"Presence"

by Revd Bruce Waldron - 5th March 2006

Gen 28:10-22,

The Story of how one of the early Israelites, Jacob, had a dream that there was a ladder reaching to heaven and in his dream, God promises to be with him wherever he goes. When he wakes up he says “God was in this place, and I didn’t know it.”

Luke 4:14-30

The story of how Jesus returns to his home town of Nazareth and is nearly killed for suggesting, in the synagogue, that God doesn’t just come to bless the Israelites.

In the 14 years that I spent in School Chaplaincy, people would say, “Why are you being a Chaplain. Why aren’t you in real ministry? What are you doing there anyway.”

And my answer was always “I’m here to keep the rumour of God alive.”

The people we meet are precious to God. Jesus, after all, came to save the world, not just the church. Sometimes people could be forgiven for thinking the church believed it was the other way around. But it isn’t.

And a lot of the time, people have no idea that God is present. They may look like people who will never, ever think about the presence of God. We may be fooled into thinking it isn’t worth even trying to be a reminder of the presence of God. But we can be very wrong too.

I want to look at the story from Genesis Chapter 28 for a few minutes.

There wasn’t much admirable about the young man Jacob. He weazled his brother’s birthright off him when he caught him at his weakest moment. He deceived his ancient old father into giving him his brother’s blessing by playing on his blurred old vision and poor tactile senses. He was his mummy’s favourite and schemed his way through life, usually at the expense of his older brother. When Jacob left at his father, Isaac’s direction and went off to find a wife, I don’t think God was very high on his list of conscious thoughts. And when he had his dream on that night, the vision of a ladder, the angels ascending and descending, he hears God’s voice saying that God is with him and will keep him wherever he goes. And when he wakes up, he suddenly realizes that God was there in that place and he never knew it. And he suddenly becomes quite religious, and starts to shift his whole orientation.

And that is the role of the church. To bring to people’s consciousness that the God they may have forgotten is there in this place. They may have forgotten it, but we are called to remember, and remind, so the presence of God doesn’t get forgotten. We keep the awareness of the presence of God alive.

But actually, when you read the text, Jacob has got it wrong. He wakes up and says, “Oh, God is in this place and I didn’t know it.” And he builds an altar there. But when you read the text, it isn’t the place that God is dwelling in. It’s with the person.

God knew about a possibility in Jacob that Jacob had never seen. And this experience of Jacob with God left him a bit shaken, and starting to rethink who and what he was. An encounter with God does that. God says to Jacob, “I will be with you wherever you go.”

God doesn’t dwell in some place. These bricks and mortar, this church building, doesn’t house God. God is with the people who meet here because of their faith, not the place, and that faith carries God out into the community, in what you do, what you say, where you go. The role of the church is to constantly remind people who don’t know that God is in this place that God is, and the place is not a church, or a temple, but the people. Even when Jacob is a scheming conniving scoundrel, God is with him, and reaching out to give him a vision of what he could really be. That too is the role of the church.

In today’s British Culture, the role of the church has changed dramatically in one lifetime. The Church was once the centre, belief in God at the heart of the culture and the Christian faith was at the heart of that belief. It helped your business if people knew you went to church. All the proper people did. And you could rely on people coming to church. Most people did, at least sometimes.

Today, the word Christian has taken on a different meaning. It is at the edges. Most people, we know, don’t know anything much about the Christian faith at all. Life rolls on focussed on many things but God is only ever thought of at the edges. And the Christian understanding of God competes with Wicca, New Age, Neo Paganism, Islam, Buddhism and spiritualism as equal voices.

Our role has to be something different today. In a culture that is dominated by consumerism, the church keeps the rumour of God alive. God is still here. People may not know it, may not acknowledge it, but God still loves and cries out in anguish for our hurting and unjust world.

Consumerism and market economy are never going to deliver a just and compassionate world. The evidence is clear after two and half centuries of market economics, however much we talk about market forces one day making a just world, the evidence is all to the contrary. The injustice is greater, the percentage of desperately poor grows every year. But God still bleeds for the pain of the bereaved and wounded and isolated. The Crucified Christ is in this place, and most people don’t know it.

We do, and that gives us a mission – being a symbol of the presence of God in this place, so people will know - or at least have the chance to know – that God is in this place. And God has a design for the human race that still has a long way to go before it is achieved.

So why the story of Jesus at Nazareth. In our Lent study guide, it makes the point that Jesus spent a lot of his time in the rural community. There are theologians and missioners who tell us that it is in the city where mission has to be engaged. But Jesus spent relatively little time in the city. He went back and conducted his mission where he had lived, and grown up, where people really knew him. Sometimes it made it harder for him, like in Nazareth. But his faith was up for examination by the people who rubbed shoulders with him as neighbour, probably as a local carpenter.

There is something about the local church, about the courage to nail our colours to the mast and say, “ I am, and I believe, and I live that faith out in the real world that knows who I am.”

Our first study for Lent, challenges us to be real in our faith, and to let our presence be a reminder of the presence of God. I hope this will be our mission as we look to the challenges of the future for the Christian Church in Bungay