Tag: God with us

Famous Last Words and a To Do List

David HerbertLeave a comment

A sermon for Trinity Sunday reflecting on the last words of Paul to the church in Corinth and the last words of Matthew’s gospel: 2 Corinthians 13.11-end & Matthew 28.16-end

Final words matter.
We know this.

When someone knows these may be the last things they say, they do not usually waste words.
Final words are often concentrated words.
Distilled words. Words carrying weight.

And this morning we have two sets of final words.
The closing words of Paul to the Corinthians.
And the closing words of Jesus in Matthew’s gospel.

Famous last words.

And what strikes me is how full of verbs they are.
So much doing.

Paul concludes his difficult letter with a flurry of verbs:
Rejoice.
 Strive for full restoration.
 Encourage one another.
 Be of one mind.
 Live in peace.

And then perhaps most awkwardly for many English Christians:
Greet one another with a holy kiss.

That is quite a list. It’s a lot to be doing.

Paul is not writing these words into a peaceful, tidy church.
Something has gone wrong in Corinth.
There has been conflict, bruised relationships, suspicion, division, hurt.

This letter has carried frustration and pain.
So these verbs are not decorative.
They are medicine and prescription,
born of blood, sweat and tears.

This is what you must do, says Paul,
if you are to become again the community God calls you to be.
Not merely what you should believe.
But what you should be doing.

And then we come to Matthew.

Matthew ends his gospel in much the same way.
Again—final words.
Again—a mountain.

That should sound familiar.
Matthew has brought us up mountains before.
The mountain of the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus taught his disciples how life in God’s kingdom works.

And now, at the end, the disciples are doing what Jesus told them to do.
They go to the mountain.

Already, before Jesus speaks, they are obeying.

And there Matthew gives us an honest little detail:

When they saw him, they worshipped him; but some doubted.
Isn’t that wonderfully human?
Not certainty and triumph.
Not spiritual superheroes.
Just disciples –
worship and doubt standing side by side.

And to that mixed-up group—to worshippers and doubters alike—Jesus gives his final command.
And again the verbs come tumbling out:
Go.
 Make disciples.
 Baptise.
 Teach.
Teach them to obey all that I have commanded you.

Again—so much doing.
And perhaps we hear these as tasks. Instructions.
A church to-do list.
A very different list to how we normally list all we do in church!

Why all these verbs?
Why this insistence on action?

And the answer, I think, is because the God revealed in Jesus is not static.
The God we meet in scripture is alive in relationship.

Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Trinity, not solitary.
Not self-enclosed.
But eternally giving,
receiving, loving, sending.

The doctrine of the Trinity was never meant to be a mathematical puzzle to solve.
It is an attempt—our stumbling human attempt—to say something true about the God we have encountered.

God is relationship.
God is communion.
God is love shared and given.

And if we are made in the imago Dei—the image of God—then we discover who we are not in isolation but in relationship too.

Which means these verbs are not arbitrary religious duties.
They are invitations into God’s own life.

Rejoice. Because joy belongs to God.

Encourage one another. Because God is giver and sustainer.

Live in peace. Because peace is the atmosphere of God’s kingdom.

Go. Because God is always sending love outward.

Make disciples. Not recruits or customers or winners of arguments—but people learning the way of Jesus.

Baptise.
And notice here, this is Trinity Sunday after all, –
Jesus says:
Baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Not names.

Name.

One name.

One life.

One communion of love into which people are welcomed.

Baptism is not simply joining an institution.
It is immersion into the life of the triune God.
Into belonging.
Into relationship.
Into grace.

And then:

Teach them to obey everything I have commanded you.

That word obey can sound severe to modern ears.
But Jesus is not asking for cold compliance.

What has Matthew shown us Jesus commanding?
Love your enemies.
Bless the poor.
Forgive.
Show mercy.
Seek first the kingdom.

Obedience here is learning the practices of love.
Learning how to live God’s life.

And perhaps that matters especially for us gathered here today,
the 5th Sunday of the month,
a gathering from six churches,

not a huge number,
not hugely impressive by the world’s arithmetic,

but enough for now.

Paul wrote to small churches.
Jesus entrusted his mission to a small uncertain group on that mountain.

Small is beautiful.
Small numbers count in the kingdom of God.
Where two or three gather, there I am among them.
The shepherd leaves the ninety-nine to search out the one lost.
God seems remarkably unembarrassed by small beginnings.

And then Matthew ends with what may be the greatest verb of all.
Or perhaps not a verb, but a name.
A promise.
After all the commands:
Go.
Make.
Baptise.
Teach.
There comes this:
And remember…

Or more literally:
Behold.
See this.
Never lose sight of this.

And then the great divine declaration:

I am with you always, to the end of the age.
Not I was.
Not I will be, if you get things right.

I AM.

The eternal verb.
The name God has always spoken to those he loves.
The name spoken to Moses from the burning bush.
The deep grammar of God.

I AM.

And perhaps this is the truth holding all the other verbs together.
We do not rejoice, restore, encourage, go, baptise or teach in order to make God present.
We do these things because God already is present.

Because the great I AM is with us,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit –
not distant,
not abstract,
but the living God drawing near,
inviting us into the holy work of relationship,
the joyful labour of love,
and the shared life of God.

Always.
To the end of the age.

The Withdom of God

David HerbertLeave a comment

Sometimes a new word is needed — not to replace what we know, but to help us see it more clearly.

Withdom is one such word.

In this Easter reflection, I explore how the risen Jesus is made known not in power or distance, but in presence — walking with, staying with, and being with us wherever we are.

