St Michael's Church (Church of England)

Paul asserts that all people, both Jew and Greek, can be saved when they acknowledge that Jesus is Lord and believe that God raised him from the dead.

Gospel Matthew 14:22-33

In a powerful storm Jesus walks on the waters of the lake to reach his disciples. The calming of the storm as Jesus gets into the boat compels the disciples

Call, response, and back to church Sunday.

Today’s Readings are fabulous, exciting, reassuring, challenging. They beat at the heart of our belief and give the building blocks of our future: personal futures, and as a church family growing in community and faith. They are in short a Vision of how to keep going forward listening to God’s call.

They speak of faithful response of past believers, blocked by misinterpretation and self fear or even petulance, and they give us really important truths that will help us deal with the kind of blocks that we have or may find in our own journey of Christian faith and action.

In the Gospel, Jesus yet again models how we should value each opportunity to spend time on our own with God as he prays with the Father after events and before the next one. Then comes the storm on the lake and Peters’ over reaction followed by the recognition of who Christ is.

Paul in his letter to the Romans gives a logical understanding of personal faith and then the real explanation of why each of should and could be a disciple.

And in our Old Testament reading Elijah reveals that God loves us even when we sulk and become petulant, and can be found in unexpected ways keen to invite us to join him, grumpy or not.

However today alongside the gift of these readings there is more to do - I would like us to hold them against something else.

On September on the 25^th I hope that we at St M will be taking part in ‘Back to Church Sunday’. This is a nationwide day when we try to encourage those who have experience of church or none to feel welcome to come along and be with us.

Back to church Sunday is all about personal invitation; one person reaching out to another to invite them to or back to church. It is being advertised nationally and supported by great resources for any church to use. With just 7 weeks to so I thought it would be helpful for you to hear what the vision is about, so you could choose to take part in it.

Do you remember when I first came here I said that once a year I like to ask each of us, well maybe a little stronger than that, challenge each of us, to aim to bring one person to church in any one year. To start their faith journey,

One person only each year for each of us to have encouraged How are we doing? Been here 3 years now, average attendance about 55 to start with, should have 220 by now if each of us managing it…….

Not quite there yet, though to be fair if we include children at Early Bird services as well as parents we probably have about 130 and rising; so we have near enough doubled our numbers without too much effort. What more could we achieve if we set our hearts and minds to it….

Could we do it? Should we do it? Can we manage it?

Lets look again at the words and works of God to us today to deepen the questions.

Starting with Romans; for those of you who like the reference to read it is chapter 10. 5 – 15.

Paul asks what does the law of God say? And replies

V7b “ the word is near you, on your lips and in your heart”

(We all have experience of that or we would not be here today)

and we hear that by our faith and our belief we are saved, indeed so is anyone who calls on the name of the Lord. We know that our lives are transformed, enhanced, enriched, ‘good’ because of our faith, surely that is Good News.

But then Paul goes on: v 14 to 15: quote…..

How are your feet? How about making them more beautiful by bringing good news to someone near you? (Much better than a pedicure or nail varnish and certainly more inclusive activity for male and female).

I suggest these verses answer the question “ Should we do it? Do what?

Offer the love of God, relationship with God by meeting Jesus. Surely Paul has succinctly answered any question about our responsibility to share what we find to be true and meaningful – to share the call to know God in Christ.

What about the question “could we do it”?

Lets revisit Elijah. 1 book kings 19. 9 – 18.

He really could be a miserable old devil, well not quite devil, but you know what I mean….

Just before this passage we heard of Elijah going into the wilderness to complain to God that he is bearing too much and asks to die…. God thinking of a better plan sends an angel with a cake, and water! Verse 8, the one before our reading says, strengthened by that food he travelled 40 days and nights to reach Horeb, the mountain of God. Horeb is another name for Mt Sinai, remember Exodus where Moses also spent 40 days and nights before encountering God so it is on that mountain that Elijah finds the cave, but he is still moody. Feeling hard done by when God speaks to him he whinges that he has been zealous but that the people of Israel have been awful – broken the altars, killed the prophets, and done nothing to keep the faith leaving him alone to do the work of God, He alone has been challenging the bad guys and was being persecuted by one and all for it!

He is conveniently forgetting that the people responded positively on Mount Carmel and that the pulling down of altars outside Jerusalem was in agreed response to the centralization of worship to the city instead of outside. The reference to killing the prophets omits to mention that it was Jezebel that killed prophets, not the people, and that 100 were rescued by Obadiah, so Elijah is not technically left by himself.

But that is how he felt, fed up, lonely, over pressed and responsible, and he is basically saying to God, WHY ME? Poor me, someone else should do it.

And what does God do? well he meets Elijah where he is, and eventually gets through to him.

First the Lord tells him to go outside and stand on the mountain for ‘the Lord is about to pass by’

Elijah goes ready to see fireworks, well not really but Signs that typically accompany theophanies ( church word for God being revealed) Signs have up to this time usually been via a succession of rainstorm, earthquake & fire. In particular rainstorm and fire are associated with the power of God. Yet Elijah discovers that the Lord is not present in the familiar signs…. So in what?

