Preaching Steve Croft: Sermon Series on the Beatitudes - The Poor in Spirit

Delievered at: St Mark's Harrogate 3^rd January 2010 – 8am

Textual Basis: Isaiah 61:1, Matthew 5:3

Today we begin a new sermon series on the Beatitudes, as presented in the Gospel of Matthew. It’s a series that has been devised alongside a particular book by Steve Croft, the Bishop of Sheffield, called “Jesus’ People: What the Church Should do Next”. I’d encourage you to go and get a copy as it’s a book you’ll be hearing a lot of references to over the coming weeks as we look at the Beatitudes individually.

Steve Croft’s basic argument is that organisations often have a character and in that way the Church is no different. And just like a person, the character of an organisation can be formed by its experiences and history. An organisation that has known only success and prosperity will have a different character from that which is used to struggling to survive. As it is with individuals, so it may be with groups of people.

So the book is an attempt - in under 100 pages – to argue that the Church is called to be a community that reflects the character and nature of Jesus Christ to our wider society. And that character, argues Croft, is to be found in the eight statements of the beatitudes found in the first ten verses of Matthew Chapter 5.

A point to stress before looking at the first of these today, is that for Steve Croft each of these statements needs to be seen not through an individual lens, about what it might say to me as an individual, but rather through a corporate lens – how does it speak to us as the body of Christ in this part of the world ?

When we read these texts we often tend to go straight for the individual interpretation: “this is how I am to be and I am to behave.” But Croft argues that in looking at the Beatitudes afresh we need to hear them in the context of how Christians can be together - as values for community living.

So having set the context for the coming weeks, let’s turn to our beatitude in today’s text: Matthew Chapter 5 verse 3  “Blessed are the poor in Spirit – for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”.

“Poor in Spirit is an intriguing phrase.” Says Croft. “An alternative translation of the Greek gives us a way into understanding it. One of those alternatives is this: “Happy are those who know their need of God.”

When he talks about the ‘poor in Spirit’ Jesus is not talking about the down in the mouth, or those having a bad day. Rather Jesus is saying Blessed are those who are spiritually poor and impoverished, blessed are those who come to God in humility and recognition of their need for Him – it is these who will enter into His Kingdom. Or to turn the phrase around again, when we think we are self-sufficient and full of our own goodness, at that moment we are far from the Kingdom of God.

One of the things about being poor in Spirit is a deep and knowing recognition of our utter dependence on God’s grace. Of the knowledge that we cannot do it by ourselves, we cannot earn our way into the kingdom. We are utterly dependent upon God’s invitation and gifting.

But it is hard isn’t it to believe this corporately at a Church like ours here at St. Marks ?

By most terms of measurement we belong to a successful church. Every week 500 or so people worship here. We give approaching £200,000 to the diocese to help support churches throughout the area, more than any other single church in Ripon and Leeds. We give away a further £50,000 – 10% of our income to those working in areas of need - supporting the homeless, working with people with disabilities, environmental groups to name but three.  We have modern facilities, a beautiful building and even beautiful clergy – I refer of course to my wife. Surely we are blessed and along the right track aren’t we ?

Jesus’ words here suggest that as soon as we start patting ourselves on the back we begin to take a step away from the Kingdom of God. We become concerned perhaps with our Church building more than with the people who form the Church. We begin to think that it is our budgets and not our prayer life that is where our focus should be. We start becoming obsessed with leadership and start losing sight of servanthood.

A parallel can be found in the lives of the rich and successful who fall from grace. Many of you will know the name of John Profumo. Although he held an increasingly responsible series of political posts in the 1950s, he is best known today for his involvement in a 1963 scandal involving Christine Keeler which led to his resignation and contributed to toppling the Conservative government of Harold Macmillan.

After his resignation, Profumo began to work as a volunteer cleaning toilets at Toynbee Hall, a charity based in the East End of London, dedicated to helping the homeless and socially deprived. He eventually became Toynbee Hall's chief fundraiser, and used his political skills and contacts to raise large sums of money. All this work was done as a volunteer, since Profumo was able to live on his inherited wealth. The social reform campaigner Lord Longford said he felt more admiration for Profumo than “for all the men I've known in my lifetime"

It was only when he had realised the utterly futility of depending on his own goodness and self-sufficiency that John Profumo discovered a life of service where he found his true vocation. 

The danger for us in Harrogate, where words like “failure” “poverty” and “need” are words we hear about others, is that through our own seeming spiritual self-sufficieny, we begin to squeeze God out.

The good news that we hear from the prophet Isaiah is good news for the oppressed, for the poor, for those who know what it is to be broken. Jesus came to save the broken and not the self sufficient. Those who believe they save themselves daily have no need for a saviour in Christ nor do they recognise such a need. Their own affluence, intellect, beauty, skill, talent will be sufficient unto themselves.

It is through the brokenness of poverty, the brokenness of failure, the brokenness of bereavement, illness and addiction, it is through the experience of emptiness that comes with brokenness that we begin to open ourselves up to the fullness of God’s grace. 

It is only when we begin to grasp our own spiritual poverty that we can enter a place of growth and grace.  So may God grant to us in this place the recognition of His Grace, of our dependence on it, and the humility of Spirit that leads us to first seek Him.

Amen

Here's To You Mr. Robinson - Redemption in the first two days of 2010

It seems a little early to be welcoming in a new decade with tales of portent, laden with meaning  but two days into 2010 and already the year has given me a story of friendship, community and redemption as well as a social media affirming by-line.

Yesterday, New Years Day, I went to the park with my wife and 19 month old daughter who is a sucker for swings with bucket seats. The park in question was the Valley Gardens in Harrogate which has recently opened a brand new play area for kids. It’s a great place – the kind of place every public space should have –with swings, slides, wooden musical instruments, climbing frames and all manner of currently unvandalised and fully operable toys.

It was here, pushing my daughter on a swing, that I noticed that my wedding ring was getting a little loose. Not that I had managed to lose any of my substantial bulk over Christmas, but the cold weather – the snow and ice were still in plenty supply in the park – meant that the wedding ring that fitted snugly over a chubby finger in the summer of 2006 sat a little loose on the contracted cold – although still chubby -  winter finger of 2009.

After finishing up on the swing, we walked over to a couple of other play pieces, but it was getting colder and there were tears and screams, so we decided to walk back to the car and head home.

Two and half hours later, at home on the sofa with a cup of tea, I noticed my wedding ring was missing. At the bottom of my ring finger of my left hand there was a circular indent in the skin but no sign of the ring that caused it. Of course I panicked and started looking everywhere. The kitchen, the lounge, the sofa, the chairs, everywhere I had been since I entered the house was searched. Thirty minutes later I realised that it was at the park by the swings that I last remembered wearing my ring. So I looked in the car, in the hope it might be there, on the pavement between the car and the house. All the while it was snowing outside and the snow was freezing over into ice.

The ring was nowhere to be seen anywhere in the house or car. So I found a torch and headed back down to the now deserted Valley Gardens, in the dark and the snow, to begin the proverbial needle in a haystack search for my wedding ring. I wasn’t particularly hopeful. The ground had a new layer of snow on it, which was rapidly turning into ice. Even if I had dropped it somewhere here, it was unlikely I would be able to see it.

 

As I swept the ground with my torch a stranger walking his dog asked me what I was looking for. When I told him he said he;d only recently put waya his metal detector in his loft and otherwise he would have gone home and got it. He wished me luck and walked on.

I got home feeling more than a little miserable. I had not found the ring, I had lost it in, and it was now somewhere, anywhere, either in the snow or even picked up and placed snugly into a strangers pocket. I had been stupid not to have taken it off when I noticed it was loose and was now without my wedding ring. I suddenly envied each of those days I had so casually worn  without a second thought and chastised myself for not being more thankful for those times or more careful in these times.

I told my wife about the man in the park and she suggested I email a few friends asking them if they had a metal detector and if they might come out and look with me. “No chance” I thought, and sure enough having emailed a few people, asking if they had a metal detector or knew someone who did and informing them of my woe, I received the replies commiserating with my loss, in some cases offering to come out and look with me, but none with any metal detectors.

So whilst every one was posting facebook and twitter updates wishing one another happy new year or commenting on how great Dr. Who was, I posted from my misery lamenting my loss and informing the world that this was a “fail” on the Happy New Year scale.

And then at about 8 pm I got a call from Keith Robinson. He said his daughter Amy – a facebook friend – had noticed my update on facebook about losing my wedding ring. He said his mom’s partner had a metal detector and could he come and help ? It was now dark, cold, the snow was falling again and I had given up. But I was touched that he had seen it and called so we arranged to meet up in the morning at 8.30 in the park, before any kids got there, and to have look.

Getting up at 7 this morning, my hopes were not high. I got to the park earl and looked again, noticing how the ground had frozen over anew. At about 8.45 Keith, his wife Beverley, his two daughters Amy and Jena,and his father in law arrived. Together we retraced my steps from the day before. It took twenty minutes before the detector started buzzing, and there – at the edge of the swings beneath the snow and the ice was my wedding ring. Incredibly and against all the hope that I had lost, we found it.

A few months ago I read a book called “Here comes everybody” by Clay Shirky. The opening chapter is about someone who leaves their mobile phone in a taxi and is eventually reunited with it after an online campaign. I have been thinking about this chapter a lot since getting my ring back this morning. There are a couple of parallels – without the online posting, the facebook updates, Amy, Jena and Bev wouldn’t have seen it, and Keith would never have rung. But the subtitle to Shirky’s book – ‘the power of organising without organisations’  falls flat as a parallel because without the community or organisation of my local Church, I would not be friends with the Robinsons and there would have been no call from Keith.

Keith’s actions flowed from his desire to help someone who was in need, a desire I believe is born the faith we share. He picked up the phone because of the Church that brought us together in that faith. In this instance the physical community came first, and the online community supplemented it. The online community offered me empathy and shared my misery. But the physical community found my ring.

There is another moral of the tale for me. The metaphor of finding something that has been lost is a constant in Christian theology. Whether it be the parable of the Lost Sheep in Luke 15 or the line from Amazing Grace – I once was lost but now am found – the story of my ring lost and found is a reminder for me of that deeper theological truth that runs throughout the Gospels - there is nothing beyond the redemption of God’s grace, no person too evil, no situation so horrible, no incident so unforgivable, that is beyond the hope of redemption. There’s nothing too lost to us that is beyond redemption.

In the finding of my needle in the haystack, I have been reminded once more that I have been found myself.

So here’s to you Mr Robinson, and the faith that we share; the ring that was lost and now is found and the endless and eternal possibilities of hope, faith and love. 

Not a New Year I am likely to forget in a hurry.