Methodist Bishop

Acts 2.1-21 ( https://www.biblegateway.com NRSVA) Last week we saw how Luke thinks of salvation history unfolding in three distinct phases, the period from creation until the coming of Jesus, the earthly ministry of Jesus himself, and finally the age in which we are now living, the Age of the Spirit. This new age was ushered in, at Pentecost after the first Easter Day, when the Spirit - which Jesus had promised to his disciples - rushed in upon them like wind and fire. There is a problem with Luke’s neat sub-division of history. This isn’t the first time that the Spirit has filled human beings. Granted that the Spirit is always part of what it means to be God, hovering over creation when the Creator God spoke the cosmos into being (Gen 1.2) and ever present in Jesus (Luke 4.18), should it have filled ordinary people too if Luke’s strict demarcation of history is correct? But in Judges 15.14 we find that the Spirit of the Lord rushed upon Samson, and in 1 Samuel 10 the spirit of t...

Psalm 68.1-10, 32-35 ( https://www.biblegateway.com NRSVA) One of the fascinating things about this psalm is that it repurposes language originally used to describe God’s ancient rival in Israel’s affections, the Canaanite storm god Baal. The Greek version of the Old Testament changed the description of God in verse 4. He becomes instead ‘the one who rides on the West’. The West? Does this mean ‘the West wind?’ In verse 33 the Greek version says ‘God... rides on the heaven of heaven.’ I’m not sure what that is, either. Presumably it means ‘the highest heaven’. The confusion is understandable because the Hebrew is unclear. Does verse 4 mean that God ‘rides upon the clouds’ or ‘through the deserts’? The Revised Version prefers one interpretation, the New Revised Standard Version the other. There is similar confusion about verse 33. Does it mean God is the ‘rider in the heavens’ or does he ‘ride upon the heavens of heavens’ as in the Greek version of the psalm? For me the contex...

Acts 1.6-14 ( https://www.biblegateway.com NRSVA) Jesus ascends to God on the Cross in John’s Gospel, but he ascends through a cloud in Luke. And he isn’t the first person to do this in the Bible.  Enoch also has a mysterious ending. The New Revised Standard Version says that ‘he was no more, because God took him,’ (Gen 5.24) which could sound like a circumlocution for ‘he died’. But the Greek Old Testament, which Luke would have been using, says ‘he was not found, because God transferred him,’ implying a more mysterious promotion to glory. And the Prophet Elijah has an ending that is explicitly like the ascension of Jesus. ‘2 Kings 2.11 says that ‘Elijah ascended in a whirlwind into heaven,’ and it’s even possible that he was seated ‘in a chariot of fire’ drawn by ‘horses of fire’. If anything, Jesus’ ascension is far less spectacular, as befits his more understated style. Luke has a very clear idea that history divides neatly into three stages. First, there is the perio...

John 17.1-11 ( https://www.biblegateway.com NRSVA) In Luke’s Gospel Jesus ascends to God from a mountaintop, lifted up on a cloud. In John’s Gospel Jesus is lifted up on a cross. The passage ends with the assurance that Jesus and his ‘Holy Father’ are ‘one’, but for John this is a moral unity, a unity of purpose, rather than a metaphysical union of two natures, human and divine. They are ‘one’ because Jesus has ‘completed the work that [God] gave him to do,’ (verse 4). That work was ‘to make God’s name known’, to share the words that God had given him, to gather around himself a group of trusted disciples who ‘know the truth’, and to be recognised as the one whom God sent, ‘Jesus Messiah’ - the Anointed One. We know from John’s description of Jesus’ death, and from other passages in the Gospel, that the decisive hour when that work was completed was on the Cross, when Jesus was glorified by God so that he in turn might give glory back to God and confirm God’s true nature as the s...

1 Peter 3.13-22 ( https://www.biblegateway.com NRSVA) This is a fascinating passage for several reasons.  First, the writer doesn’t talk about Jesus’ resurrection in bodily terms. Verse 18 says, ‘He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit.’ This reminds us that Paul, also, never mentions the empty tomb. So there were two different strands of teaching about Easter in the Early Church, one emphasising Jesus’ bodily resurrection and the other focusing more on spiritual resurrection. Second, the writer refers to an idea that quickly became of importance to the Early Christians and remains so today. If being reconciled to God through Jesus’ death on the Cross is the pivotal moment in human history, what happens to all those people who never got to know about it? In verse 19 the writer says that Jesus ‘went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison.’ Taken very literally, this could mean that - during the three days before Jesus’ resurrection was reveal...

John 1.35-39a This Bible study is based on a series of reflections about the meaning of discipleship by John Leach, an Anglican priest and discipleship adviser in the Diocese of Lincoln, which were first published in 2017 by the Bible Reading Fellowship. Where appropriate, I have given them a Methodist twist. There has often been a view, for which John Wesley is partly responsible, that becoming a Christian is a one-off, static thing, a single episode rather than a process. We are saved, to use John Wesley’s terminology, we can know that we have been saved, and we are saved to the utmost. Wesley even believed that it was possible for a disciple to become a perfect Christian, perfect in faith and morals at any rate, although modern psychologists might doubt that. If we are talking about becoming a Christian, crossing the line between belief and unbelief, doubt and conviction, then Wesley might be right. We can know that we have become believers and some of us can know exactly w...

Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that is taking place among you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you.  (1 Peter 4.12-14 https://www.biblegateway.com NRSVA) What is the fiery ordeal to which the writer refers? Given that Peter is believed to have perished during Nero’s persecution after a great fire in Rome, people have often wondered whether it relates to a passage in an account of the persecution by the historian Tacitus, who was a boy at the time of the fire. He wrote, "Therefore, to stop the rumour [that he had set Rome on fire], he [Emperor Nero] falsely charged with guilt, and punished with the most fearful tortures, the persons commonly called Christians… Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired.’ Some things about this ac...

Acts 17.22-31 At Speakers' Corner in Athens Paul takes on the debaters. Talking to a Jewish audience he would describe how the Church of Christ is the new transformed Israel. Speaking to Greek people, who pride themselves on being open-minded, scientific seekers after truth, he tries a different pitch. He's come to tell them about the unknown god whom they suspect might be out there, within and beyond the framework of existence, what Donald Rumsfeld called 'the unknown Known' or 'the known Unknown'. (That's an example of choosing the wrong pitch for your audience.) It's comforting, at a time when we cannot go into them, to remember that this God, 'who made the cosmos and everything in it, …does not live in shrines made by human hands.' Despite our many achievements, which have only multiplied since Paul's time, we still find ourselves 'groping' in the darkness for a God who is actually 'not far from each one of us', w...

John 14.15-21 ( https://www.biblegateway.com NRSVA) What is a Christian? This was an urgent question in John’s church because there were people who claimed to be followers of Jesus but who held very different views from John and his friends. John talks about them explicitly in his letters, and by the time these were written things were getting pretty tense. The church had split, with some members leaving to pursue a very different direction. The word ‘antichrist’ is banded about freely in the letters. It’s a term used solely by John, and only to describe his opponents. No one knows precisely what it means, but it’s not a compliment. It was very important to John to be able to tell the difference between the real followers of Jesus Christ, and the people who - although they said they were Christians - were really ‘anti-Christs’ because they took a totally opposing view. John says that the true followers of Jesus are ‘they who have [his] commandments and keep them.’ These are the p...

1 Peter 2.1-10 ( https://www.biblegateway.com NRSVA) Here the author of 1 Peter uses some everyday images to describe different aspects of the Christian life.  He begins by borrowing an idea from Paul and then expanding on it. Paul had reminded the Christians in Corinth that it’d been necessary to feed them with milk because they were ‘infants in Christ’ who weren’t ready yet for solid food.  The author of 1 Peter says a ll Christians should ‘like newborn babies, drink spiritual unadulterated milk’ to ‘help [them] grow into salvation’. He’s no longer thinking, as Paul did, of milk as a starter food for people who aren't yet ready to digest the real thing. Instead, he’s thinking of it as a rich and creamy gift from God. This isn’t milk that’s been watered down to make it go further. It’s full-fat milk packed with nutrients - a gift to those who’ve ‘experienced that the Lord is kind’. He then riffs on the idea of ‘Peter The Rock’. But he reminds his readers that the t...

