Anniversary Service 2010

Anniversary Service 2010

January 16th, 2011 (AM). By: Rod Earnshaw

Rod Earnshaw delivers a message for the 3rd anniversary of the launch of HTG.

Click here to watch a short history of our parent church, Jesmond Parish Church, celebrating its 150th anniversary this weekend.

This morning we’re celebrating God’s work to bring us together as a church.  Over the last few years God has done remarkable things for us.  In fact God has been doing remarkable things for us for centuries – as we’ve seen, we can trace our history right back through Jesmond Parish Church and the Cedars Community church here, through evangelical awakenings and reformations, through missionary journeys from Europe and the middle east, right back to the first witnesses who proclaimed Jesus resurrection.

And year by year this celebration service, this remembrance of history is important for us to maintain our bearings as a church.  That’s one of the reasons I wanted us to watch that short history of Jesmond Parish Church, because that’s our heritage – that’s where we’ve come from.  And we’ve got to understand our history if we’re going to influence our future.  But also because we face the same dangers they faced, good beginnings can give way to bad endings; and because we pray the same prayer they pray – we pray for God to do remarkable things here, for Jesus to be recognised by hundred, and even thousands, for more and more people to put their trust in Jesus and be saved.

That’s also why I’ve chosen this parable from Jesus this morning.  In this remarkable passage Jesus stuns the religious elite by telling them that they stand to miss out on God’s blessing by rejecting Gods invitation – and that the no hopers, the near-do-well’s and the ignorant will get in ahead of them.  His point is simple – he offers a remarkable invitation to enjoy God’s hospitality, but not everyone can accept the invitation.  The applications for us are profound.  But I just want to make two simple points:

Jesus rejects the religious people; and

Jesus invites the undeserving and the ignorant

Let’s jump right in with point one:

Jesus rejects the religious people

A bit of context might help here.  Jesus isn’t yet on the ‘most wanted lists’.  The chief priests, Pharisees, Sadducees and teachers of the law were still checking him out.  And the occasion is a meal at the house of ‘a prominent Pharisee’ (verse 1) – it looks like Jesus’ big chance to get in with the religious heavies – a bit of schmoozing and Jesus could be in with the big wigs.

But Jesus makes no attempt to play any social games, in fact just the opposite.  The meal starts with what looks like a deliberate test – someone’s arranged for a sick man to be there, and it’s a Sabbath – but he wouldn’t heal on the Sabbath would he?  YES he will, and he’ll rebuke them for their callousness while he’s at it.  And then he goes on to criticise the guests for trying to hog the places of honour; and the host for trying to win friends and influence people by his dinner parties.

It’s fair to say this lunch isn’t going well.

Verse 15 sounds like someone’s attempt to smooth over troubled waters – let’s change the subject shall we – let’s talk about something we can all agree on, won’t it be nice for everyone who gets into the kingdom of God.

That sounds like a safe bet at a religious function doesn’t it?  Wrong – it leads Jesus to declare that none of those religious types will make it into God’s kingdom.  He tells a story about them.  You’ve just heard it – the local big wig holds a feast but no one can be bothered going, so he invites the unwanted and unworthy, while the original invitees miss out.  The coded message isn’t hard to unravel – God is the host, heaven is the feast, and the religious types are the ones who got an invitation but are now shunning God by making lame excuses.

Apparently when you were planning a big do – say a celebrity wedding, a white tie fund raiser, that’s the  sort of meal we’re talking about – you would tell the local VIP’s the dates and ask if they were going to come – a bit like an RSVP.  Then on the day you would send out messengers telling them the meal was about to start – and this is the messenger that we’re following in the story.  But when the messenger arrives the guests have changed their minds – the meal has been prepared for them, but they don’t want to come anymore.

Since they’ve agreed to go their excuses seem a bit thin – I’ve just bought a field I need to go and look at it – really??  Who buys a field without looking at it first?  Same for the oxen; we’re in ‘I can’t come to your wedding because I’ve bought a new Ipad and I want to play with it’ territory.  What about the bloke getting married?  If he’s planned his wedding on the same day I’d guess he never really intended to go to party!

The reality is the guests are fobbing off the host – these are effectively snubs.  They’re happy to pretend to his friends, but when it comes down to it they don’t care about the host or his party.

When the servant tells the master he’s not impressed. In fact Verse 21 says he became angry and in verse 24 he says to the servant ‘I tell you, not one of those men who were invited will get a taste of my banquet’.

That’s the sting in this tale for the men Jesus is eating lunch with.  They were the ones invited to the party.  They made a great show about being devoutly religious.  But here they were rejecting the Lord Jesus.  Setting traps for him.  Sneering and judging him, inventing reasons for rejecting him.

They were revealing the truth – they were only ever pretending to be interested in God.  When God showed up they rejected him outright.  They weren’t interested in God, why would they expect to be included in his kingdom?  The only way in is to accept and trust in Jesus.  And they couldn’t bring themselves to do it.  They were so full of their own importance, they didn’t have room for God.

That sting in the tale is a warning for all of us who find ourselves in church.  We’re the religious insiders.  We need to be very careful that we’re not following in their footsteps.  It’s all too easy to base our confidence on our religiosity, and to look down on everyone else.

And that goes for us as a church as well – history is full of churches that loose the gospel.  We remembered our connection to the great turning points of church history earlier.  We’re privileged to be on the end of a great chain of believers from Jesus day forwards.

But why did the gospel need to be rediscovered so many times?

The New Testament was written mostly to churches on the brink.  The creeds were written to correct false teaching and safeguard the truth.  In the 15^th and 16^th Centuries the reformation brought the gospel back into the church after centuries of religious accretions had almost completely crowded it out.  By the 18^th Century it took an evangelical awakening to renew the focus on the gospel in the Church of England, but most of those gains were quickly lost.  We saw it all too clearly in that JPC 150 video – even with a clear mandate to preach the gospel JPC spent many years indulging in anything but.

That’s our heritage, now it’s our turn.  Three years in and it’s been exciting and tiring and exhausting and fantastic.  I’ve loved being part of this church, I hope you have too.  And we want people to be celebrating the work of the gospel here in Gateshead when we’re 150 old.  We want the gospel work here to outlive any of us, including the babies in the crèche.

So we need absolute clarity about the gospel.  God doesn’t love us for what we do.   Religion will never get us into heaven.  And as a church we won’t succeed by clever preaching, by a good youth programme or effective love for our neighbours.  We want all of those things, but they all fall to the ground if they’re not rooted in the gospel.

Religion is the enemy of relationship with God, but religion is in our hearts, and churches keep falling into it.  So let’s listen to the warning this morning with full seriousness.  May God preserve the sound teaching and promulgation (I love that word – it means promotion, publication, declaration) of the gospel here at HTG for generations to come.

That’s the negative side of Jesus story.  Jesus rejects the religious.  There’s no access to God through religion.  Thankfully there’s a positive too, and that’s my second point.

Remarkably, Jesus invites the undeserving and the ignorant

In Jesus’ parable the master of the feast was determined that a few no-shows wouldn’t ruin the party.  In fact in verse 23 we get a remarkable statement of intent.  He says to his servant:

‘Go out to the roads and country lanes and make them come in, so that my house will be full’

Do you see that?  The master is absolutely determined that there will be a feast, and it’ll be a belter.

And the list of invites is astonishing.  Verse 21 ‘go out quickly into the streets and alleys the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame’.

We live in a different age, when disability is no handicap, the blind, the lame, the crippled – we make a big show of not discriminating against any of them.  Not so in Jesus’ time – the master is inviting the beggars, those who couldn’t work, those with no place in his society, the unworthy.

Decoding the message the analogy is to those who know they don’t belong in church.  The very sorts of people Jesus hung out with – prostitutes, extortionists, thieves, and yes, the sick and the demon possessed – people who wouldn’t for a moment think they were right with God, who knew they weren’t right with God.

And when those people didn’t fill the place they went to the absolute outsiders – people who wouldn’t have even heard about the feast otherwise.  In the first instance this is talking about the gentiles, the great unwashed, the ignorant idolaters who were by birth excluded from God’s people.  Even those outsiders were going to be included.

The point Jesus is making is that the invitation is extraordinary.  It’s not the religious; not the ones who’ve racked up the most brownie points who’re going to be in the kingdom of heaven.  Every single one of the people who eats in God’s banquet will know that they don’t deserve to be there.

That’s you and that’s me.

And that’s the people of Gateshead, Blaydon, Hebburn, Jarrow, Wickham, Dunston, even Newcastle.  The message that’s been passed down to us from Jesus witnesses, through the creeds, the reformation, the articles of the Church of England, the preaching and church planting of the evangelical awakening and Jesmond Parish Church – that message is the most remarkable message the world has ever heard.

It calls out to everyone ‘you’re not worthy – but you are welcome’.

Now, in our generation, in our corner of God’s world we’ve been commissioned to tell that message to our neighbours, to our workmates, to our families, our communities – to everyone.  That’s what we’re here for.  That’s what this church is about, what we promised together just a few minutes ago.

God has done remarkable things for us and through us – more than we can know.  And he wants to do remarkable things through us for the generations to come.  Let’s pray and work to see even more remarkable things over the next 150 years.