Finally, after the fire there is an eerie calm, literally translated “ a sound of fine silence”. The traditional translation from the King James version of the phrase as “a still small voice” & this has been popularized in hymns, but it does not convey the oxymoron. The NRSV gives us the words “a sound of sheer silence” yet Elijah is able to hear something…. V 13.

The Hebrew words for sound and silence, in fact occur together in Job 4.16, where that combination is taken as an expression for a barely audible sound and that is what sheer silence means here – a hushed sound.

What Elijah hears, is the calm that comes after a storm, but it is in this stillness that he somehow encounters the Lord and in the record of him covering his face with his mantle we learn that he is indeed encountering the numinous in that stillness.

Then comes the voice: clearly saying to “go on his way”

Yet still Elijah replies as he has in the past basically saying I can’t do this, no one else cares. It’s too much.

So, whether it is true or not, God responds to where Elijah sees himself, setting him a task he can do, yet one which will have vast reaching effect even though it is only to lead one person to a new journey with God by anointing Elisha for his journey and his task.

One person was the task of Elijah, when it all seemed too much God gave him just one call to give, one sharing of the good news. And that one person was to be important in the ongoing plan of God and salvation.

I asked the question “Could we do it” could we ask one person to come and find out what church is, what God is, what it is that we value so much we return to worship, to pray and be sustained.

Can we do it in the face of our fears – (not like Elijah, where he thought he would be physically killed or be alone literally in the wilderness), no our fears are not that, yet God knows they are real and meaningful to us.

I guess we might fear being rejected, or feeling stupid, or just not know how to go about it. Could we do it? not in our own strength maybe, but in the strength of God?

I’d like to share a real story with you, a story of invitation, witness, and transformation. Before I start I will say that I have permission of those in the story to share it.

Many of you will know Roxane and Tamara, Tammy, who come to this church. They started coming well I guess over a year now. Because they were invited to their sister’s confirmation service. They were so moved by the preaching and experience that they decided to start attending church and came along here. Tammy says when she shared the peace at that confirmation service she felt something happen, a feeling in her hand and she said, ‘that’s not normal’ !

In time she and Roxane attended Alpha and last year chose to be confirmed. Yesterday many of us celebrated Roxy’s wedding in this church and next year it will be Tamara’s turn. They say that getting to know God and Jesus is changing their lives, is giving them something they have not known before.

All because of an invitation to come to church……

Can we find the personal strength to invite someone to come to church?

What if, just like Elijah, we thought it was pointless and useless, and yet the very person we invite turns out to be someone of great importance to God? What then?

In the Gospel today I think the general description for the disciples could be said to be ‘headless chickens’, or maybe it should be ‘flapping fishermen’.

I wonder which scared them most, the storm, or the idea of Jesus walking on water! Indeed they were still so slow in the concept of Jesus as the Son of God they preferred the idea of a ghost to him being present and it took his words to them to break in the truth.

And what about that weird set up where Peter walks and then sinks, is that to speak about our need for faith? Can we call others if we have just enough faith?

NO, NO, NO.

This represents the worst interpretation of the text. In fact I suggest that the business of saying ‘if I or we have enough faith’ is a cruel twisting of the love of God, for as we face the realities of accidents, disease aging and circumstances like the recent tragedies reported in the news our faith can be shattered by such a translation.

The very words of Peter display what a distorted notion this is

“Lord if it is you, command me to come to you on the water“- “If it is you”!

for Matthew Peter’s problem was not just that he took his eyes off Jesus but that he was actually having the cheek of bargaining with God, asking for proof of the presence of Christ.

However, What if the message of this text were:

If he had had enough faith, he (Peter) would have believed the word of Jesus that came to him in the boat as showing the presence and reality of God?

God spoke to Peter through Jesus where he was, in the boat.

Faith is not being able to walk on the water, only God can do that, but faith is daring to believe, in the face of all evidence, that God is in the boat with us, in our community here, as we go through the storms and the calms of our experiences.

And faith is about believing that not only should we invite people to join us at church, (because we know we have something fabulous here) it is about believing that we can do it and that when feel our metaphorical knees knocking that God is with us in the boat, (or invitation)

So please, may I ask you to start considering who you might ask to our back to church Sunday, and what that might entail. How it might feel to them? What you could do to make it feel less odd or daunting?

In the next few weeks we will go on thinking and praying about it. I hope we will remember this in our private prayers and in our church intercessions. I hope we can share the vision of God, that the Good news we have is good enough to share.

Paul says, “ how are they to proclaim him unless they are sent?

Please, with respect, Consider yourselves sent...

He also says “how are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard”

That is why we are sent

And he says

“the word is near you, on your lips and in your heart’

in the strength of Christ, and the action of the Holy Spirit, I pray that we will believe this.

Amen.

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