinces of their empire;
and it exists in our world,
            as the wealthy continue to exploit the poor and the vulnerable.
 
But how can this cycle be broken?
            What does God say to a world of such exploitation.
 
As we’ve seen already with our opening hymn,
            God stands against injustice.
 
And sure enough in the story of the Exodus,
            God calls Moses to announce judgment on the empire
            for its exploitation of the people of Israel.
 
If only Pharaoh had listened to Moses
            all the bloodshed that followed could have been avoided.
 
The Nile turning to blood,
            the Red sea running with blood:
these rivers and seas of blood
            are created by the actions of the empire
            in refusing to repent and turn away from exploitation.
 
And so I want to suggest
            that the plagues visited on Egypt,
            and the destruction of their army in the Red sea,
are only problematic if you read this story
            from the perspective of Egypt, from the perspective of the empire.
 
Do you find yourself feeling sympathy for the firstborn,
            empathy for the soldiers?
I know I do,
            but then I also know that I am someone who is deeply complicit
            in the systems of imperial domination that we have in our world.
 
If I read myself back into this story,
            I know that I’m an Egyptian.
 
But those who identify with the enslaved people of Israel,
            need feel no sympathy
            when the empire reaps the reward of its violent oppression.
 
It’s no coincidence that the Exodus story featured so heavily
            in the language and hymnody of the enslaved Africans
            on the plantations of North America.
 
It’s no coincidence that the liberation theologians of Latin America
            turned again and again to the story of the exodus
            as they reflected on their experience of oppression and domination.
 
It’s no coincidence that Martin Luther King wrote,
            in his letter from Birmingham Jail,
that ‘Freedom is never given voluntarily by the oppressor.
            It must be demanded by the oppressed.’
 
There is no room here for sympathy for the oppressor,
            because God has no sympathy for the oppressor.
 
The Exodus story, with the people of Israel crossing the waters that ensnared them,
            to begin their long journey to a better world,
is fundamentally a story about God’s commitment to freedom,
            it is about God’s commitment to emancipation.
 
The judgment that is visited on the empire
            is everything the empire deserves;
as it is burned away, washed away,
            as a direct consequence of all the evil it has done on the earth.
 
The God of the exodus is a ‘liberating God’’
            a God who is always for the oppressed,
            and never for the oppressor.
 
And every time an empire has claimed God’s blessing
            as they have dominated the world,
they have sowed the seeds
            of their own ultimate destruction.
 
This is true from Egypt, to Babylon, to Rome,
            it is true from the domination of Christendom,
                        to the maritime empires of the colonial Europeans,
            and it is true from the financial empires of global supply,
                        to the exploitative despots of oppressive regimes,
 
God is always on the side of the oppressed,
            and never on the side of the oppressor.
 
So wherever new Pharaoh’s emerge in human history, grasping after power
            even though their own people are destroyed in the process,
God is on the side of the enslaved.
 
I think that the despotic rulers of our world
            need to hear this, and hear it clearly.
 
But I also think that we who live in the West,
            need to hear this, and hear it clearly.
 
And dare I say that I think our current government
            needs to hear this, and to hear it clearly?
 
God will not stand with those
            who stand against the poor,
and God will stand against those
            who oppress, enslave, and marginalise.
 
And if I might widen the perspective slightly,
            in a story where it is the waters of the sea
            that bring the judgment to the oppressor,
I think that nature itself echoes something of God’s character,
            where those who exploit the environment
            create a context where many will suffer.
 
Nature itself is resistant to exploitation,
            and the judgment on humanity
                        unlocked by the unfettered release of carbon,
                        or by habitat destruction, or by over-fishing,
            is a further consequence of imperial domination in our own time,
                        as well as a revelation of God’s judgment
                        on those who destroy the earth.
 
As the Book of Revelation puts it:
            ‘your judgment has come… the time has come…
            for destroying those who destroy the earth.’ (Re. 11.18)
 
But to return to the book of the Exodus,
            eventually, the people of Israel
                        made their way through the Red Sea,
            to the wilderness of Sinai,
                        to begin their journey to a new world.
 
And what they discovered, almost immediately,
            was that the road to the promised land
            was not itself the promised land.
 
Facing starvation in the desert,
            they turned their faces back towards Egypt,
and with rose-tinted spectacles,
            remembered the storehouses of grain that had sustained them
            through the years of their enslavement.
 
The truth is that it’s not easy to leave empire,
            it’s not easy to stand against injustice.
It’s always a journey of faith,
            and will most likely be a costly journey.
 
Our reading today doesn’t go on to describe the manna from heaven
            that sustained them for their journey,
where each received, each day, just enough to live on but no more.
 
But we remember that manna in our communion service
            as we share the bread that sustains us on our journey.
 
We are, each of us, individually and as a community,
            called to make our own journey out of Egypt.
 
We are, each of us, called to reckon with the judgment of God:
            on our actions, our society, and our world;
as those who exploit are called to account and found wanting.
 
But we are also called to hope,
            to a conviction that a better world is possible.
 
We are the body of Christ in our world,
            and we may be broken,
            but we are also re-membered,
we are remade as we share bread and wine
            around a table where all are welcome,
and this is the symbol and sign of the new world
            that God is bringing into being.
 
So as we eat and drink,
            taking into our bodies the harvest of the world,
we must also, as Paul puts it, examine ourselves
            ‘and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup.
‘For all who eat and drink without discerning the body,
            eat and drink judgment against themselves.’ (1 Cor. 11:28-29)
 
This is not to say that we have to be perfect
            before we gather around the table of the Lord.
            Far from it!
 
But we do need to gather in recognition
            of our complicity in the sins of the world,
ready to repent of our sins,
            to receive forgiveness and new life.
 
And it is this gift of new life, this calling onwards,
            that will bring us through
                        the seemingly impossible barrier of our own Red Sea
            through whatever sins, addictions and weaknesses
                        are trying to keep us enslaved in Egypt,
            or to take us back to somewhere we thought we had left.
 
As we share in the body of Christ,
            we are remade as the body of Christ,
a community of hope,
            called together to be the first fruits of the new humanity,
            the first fruits of the great harvest of all the earth.


[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivers_of_Blood_speech


































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































Wednesday 7 September 2022

The Inheritance of the Church

A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
Sunday 11th September, 2022

Genesis 12.1-9  
Revelation 14.1-7; 21.1-5


Do you ever have those days where you wonder whether it’s all worth it?
            …Where you wonder just where it’s all going,
                        what the point of it all is?
 
The stress! the hassle! the disappointment! the frustration!
 
I’m talking, of course, about church life…
 
I mean, it’s such a great idea in theory, isn’t it?
            A community of people, filled with the Spirit,
            walking the path of Christ together
                        in loving relationship with one another,
                        and in faithful communion with God.
 
And yet the reality is so often so far short of the ideal.
 
Arguments, relationship problems,
            sinful behaviour, and petty politics,
are all too frequently the day to day reality of church life.
 
Recent research into why people leave church
            shows that whilst many pastors believe that people leave their churches
                        primarily due to a loss of personal faith,
            the reality is often more prosaic, and in many ways more worrying,
                        with a general disillusionment
                                    with the structures and institutions of church itself
                        being far more influential
                                    than any disillusionment with God. [1]
 
In other words, it’s not God that causes people to leave,
            it’s other people!
 
And then there’s the numbers issue.
            We might, in theory, believe that through us
                        Jesus Christ offers good news to all people,
            but either we’re not that great at communicating it,
                        or a lot of people don’t want that kind of good news.
 
And we tell ourselves that numbers aren’t everything,
            and that depth is as important as breadth,
but fundamentally, if no-one comes,
            we’ve not got much of a church.
 
Churches across all the main denominations
            are reporting a sustained decline in attendance through 2022,
            compared to pre-pandemic levels.
 
One might wonder why we carry on?
            And many, in fact, do just that.
 
I remember reading an article
            in the Baptist Ministers’ Journal a few years back,
written by a recently retired anonymous minister,
            who said that the moment he received his pension,
            he stopped going to church.
 
He had stayed the course because he had had to be there,
            but over the years he had utterly lost faith in the people of God.
 
And if I’m honest there have been moments in my ministry,
            when never darkening the door of a church again
            has seemed like a tempting proposition.
 
So, honestly, is it worth it?
            Is it worth the stress, the hassle,
                        the disappointment, the frustration?
 
What is the point of being part of this so-called ‘people of God’?
 
There are many people sitting in congregations across our city
            who are asking what on earth the point is of persevering with church.
And there are many others who used to be in our churches
            who have come to the conclusion that it’s just not worth the struggle.
 
So, what is the point? Is all this worth it?
 
Well, I think that this question is addressed is by the passage
            we had read to us a few moments ago from Genesis chapter 12.
 
Here, in this story of the call of Abraham,
            we find an account of the moment it all starts.
 
Here, with Abraham, we get the story
            of the beginning of the journey that we are now a part of.
 
The origin of the ‘called and commissioned’ people of God
            begins right here in Abraham’s encounter with God.
 
And in this story, which echoes down the millennia to us,
            we find that the call to be the people of God,
                        the call to follow wherever the path takes us,
            is also a call to be good news to all nations.
 
It seems that the foundational principle,
            right at the heart of the origin the people of God,
is nothing less than gospel itself
            – a gospel of good news for all, not just for some.
 
In the book of Genesis, the move from chapter 11 to chapter 12
            is an important one
because it describes a fundamental shift
            in the story of God’s relationship with humanity.
 
It is, if you like, the move from pre-history,
            to human history.
 
Walter Brueggemann describes it as
            ‘the most important structural break in the Old Testament’, [2]
because it marks the point of transition
            between the history of humankind, and the history of Israel,
            between the history of the curse, and the history of the blessing.
 
You see, if you were to read through Genesis chapters 1 to 11,
            you would meet the stories of humanity’s inability to save itself.
 
From the fall from grace in Eden,
            to the growing hostility between humanity and creation;
from the first murder
            to the more general wickedness of humanity;
from the destructiveness of the great flood
            to the curse of Babel.
 
Through the first eleven chapters of Genesis
            we find God’s good creation on a downwards spiral,
with the story of humanity up to this point
            leading to nothing beyond barrenness and futility.
 
In the Abraham story,
                        his wife Sarah is famously unable to have children,
                        having got too old,
            and so the promise from God
                        that he will become the father of a great nation
            is one which seems to them a laughable dream.
 
The barrenness of Sarah in Abraham’s story
            is in many ways symbolic
                        of the barrenness of the world as a whole,
            which every year grows older,
                        without bearing the fruit of new life.
 
The way Genesis has been telling the story up until this point,
            humanity is going nowhere
                        other than an eventual petering out,
                        and a dwindling away to nothing.
 
So it is into a world that has run its course,
            to a world that is dying without issue,
            that the promise and call of God comes.
 
Just as the God of creation called something from nothing,
            calling ‘order’ from chaos,
so in the call of Abraham
            the same God calls humanity to new life;
                        calling forth life from a barren womb and a sterile world;
            calling people of death to experience the gift of life
                        which they meet through covenant relationship
                                    with the living God.
 
This call of God then echoes through history,
            through the prophets of Israel, down to the first century,
and it’s a call repeated in the invitation of Jesus
            who invited his own disciples to ‘follow’ him.
 
The call of Jesus is likewise heard as a summons
            to move from chaos to order;
            it is an invitation to move from barrenness to new life.
And like the call of God to Abraham,
            it’s a call that is accompanied by promise.
 
The Lord told Abraham that through his descendants
            ‘all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’
And to this end promised Abraham a new world,
            where humans are reborn, are born again,
            into covenant relationship with their creator.
 
Through the call of God and the promise of the covenant,
            a new way of being opened before Abraham,
bringing into existence
            that which could not be achieved by other means.
 
The building of a tower to the heavens at Babel
            had failed to bring humanity any closer to God,
but through God’s gracious intervention,
            the covenant established with Abraham brought God close to humans.
 
Humans had to discover
            that they could not reach God through their own efforts,
and that the gift of new life comes from God alone
            as a gift from the God of love,
and not as the result of human activity and attainment.
 
The promise of God is fulfilled by God’s action,
            rather than by the efforts of humans.
 
The lesson of the call of God on Abraham
            is that people are not ultimately reconciled to God
                        through Abraham’s efforts,
            nor through the efforts of his descendants,
                        nor through the efforts of humanity as a whole,
            but only in and through the one who calls
                        and gives the gift of new life.
 
But this call to Abraham,
            and the promise to him and his descendants,
            also carried a commission.
 
God’s chosen people are not to live in a vacuum,
            separated and holy.
They are to live with, for, and among the nations of the world.
 
The good news for Abraham
            is also to be good news for all peoples,
            good news for all nations,
without qualification, without barrier, without condition.
 
Just as the Lord called Abraham into new relationship,
            so through Abraham and his descendants
                        the same call must go to all people.
 
The same promise,
            of new life in relationship with God,
            is for all nations, not just for one nation under God.
 
In the New Testament,
            we find that both Paul and Peter grasp this truth,
            and see its fulfilment in Jesus Christ as good news for all people.
 
In his letter to the Galatians,
            Paul says that (Galatians 3:8)
            ‘the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith,
                        declared the gospel beforehand to Abraham,
                        saying, “All the Gentiles shall be blessed in you.”‘
 
And in his sermon at Pentecost,
            Peter declares to his Jewish congregation that they (Acts 3:25)
                        ‘are the descendants of the prophets
                        and of the covenant that God gave to your ancestors,
            saying to Abraham,
                        ‘And in your descendants
                        all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’’
 
This is the true purpose of the people of God,
            and it has been so from the very beginning.
 
The Good News is for all nations, for all peoples,
            and has always been so.
 
This same principle can also to be found in the book of Revelation,
            where the church is described as the Bride of Christ.
 
Now, I don’t want to get too earthy about this,
            but seeing as we’ve already spoken about Sarah’s child of promise,
                        it seems to me that there is another promise
                        inherent in the image of a bride and a groom.
 
In the first century world, the celebration of a wedding
            included the hope that it wouldn’t be long
                        before new life came into being,
            as a result of the consummation
                        of the relationship between bride and groom.
 
All of which raises an interesting question:
            Given that in the book of Revelation
                        John describes Jesus as the Lamb that was slain,
                        and the church as the bride of the Lamb,
            One might well ask who it is that he envisages
                        as the offspring of this marriage that he describes
                        between Christ and his Church?
 
The Abraham story may help us here:
            The covenant with Abraham
                        was built upon a marriage,
            with the barren Sarah becoming miraculously pregnant,
                        thereby beginning the ‘great nation’
                                    through whom, we are told, all nations will be blessed
                                    (Gen. 15.5; 18.18).
 
It may be that John’s image of the final consummation
            between Christ and the Church,
                        which he depicts as a marriage
                        between a bride and her husband,
            has in view the ultimate fulfilment of the promise made to Abraham.
 
If this is the case, then the marriage of the Lamb and the bride
            may not be so much the end of the story,
            as it’s present reality.
 
This may not be a marriage that has yet to happen,
            and which will occur only at the end of time.
Rather, it could be read as a description of the here-and-now,
            with the church united with her Lord
            in loving and fruitful union.
 
Rather than seeing the marriage of Christ and the Church
            as the final goal of creation,
we find before us the possibility
            that there is a much greater inheritance due to the Church,
as the embryonic promise of God’s covenant with Abraham
            is brought to birth in the proclamation of a gospel
            for ‘every nation and tribe and language and people’ (14.6).
 
The book of Revelation ends with this picture
            of the church as the Bride of Christ,
and she is seen joining her voice with that of the Spirit
            to call all the nations of the world,
            all those beyond the gates of the new Jerusalem (cf. 22.15),
                        to enter into the city and drink from the river of life
                        which runs through the city (22.1–2).
 
The covenant which began with Abraham
            thus finds its fulfilment, as the people of God
                        become a source of blessing to all peoples,
            releasing them from their enslavement to the forces of evil
                        and enabling them to enter into the new life
                                    that is theirs when they are born again
                                    as citizens of the heavenly city.
 
As Jesus’ famous conversation with Nicodemus shows,
            those who want to enter into the new life that begins in Jesus,
            must do so through being born again, through being born from above.
 
But they do so as those
            who are born into the new life
            that came into the sterile world of Abraham,
                        through the barren womb of Sarah,
and they do so at the invitation of the Spirit,
            to enter into a life-giving relationship with Jesus.
 
This same principle can also to be found in the image of 144,000,
            who are another one of Revelation’s symbols
                        for the faithful and chosen people of God.
 
Within John’s story, only the 144,000
            can sing the song of salvation to the earth.
Only the faithful people of God
            can speak the gospel to the nations.
 
However, what becomes clear is that
            through their faithful proclamation of the gospel for all,
            they are seen to be the firstfruits of a much greater harvest (14.4).
 
The seed is sown,
            and the Lord brings it to fruition.
 
This image evokes the Jewish practice
            of offering the first fruits of a harvest
            to symbolize the fact that the whole harvest belongs to God.
 
Understood in this way, the faithful witness of the Church
            is seen once again to result in good news
                        for all the nations of the earth,
            as the covenant with Abraham is fulfilled
                        in the gathering in of the great harvest,
                        of which the church are simply the first fruits.
 
So, to return to the question with which we started:
            Is it really worth it?
            Is it worth persevering in witnessing
                        even through difficulty and persecution?
            Is it worth persevering with the people of God,
                        even when all seems lost
                        and despair, despondency and defeat
                                    lurk round every corner?
 
Yes, says John, it is!
 
Because the gospel is good news for every nation,
            and the ultimate result
                        of the faithful witness of the people of God
            is the freeing of all the nations
                        from their enslavement to the forces of evil,
            as the coming judgment of God consigns to the flames
                        all those systems and principalities and powers
                        which distort, demean and destroy the covenant relationship
                        into which God calls the people of the earth.
 
When seen from the perspective of the earth,
            the people of God might be a feeble, frail and flawed grouping,
            with the good news hard to discern within them.
 
But when seen from heaven’s perspective,
            those of us who gather
                        faithfully and steadfastly in the name of Christ
            are seen to be the fulfilment of God’s covenant with Abraham.
 
We are those who proclaim a gospel
            which is good news for all nations,
and we are those who pave the way
            for the eventual ingathering of all people
            who pass through judgement to hope and new life.
 
We are those who have been born again and from above,
            and we are those who will in turn bring to birth
            a people so great that no-one can count it.
 
This, surely, is good news.
 
Good news for all nations,
            good news for all the world.
 
This is the gospel of Christ.
            Thanks be to God
 


[1] Alan Jamieson, A Churchless Faith, SPCK, London: 2002
[2] Brueggemann, Genesis, p. 116