Refreshing lives, transforming faith, at the heart of the community Haere Mai, Piki Mai
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It is a useful ability, although few admit to exercising such a skill. It is the capacity to tune in to particular voices, while totally switching off to all others.
We live in an age of information overload. There is no shortage of information out there, pretty much on any and every topic you care to name. We need to remember that information is not the same as communication. Books offer information. People communicate, in some relationship of some description. Communication is about making connections – relating information to specifics, grounding in to our world and our experiences.
Today is National Bible Sunday – a special focus close to my heart. There has never been a time when the Bible has been more readily available. We very often have multiple copies in differing translations. The Bible is available in print, on tapes, CDs and as MP3 downloads. Likewise there is an abundance of resources to explore and understand the Bible – dictionaries, encyclopaedias, commentaries, specialist books. We can learn masses and masses of information about the Bible. Yet for all this, we live in biblically illiterate times. The vast majority of our community know next to nothing about the Bible and the great story of salvation it contains. And disturbingly, many surveys are showing that believers within our churches are opening the Bible less and less.
One of the foundations of our Christian faith is the belief that the great God who stands in and through creation of this amazing world is a God who communicates. There is no need for guesswork. It is not the case that in thinking and exploring the things of God that one guess is as good as another. God hasn’t left us in the talk, resorting to wishful thinking.
It is a reasonable belief. God has made us with the capacity to communicate. It is one of the great features of being human. And the God who has given us the capacity to communicate is a God who communicates himself. God is not silent.
In Hebrews 1, we are told that in former times God communicated to our ancestors through the prophets, but now in these final days he has spoken to us through his Son. Not only does God want to communicate with us, he is good at it.
In today’s Gospel reading from Luke 4:16-24 we see a very distinctive way Luke has chosen to highlight the start of Jesus’ public ministry. Luke has the start with Jesus’ return to the town of his childhood, and especially a visit by Jesus to the synagogue there. Jesus is handed a scroll, and opens it to a particular passage. There is great expectation as he reads a familiar and cherished passage from Isaiah – a passage of hope, of promise by the God of Israel that he sees and hears the realities of life’s experiences, and will act dramatically to change all that. To this point Jesus has everyone with him. He is passing on information, a message from God contained in the Scriptures. And then he stuns them. He makes a connection, locating his own story and calling in the bigger context of God’s great work of salvation.
“Today”, Jesus said, “this has come true before your very eyes”.
With all the spiritual gifts and skills we hope to develop in public ministers of the Gospel – communicators, pastors and teachers – the most important one is the ability to answer one key question people have just below the surface – a question that makes all the difference in the world: ‘Where is God in the picture?’
Jesus answers that question – God is not at a distance, not uncaring and indifferent to the realities of life. God is at work, and Jesus was and is central to that work of God.
Do we exercise selective hearing? It is often a question of attitude – a willingness to listen and respond. There are different types of information that we hear. Some we respond to with a detached
“that’s interesting”, but for others an immediate and decisive response is required.
For all our availability of Bibles and resources to explore the great story of creation and salvation, we all too often respond at the
“that’s interesting” level. We hear it as information about God, not communication from God.
Are we listening? In the living Word God speaks to us, guides, instructs, rebukes, challenges, encourages.
Note the response to Jesus. People didn’t want to hear, couldn’t handle his message. To engage in selective hearing with God is a very serious matter indeed. We live n an age in which there is a very real danger of tuning out to God. There are too many other distractions.
God is not at a distance. There are answers to our cries and questions of God:
“Where are you?”
“Do you care?”
“What are you doing?”
“What is there to hope for?”
“Where is life heading?”
At the centre of God’s communication with his creation is his Son – Jesus, THE Word of God, and Jesus occupies centre stage in God’s Word, and in our lives.
There is a great Collect in the Book of Common Prayer that says it all:
Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning; grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience, and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace, and ever hold fast the hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our saviour Jesus Christ.
Amen.
This sermon was written and delivered by
Reverend Dr Tim Harris, Dean of
Bishopdale Theological College
at Nelson Cathedral on Sunday, 20 July 2008