A few weeks ago, some of us met for conversation around the subject of finding our voice in worship.
There were so many of us that we had to break into small groups to get the best out of each other.
As we fed back into the larger group a phrase was coined which seemed to sum up the meaning of our conversation.
We were talking about how we enable the worship of the people of our churches and villages.
A voice of one of our shepherds came over loud and clear.

She had found that the most important thing in her work
was winning the trust of the sheep.
And she talked about how she did that.
By staying with them.
Not driving them. Not fixing them.
Staying with them until they found their own voice.

That opened our eyes to what we were exploring.
How do we enable the worship of the people of God
when so often we are led to believe that we have to be anything but ourselves?
It is by staying with people, as they are, that encourages people to be as they are.

And one good shepherd reminded us of another good shepherd,
who knows the voice of his sheep
and whose sheep know his voice.

And so, a word was born.

And we called that word … withdom.

Some of us weren’t so sure.
“Withdom is not a proper word,
it’s not in the dictionary.”

But we let it stand
because it carried our meaning.

It was never meant to find its way into the dictionary,
or become word of the year.

It was meant to lodge
in our theological imagination …


as just the way God is,
with us,
full of withdom,

and the way we’re called to be
with all those God loves
and chooses to be with,
all those blessed by withdom,
the least, the last, the lost.

We dared to imagine
the rule of the kingdom of God
being the withdom of God.

And once we begin to see it,
we notice it everywhere.

There is much withdom
in our readings today.

In our reading from Acts (Acts 2:14a, 36-41),
Peter stands with the eleven
and addresses the crowd who were with them.
Three thousand of them accepted his message
and joined the eleven –
not just agreeing with them,
but coming to be with them.

The Road to Emmaus: Painting by: Ronald Raab, CSC

The gospel (Luke 24:13-35) puts us alongside two grief stricken disciples
as they make their way home.
They are joined by a stranger,
who walks with them,
in their grief,
through the valley of the shadow of death.

He is with them.

Nothing could stop him being with them.

Not their confusion.
Not their grief.
Not even their walking away.

He would not be separated
from their lived experience.

This is what he shows them
as he walked with them, stayed with them,
broke bread with them.

And this is the truth we are given –
that nothing … can separate us
from the love of God in Christ Jesus,
neither death nor life,
neither angels nor demons
neither the present nor the future,
nor any powers that be,
nothing in the whole of creation
can break the withdom of God. (Romans 8:38-39)

And if this is the withdom of God …
then this is the life we are called into.

Not to drive people.
Not to fix them.

But to be with them.

To stay with them
until they find their voice.

To be a people who can be trusted …
because we come alongside.

To be with those
who have been told they are not good enough …
and those who are walking away …
and those who don’t recognise hm.

This Easter morning – r evening –
the risen Jesus
comes alongside two disciples
who are confused,
disappointed,
walking away,
not good enough … perhaps in their own eyes.

And he is with them.

Nothing could stop him being with them.

So, if you have ever been led to believe
that you are not good enough …
that God is somehow not with you …
hear this story again.

The Lord is here.
His Spirit is with us.

God on the night shift

David HerbertLeave a comment

We’ve stayed up!
We’ve stayed awake
to make this night,
this night above all nights, holy.

And we’ve sung praise to this holy night.
Perhaps for the first time tonight in this church
have we sung congregationally the lovely carol, Cantique de Noel.

Noel is a word from Anglo-Norman French. It means birthday.
So when we sing Noel, we are singing a birthday song to the world –
a new beginning sung into the night.

This holy night we see God
as light, forever a-light in our darkness,
a light in our fears, aloneness and confusion.
Tonight we see night as the time God acts.
God’s creation begins in darkness.
That’s our Genesis.
The Exodus began in the dark.
The resurrection begins “while it was still dark”.
God works the night shift.

Tonight we see God –
the very nature of God,
seen and worshipped
as the smallest,
the most vulnerable of life.
This is how we see God,
in a stable, in the busyness
of a crowd of people, in a state
preoccupied by the presence of enemy power.

We see God in that darkness,
and we begin to love the name of that baby,
Jesus, the one who saves us
by joining our darkness with the lightness of love.
As night follows day, he is with us
in the darkness of hurt and disappointment,
rejection, betrayal, the loss of loved ones,
the anxiety of making ends meet,
in a world of war, and a world in flight –
he is with us, our boy, Emmanuel.

Grace doesn’t come with a sword
to overcome the darkness with a spectacular blow.
Instead God illuminates the darkness
with everlasting companionship.

And in this new light, we see ourselves again
as the very image of God.
This holy night, God appears small,
and that smallness reveals what God is always like.
The manger isn’t camouflage, it is revelation.
The manger is our mirror image.
We are made in the image of God,
not born to be high and mighty, first and foremost,
but born into smallness – humble at heart.

And this is the best possible light,
this night, to see one another.
Even though we are in the dark
God helps us see his work begin in smallness,
even with the least, the last and the lost.
God imagines us all worth visiting,
all worth illuminating, all worth saving.

And perhaps, finally,
this holy night invites us
not only to consider how we see God,
or how we see ourselves,
or how we see one another –
but how God sees us.

God does not look for the impressive,
the sorted, the strong.
God looks with delight
upon those awake in the night,
those keeping watch,
those doing their best to get through.

This is the light God shines upon us:
not a searching light,
not a judging light,
but a warming one.
A light that says,
You are worth visiting.
You are worth staying with.
You are worth saving.

This holy night,
God sees us as beloved.
And that is blessing enough
to carry us back into the dark,
Unafraid.
Good night.