Psalm 31.1-5, 15-16 ( https://www.biblegateway.com NRSVA) This psalm is one of two which Jesus appears to quote when he's hanging on the Cross. He says, ‘Into your hand I commit my spirit,’ (verse 5). Stephen repeats the same words as he's being stoned. And that’s why it features among last week’s readings. This is a psalm for people who find themselves in tough terrain. They're seeking refuge. They need a rock to cling to, a strong fortress to save them. An invisible net seems to be closing around them. Caught out in the open, they're fearful of being put to shame, perhaps because they’ll be seen to fail the tests that they’ll inevitably face there. All  they can do is commend their spirit to God and hope that he’ll save them. ‘My times are in your hand,’ says the psalmist.  Does this sound familiar? These words brought comfort to Jesus and Stephen. Perhaps they can also comfort us!

Acts 7.55-60 ( https://www.biblegateway.com NRSVA) Stephen wins no awards for diplomacy. Like the proverbial Yorkshireman, he calls a spade a spade. If he hopes that a bit of straight talking will invoke a spirit of contrition and repentance he’s badly misjudged the mood of the meeting! His listeners are already infuriated, but now he calls out that he can see a vision of Jesus standing at the right hand of God. That’s the final straw. The crowd lynches him and so he becomes the first Christian martyr. Luke has no hesitation in calling this a murder. Yet Stephen appeals to Jesus not to hold this sin against them. He also echoes Jesus’ own words from the Cross, ‘Receive my Spirit.’ In fact, on the face of it, Stephen quotes two of Jesus’ sayings from the Cross, but - as we saw in Holy Week - the words, ‘Father forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing’ aren’t found in the earliest manuscripts of Luke’s Gospel. But either way, there is a clear reference here to the Cro...

I am the way, the truth and life John 14.1-14 ( https://www.biblegateway.com NRSVA) ‘I am the way, the truth and life’ is one of the most memorable things that Jesus ever said. It echoes similar sayings in the other Gospels, where Jesus repeatedly talks about ‘the way’. It’s always ‘the way of the cross’, which we’re expected to take ourselves if we wish to do the same works that Jesus did. It’s also essentially the same idea as ‘Jesus the gate’, which was central to last Sunday’s Gospel reading. ‘The truth’ is that Jesus has been sent by God, and ‘the way of the cross’ reveals what God is like. ‘The life’ is in part the reward for following the way. But it’s also what we get when we encounter Jesus, a relationship with God which even death can’t bring to an end. ‘I will do whatever you ask in my name’ isn’t a magical promise to get us out of a tight fix whenever we need it. It’s just a natural consequence of believing in Jesus and what he presents.  Jesus also says, ‘The...

1 Peter 2:19-25 ( https://www.biblegateway.com NRSVA) On Songs of Praise a Methodist shepherd was trying to teach Aled Jones how to use a sheepdog to herd some ducks. ‘You’re not telling the dog what to do, Aled,’ he scolded as the ducks went in the wrong direction and the dog scurried around rather aimlessly at their heels. ‘I can’t remember the commands,’ Aled replied. Helen and I sympathised. We’re always struggling to remember the right commands for Phoebe, our son’s dog. What persuades people to go in the right direction? Can they be nudged, like a sheepdog stealthily creeping into position to cut off the most obvious escape route? If the dog and the herder can work skillfully together the ducks will almost volunteer to be penned in. It becomes the obvious thing for them to do. In the same way, if the government nudges us to start a pension it becomes the accepted way forward when, without any shepherding, many of us might have decided to spend our money now rather than sav...

They spent much time together. Acts 2.42-47 ( https://www.biblegateway.com NRSVA) This passage describes what life was like in the Early Church. In the light of Paul’s letters, which were written much earlier than Acts, some people have wondered whether it isn’t rather an idealised picture. