On Sunday 11th October this year, I had the honour of preaching at Kingshill Baptist Church in Buckinghamshire (pictured). The village of Little Kingshill is a more rural location than I am used to preaching in, but they challenged my assumptions about rural churches by being a very lively, active and welcoming congregation. Below is the text of my sermon.
Although this is the text that I wrote beforehand, I deviated from the wording slightly in practice. However, the substance is the same (the content overlaps partially with my sermon in Oxford the previous week, which you can see in my previous post).
The sermon followed two Bible readings:
Several times a week, I walk between New Street station in Birmingham, and Aston University where I work as a chaplain. One day I was walking back to the station after quite a tiring day and I passed one of the numerous Christian street preachers who can be found in central Birmingham. He was telling passers-by that they were in danger. He was warning them that they had been living with no regard to God or the future, enjoying themselves without thought of the consequences but that they would soon find that they had – as he put it – “maxed out the credit card” – and that they had a debt that they were unable to pay.
I looked round at the people in the street. There were people like me, on the way home from work. There were parents with small children, some of them clearly struggling. There were homeless or semi-homeless people begging on the sides of the street or under the influence of alcohol or other drugs, slumped in corners. There were people seeming harassed and stressed as they went in and out of shops. A few people seemed cheerful. A lot didn’t. But on the whole they didn’t look like a group of people enjoying riotous lifestyles with no thought of the consequences. But the preacher continued regardless, warning them of the punishment they would face.
I considered approaching the preacher and saying, “Have you got any good news?” Because all he seemed to be offering was warnings, judgement and condemnation. He perhaps had forgotten that the word “gospel” translates the Greek word “evangelion”, which means something like “triumph,” “victory” or “good news”. I do wonder sometimes if preachers like this go round knocking on people’s doors and saying, “Have you heard the bad news?”
The Bible makes clear that the gospel of Jesus Christ is good news. Mark’s Gospel, the oldest of the gospels we find in the Bible, begins simply, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ”. Paul, when writing in the midst of persecution and sufferings emphasises that the message he preaches is good news.
In the reading we heard earlier, from Luke Chapter 4, we saw Jesus going into the Nazareth synagogue and reading from Isaiah’s declaration of “good news to the poor” and making clear that he had come to fulfill that prophecy. The gospel is particularly good news to the poor. Jesus proclaims freedom to the oppressed. But even for those who are rich and powerful, Jesus has good news. Later in Luke’s Gospel, we see the rich man Zacchaeus giving away half his wealth and finding joy in joining Jesus’ community of equals.
If we are not preaching good news, we are not preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Now there is lots of bad news in the world. We do not need to preach bad news. People already know the bad news. People know how horrible the world can be. You have only to switch on the radio or open a social media platform to be reminded. In the last fortnight alone, we have seen the horrendous anti-semitic murders at a Manchester synagogue, to be followed only two days later by an arson attack on a mosque in Peacehaven in Sussex. As we hold our breath to see if the deal to end fighting in Gaza is successful, we can barely imagine the suffering that continues there – to say nothing of Ukraine and elsewhere. In a world that has enough food to feed everyone in it, if only we organised it differently, people die every day from preventable hunger. Can there be any bigger sin in the world?
That’s why the gospel can never be cheap or easy good news. The good news that Jesus brings is much deeper than trite or shallow reassurances. When I became a Christian in the 1990s, there was a popular worship chorus that included the line, “In your presence, my problems disappear”. What nonsense. What blasphemy – to present Jesus as an individual problem-solving machine. Telling someone that their problems will be over if they put their faith in Jesus will ring hollow if they are shivering in the cold because they cannot afford both heating or food, or because they are frightened of leaving their house because the far right have been marching in their street.
And this leads me to the other Bible reading we heard earlier – from Lamentations.
If you ask people to choose their favourite books in the Bible, I doubt that Lamentations would feature in many people’s answers. The content of Lamentations can be roughly summed up as follows:
Chapter 1: Everything’s dreadful.
Chapter 2: Everything’s still dreadful.
Chapter 3: Yes, everything’s still dreadful. But there are, possibly, some glimmers of hope.
And so it goes on. Most of the book is lamenting suffering and injustice. It was probably written in the fourth century BCE following the fall of Jerusalem, admist all the poverty and oppression that followed that event. But as the Book of Lamentations goes on, glimmers of hope appear. They are never more than glimmers. There is no triumphant finale or happy ending. But sometimes, this is how life feels. Sometimes, this is how life is. This is a book that recognises the reality of suffering while beginning to find hope.
Those who preach bad news like the street preacher I mentioned, and those who preach a trite positivity with no depth to it, both make the same mistake. They both overlook the reality and extent of suffering that many people are already experiencing in their lives.
Proclaiming good news does not mean pretending that suffering is not real. It means proclaiming hope – not trite, shallow hope but deep, meaningful hope – in the midst of suffering.
