SERMON TO KBC EVENING SERVICE 18 MAY 2007.
I’d like to tell you about a man named Arthur. Arthur was a drunkard and a petty thief. A homeless derelict, he lived on the streets of Sydney. And he had a bit of chalk. After walking in one Sunday night into a church service and hearing a particular sermon, he took this bit of chalk and started writing all over the streets of Sydney. He wrote the same word time and time again. He’d write it on pavements, on benches, anywhere he could. It was always the same word. People would see him write the word down; or they’d walk passed and see the word on the pavement and say to one another Arthur wrote that.
Arthur died in 1967 and the city council decided to remember Arthur by putting his word in solid brass in the pavement in the middle of Sydney. If ever you find yourself in Sydney Square at St Andrew’s Cathedral have a look for the word. It’s there, right next to the Wall-of-Water. Hundreds of thousands of people walk past it every day. And some of them remember Arthur and say to one another “Arthur wrote that”.
And in the year 1999 as Australians, with the rest of the world, celebrated the new millennium, Arthur’s word was lit up by fireworks over the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The whole world saw the word that Arthur first wrote down with a bit of chalk.Emblazoned in fine colour across the Australian sky, the word “eternity” was there for all to see.
Known as “Mr Eternity”, Arthur Stace took the words of one of the books of the Old Testament, Ecclesiastes, and made them his own: God has put eternity in the hearts of people.
In his way, Arthur Stace, knew what mattered in life. He didn’t have any material possessions, but he did have a grasp on what good perspective is all about.
So, following Arthur Stace, I want to share with you tonight about things that matter.
Christ’s disciples were always asking questions about things they thought mattered: why somebody was sick; why a tree hadn’t grown any fruit; why Jesus was talking to particular people in particular places; why five loaves of bread and two fish could feed a crowd of five thousand; and why Christ should have to go to the cross and die. And sometimes, in fact more often than the disciples realized, Christ asked his disciples about things he knew mattered.
In one of the books of the New Testament that tell us about the life of Christ, a book written by a fellow named Mark, we read about a conversation that Christ had with his disciples. We read about it in the eighth chapter and it goes a bit like this:
Jesus and his disciples headed out for the villages around Caesarea Philippi. As they walked, he asked, “˜Who do people say that I am?”
“Some say, “John the Baptizer”, they said, “Others say ‘Elijah’. Still others say “one of the prophets”.
He then asked, “And you?” “what are you saying about me? Who am I?”
Peter gave the answer: “You are the Christ, the Messiah.”
Jesus warned them to keep it quiet, not to breathe a word of it to anyone. He then began explaining things to them: “It is necessary that the Son of Man proceed to an ordeal of suffering, be tried and found guilty by the elders, high priests, and religion scholars, be killed, and after three days rise up alive. He said this simply and clearly so they couldn’t miss it.
But Peter grabbed him in protest. Turning and seeing his disciples wavering, wandering what to believe, Jesus confronted Peter. “Peter, get out of my way! Satan, get lost! You have no idea how God works!”
Calling the crowd to join his disciples, he said, “Anyone who intends to come with me has to let me lead. You’re not in the driver’s seat. I am. Don’t run from suffering; embrace it. Follow me and I’ll show you how. Self-help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to saving yourself, your true self. What good would it do to get everything you want and lose you, the real you? What could you ever trade your soul for?
The thing that mattered to Christ was who his disciples said he was. It’s not that Christ was vain and needed recognition; it’s that he needed his disciples to know who he was and what his life meant for them. You can, I think understand Peter’s reaction in this passage. Jesus had become one of his closest friends; they had traveled together constantly for almost three years; they’d seen all sorts of things together and had all sorts of conversations. Then Jesus tells Peter and the rest of his disciples that he is going to die. There was more to it than that of course: Jesus also said he’d rise again. But Peter, nor any of the other disciples, really understood it.
Following Christ, Peter was to discover, meant figuring out what things really mattered and then sticking to them, never mind what anybody else ever said or did. The key thing Christ was teaching his disciples was about self-sacrifice, about both giving up life and finding life again. The Christian life is full of paradoxes. The Bible teaches that when we are poor, then we are rich; when we are weak, then we are strong; when we are persecuted, then we are blessed; when we die, then we live. That, of course, is the central message of Christianity encompassed in the Easter story. That our life – our very identity -comes through death. But before we go there, I want to tell you another story.
There’s man called Jonathan Aitken who, in his day, was a well-known British cabinet minister. He was wealthy and, as a former war correspondent, had seen a lot of life. But one day he lied in court and was thrown into prison. From being a powerful leader he was now a mere criminal. A “unday Christian”he found his faith was tested and challenged while he was in prison. He tells the story about some friends he made in prison and the conversations they ended up having.
On my first day, a very young black prisoner came and asked me if I would read a letter he had had from his ‘brief’ (his lawyer). He said, “Would you read it to me?” and I did. Then I wrote a letter for him and he skipped out of my cell saying, “That MP geezer has got fantastic joined-up writing.”
This news shot around and from that moment onwards, every night outside my cell there was a small queue of people wanting me to read letters for them.
A fellow called Spider was my next door cell mate and he sort of kept order as these guys queued.
This sort of got me into the community and I was astounded to discover how some of these young prisoners tick.
Sometimes I was the butt of some humour. One guy said “Jonno, you have no idea what an impact you are making on the girls of Brixton. They can’t believe the sudden improvement and quality of their love letters!”
Be that as it may, I was trying to understand and get on terms with the prison community.
One of the guys whom I wrote letters for was an Irish burglar called Paddy (they’re always called Paddy).
He was a rogue with a lot of energy and charm but he couldn’t read or write. One night he invited me into his cell and we had a conversation about our families. Then he suddenly said to me, ˜You know I would really like to thank you for all the time and trouble you’ve taken with all the other prisoners and I want to give you a gift. You can have anything you want, free of charge from me library.”
As he dived under his bed to bring up the gift, I wondered what on earth was going to come out. What came out was an amazing selection of hard core porn magazines.
I sort of said, “Thanks but no thanks, Paddy”, and he took umbrage instantly.
Then he thought briefly for a reason why I had refused the magazine and he said, “Ah… if it boys you’re after…”. And he dived under his bed again to bring out a different selection of porn magazine.
Then I said, “No thanks Paddy. I used to like those sort of magazines, but these days I am trying a different path in life.”
Paddy said, “What kind of path would that be?”
I replied, “It’s the path of having a Christian faith and of following the teachings of Jesus Christ. It has changed my life in a very profound way.”
Suddenly there was a great stillness in that cell and after a long pause Paddy said something which was very very surprising. He said, “You know, I’d really like to try that path meself” and I realised that this was a moment of sudden challenge for me: what on earth to say next in that stillness?
What I said was, “Well maybe, Paddy, we had better go and sit down and say a prayer together.”
So we did that the first night. And again the second night… and the third night.
Then Paddy, who had the qualities of a good recruiting sergeant, wanted to expand our prayer partnership.
So he recruited another Irish burglar to join us. Then another one. And then a dipper (a pickpocket). And a blagger (an armed robber) and a kiter (who bounces dud cheques) and a lifer (who was a murderer).
So before we knew where we were, we had rather an unusual prayer group. It brought a new meaning to the Christian term “Cell group”!. I wish I could tell you about all the things that happened in that prayer group. It was based on the blind leading the blind. The only thing I really knew about prayer was what I was doing on my own by myself in the early mornings or what I had learnt on the Alpha course.
But I knew something about listening to God. One of the verses from the psalms is, “Be still and know that I am God.” (Psalm 46:10)
And I knew some of the ways you can start to pray for things you need: above all, how to pray for a relationship with God. To attempt to summarise what happened in that prayer group, I have three or four words all of which happen to begin with the letter P.
The first is pain. Almost everyone goes through pain sooner or later in their lives – often much worse pain than a prison sentence. But in stiff upper-lip Britain people are very reluctant to admit their pain either to one another, or to God. It seems to be in our culture to suppress it, deny it, bury it, hide it. I sometimes used to think that we prisoners were quite lucky.
The pain is so obvious when a bunch of men go through incarceration together.
It was Martin Luther who said, “It is in our pain and our brokenness that we come closest to Christ” and that was certainly our experience. Our pain was a gateway to a deeper faith. But don’t wait for the pain. Don’t wait for the adversity. Find some other way is my advice.
Next, of course, we were in prayer. One night, having heard about 900 different ways of praying in prison, I said, in my traditional Anglican way, the evening collect which begins, “Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord”… And the Big Dipper from Brixton said, “Ooh, Jonno, you have a fantastic way with words.” I tried to explain that it was actually a prayer written by [the medieval English poet] Cranmer - but it was no good.
And the other word beginning with P is perseverance. We would keep on praying night after night that we could have a real understanding and knowing relationship with God like we would all like to have with our earthly fathers.
Pain, prayer and perseverance. That’s a pretty good summation of the Christian life in many ways. In pain, we find healing; in prayer, we find God; in perseverance we keep on going, even if that takes us to the Cross. And that’s what Peter hadn’t quite figured out. It mattered whether he let Christ go to the cross and it mattered that he follow him.
Each of us has some things that matter more to us than other things. For some of us, what we study at university will matter a lot. For others, the type of person we go out with will matter a lot. For some other people, it will be the type of music they listen to or the school they went to or the sports-team they’re in. For others still it will be whether they get on with their parents, or whether their parents get on with each other, or whether Dad will come home tonight drunk like he did last night and the night before that, or whether their brother or sister will ever ring home again, or whether someone will tell them that they love them and are proud of them. Sometimes the things that matter, matter a lot.
Arthur Stace knew that eternity mattered. Christ knew that it mattered what his disciples called him. The disciples learned that it mattered what following Christ would all be about. The most important thing that matters is whether we follow Christ or not.
In a few weeks time we’ll celebrate Easter. Whatever those that market Easter chocolates might try and tell us, Easter is all about new life. It’s all about new choices. It’s all about things that matter. Easter only has any meaning because of its two parts: Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Arthur Stace was a homeless man who lived on the streets. His impact on life wasn’t because of his great riches. In poverty and destitution, he lived a good Friday existence. But his message was the message of Easter Sunday. That even in bad times, eternity is only a chalked pavement away.
In the story in Mark’s gospel, Peter can’t believe what Jesus is telling his disciples. Life has been pretty good, but it’s not going to stay that way. Things will get tough. Life is no different if you’re a Christian. The same experiences happen to Christians and non-Christians alike. That’s part of Christ’s message: don’t run away from suffering. When Good Friday comes don’t head for the hills or hide in a cave. Because Good Friday matters. It matters how we cope when life gets tough. It matters who we turn to. In our pain and brokenness, we come closer to Christ. The things that matter to you matter to Christ. The pain that you carry, Christ carries with you. The tough decisions that you will make will be shared by someone who knows what tough decisions are all about, because Christ took a decision that took him to the Cross.
Good Friday matters because Easter Sunday happens. There’s this group of inmates who befriend a man who has got this “fantastic joined-up writing”. These men know what Good Friday is like. They had no freedom. But these men meet together and pray together and change their lives together. Because what happened on Easter Sunday matters. And it matters a lot. It matters more than Christmas. Not only did God send his only Son to earth to become one of us, to live in our neighbourhood, to experience life as we experience life; God also sent that son and, in that, himself, to die on a cross out of utter, total love for you and me. Because to God, we matter. You matter. I matter.
Psalm 139, a song in the Old Testament, tells us that God knows everything about us before we are even born; before a word is on our tongue, God knows it completely. We matter to God so much that we have his full attention. That’s kind of hard to grasp, I know. I think a useful way to see it is God as a proud father or grandfather walking around the streets of heaven, or talking to St Peter in the heavenly supermarket, pulling out his wallet and in it he has a photo of you. And he spends the next hour, okay, two hours, telling St Peter all about you and how proud he is of you and how he listens to those conversations you don’t think anyway hears and how he laughs with you and how he cheers you on at your sports games and how he cries with you when you’re all alone and you feel you have no friends. And your picture is there, pride of place, in his wallet. That’s a useful way, I think, to see how much God loves us. .
About thirty years ago a Christian couple had a child and they wrote a song to celebrate the birth of their new child. The first verse of the song goes like this:
Because He lives, I can face tomorrow;
Because He lives, all fear is gone,
Because I know he holds the future
And life is worth the living just because he lives.
There’s another song, probably as old as that one, and its verse goes something like this:
Something beautiful, something good,
All my confusion, he understood
All I had to offer him was brokenness and strife
And he made something beautiful of my life.
Arthur Stace, Peter, Jonathan Aitken, you and I: God is making something beautiful of our lives. Because on Easter Sunday God showed that life always comes first and that light is always stronger than darkness and that his love for us can never be separated, no matter whether we’re in prison or homeless or in pain. That’s one of the great hymns in Paul’s letter to the Romans in the New Testament:
God knew what he was doing from the very beginning. He decided from the outset to shape the lives of those who love him along the same lines as the life of his Son. The Son stands first in the line of humanity he restored. We see the original and unintended shape of our lives there in him. After God made that decision of what his children should be like, he followed it up by calling people by name. After he called them by name, he set them on a solid basis with himself. And then, after getting them established, he stayed with them to the end, gloriously completing what he had begun.
So what do you think? With God on our side like this, how can we lose? If God didn’t hesitate to put everything on the line for us, embracing our condition and exposing himself to the worst by sending his own Son, is there anything else he wouldn’t gladly and freely do for us? And who would dare tangle with God by messing with one of God’s chosen? Who would dare even to point a finger? The One who died for us – who was raised to life for us! is in the presence of God at this very moment sticking up for us. Do you think anyone is going to be able to drive a wedge between us and Christ’s love for us? There is no way! Not trouble, nor hard times, not hatred, not hunger, not homelessness, not bullying threats, not backstabbing, not even the worst sins listed in Scripture…. None of this fazes us because Jesus loves us. I’m absolutely convinced that nothing, nothing living or dead, angelic or demonic, today or tomorrow, high or low, thinkable or unthinkable – absolutely nothing can get between us and God’s love because of the way that Jesus our Master has embraced us.
*
That Sunday started like any other day: the sun rose over the porticoes of Jerusalem, the vendors wheeled out their morning trolleys, the guards went to their posts, and a group of men and women tried to return to their fishing boats, their trading posts, and their homes, and yet all with a profound sense of loss.
But things were different this day. Perhaps folk noticed in the way the wind whispered differently, or the way the light broke through the morning clouds, or the way the dawn chorus of birds sang in the day. For some it was as obvious as a rolled away stone and an empty tomb. But not all saw these miracles of life. Others believed because they met the Christ, scarred with the wounds that killed Him, yet raised from the dead and real to touch,
On that day, two worlds met: the kingdom of this world met the kingdom of our God. Humanity and divinity kissed; sorrow and love embraced; life encountered death and triumphed.
At the beginning of this day it seemed as if the darkness would never lift, as if hope would forever be lost, and as if death and decay would forever win out.
By the end of this day, the disciples had seen a new land, where there is no more sickness or crying, where always and everywhere God dwells with God’s people. This distant land had come close: it entered, became flesh, dwelt among us.
This was not just like any other day. On this day, the Son rose. He showed that life is life, eternal.
And the message that rang through the streets that day, between neighbours and friends, colleagues and brothers, parents and children echoes still down the ages:
Christ is Risen.
He is Risen indeed.
*
And that is the greatest mission of them all: the mission to all of humanity.
Eternity matters. Pain matters. Prayer matters. Perseverance matters. Good Friday matters. You matter. I matter. Easter Sunday matters. For in all that matters, God, through Jesus, has embraced us.
I want to conclude tonight in prayer, but before I do I want to ask some questions of you. You might want to answer these questions in your own time. You might want to talk to someone about them tonight.
The first question is what matters to you? What are the things in your life that are really important to you?
The second question is, does God matter to you? Maybe you’ve never known the embrace of God in Christ and you’d like to. Maybe you’d like to have the life and peace and hope that this embrace of God in Christ will bring. Maybe you’d like God to matter to you and to matter about all the things in you and about you. Maybe you’d like God to open his wallet, with your photo in it, and talk about how much you matter to him. Maybe you’d like to know first-hand how proud God is of you and how much he loves you, of how you matter so much to him that he’s prepared to die for you and then to rise again in new life and new hope. Maybe you’d like to know the God that has you as what matters to him.
I hope and pray that you will take some chalk, or whatever and however you want to express yourself, and write eternity down on a pavement or with your friends or in your own heart and as you do that, that you see the shadow of an empty cross across this eternal land and that you know the love and the companionship of God, by your side, embracing you in Christ.
God, who writes eternity on our hearts,
Thank you for your mission to us
Thank you for coming into our neighbourhood and living our life
Thank you for loving us so much that you would die for us
Thank you for Good Friday. Thank you for carrying our pain.
Thank you for Easter Sunday. Thank you for the hope you give us.
Thank you for new life. Thank you for new beginnings.
Thank you that because you live, we can face tomorrow.
Thank you that you are always, every day, making something beautiful of our lives.
God, we invite you to be our companion, to embrace us.
We ask that you would bring light into our darkness.
We pray that you would be the one thing that matters most to us,
In all of eternity.
Amen.