And this takes us back to that reading from Luke. We saw Jesus returning to his home town, where no doubt some people remembered him from childhood. “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” they ask. But now he’s standing up in the synagogue, reading Isaiah and proclaiming “good news for the poor” and “freedom for the oppressed”.
Then Jesus tells his audience that the scripture is fulfilled now in their hearing. How absurd that must have sounded. The Roman imperial forces were in control. Many historians suggest that Galilee was struggling with severe poverty. The people who heard Jesus knew that he had lived with them in Nazareth. He had endured the Roman oppression. He had lived through the poverty and injustices that at least some of them were experiencing.
It is difficult to know why they became so angry. Perhaps they thought he was arrogant. Perhaps they feared the Romans’ response. Proclaiming the Gospel sometimes leads to hostility. Nonetheless, it is good news offered in the midst of bad news, a deep hope despite the horrors around it.
The God of Jesus Christ is not a god who causes suffering but a god who suffers with us. He endured one of the most unimaginably painful forms of death that human cruelty has ever invented. He was sentenced to death by the forces of the Roman Empire that were occupying Palestine.
The Roman authorities may have thought that they could easily get rid of a troublemaking Jewish peasant. They were wrong. When God raised Jesus from the dead, the victory of love over evil was assured. The forces of sin, oppression and empire were put on notice that their defeat had begun. With the resurrection, the triumph of the good news was assured.
This does not mean that we should simply sit back, accept things as they are, and wait for God to intervene in the future. Jesus promised his followers that the Holy Spirit would be with them now. The Kingdom of God is both now and not yet, breaking into our mundane and often unjust realities even as we await its total fulfilment in the future.
For as we’ve watched the news in recent weeks, it can be hard to believe that, as Martin Luther King said, “the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice”. The gospel we proclaim is not a naïve or shallow hope that things might get better one day. It is rooted in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
We glimpse the Kingdom of God in small moments of kindness and in global campaigns for justice. The Kingdom of God flashes into our presence when people reach across boundaries and recognise their common humanity. Just over a week ago, we saw the reality of sin with the vile murders at the Manchester synagogue. And we glimpsed the Kingdom of God when people of many faiths and none declared their solidarity with Manchester’s Jews. Working at a university chaplaincy, one of the most memorable moments of the day for me was when a Muslim member of staff used the chaplaincy prayer room to pray for the victims and for British Jews in general. In the midst of horror, let us keep our eyes open for the flashes of light.
There are times when I want to ignore the bad news. Sometimes I want to pretend I haven’t heard it – whether it’s global, national or personal news. But of course some of us can ignore bad news more easily than others. You can ignore war – unless you’re in the war zone. You can ignore news of starvation – unless you’re starving.
So let’s be prepared to recognise the reality of bad news, to listen to people who are hurting, to allow ourselves to be challenged or confused, to show solidarity perhaps to people under attack – whether that be Jewish worshippers in Manchester, children bombed in Gaza, or the many groups frequently scapegoated by parts of the media – whether that be Muslims, Jews, trans people, benefit recipients or refugees crossing the Channel in small boats.
Let’s also recognise our own role in the sins of the world. The world cannot be divided simplistically into goodies and baddies. In recent days for example I have been very conscious of the times that I have failed to challenge anti-Semitism. Recognising our sins does not mean we should spend time beating ourselves up. Rather it means that we can rejoice in God’s forgiveness, pray for God’s forgiveness for others and ask God to guide us in the present and the future.
Because in the midst of the horrors that we experience, we can cling onto, and gently point others to, the good news that we find in Jesus. This is not a shallow hope that comes only when we’re feeling good. God loves us however we’re feeling. It is not a calculated optimism based on an analysis of probabilities. It is a hope found in Jesus Christ. A hope, a faith, that the Kingdom of God proclaimed by Jesus is ultimately stronger than the all the might and power and violence of the kingdoms and empires and armies of this world.
Jesus showed the way in the passage that we heard earlier, from Luke’s Gospel. He declared, quoting Isaiah, that God had anointed him to bring good news. And this is true for all of us. For me, for you, for every one of us! Every one of can say, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release from suffering,” and so on. God has anointed you and me to share the good news in our lives – while recognising that some people may understandably find it hard to believe.
We are all broken people in a broken world, and we are compromised by the sins against which we protest. Yet however often we fail, God will not tire of forgiving us. So when our focus weakens or wanders, let’s ask God to keep us focused on the Kingdom of God, on the Christ whose love and justice are triumphing over the sins and evils that see us divided and mistreating each other.
Hatred and injustice will not win. Love will triumph. This is the Gospel we proclaim. And it is good news.
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My book, The Upside-Down Bible: What Jesus really said about money, sex and violence (Darton, Longman and Todd, 2015) can be bought in paperback or e-book, priced £9.99.
Symon Hill 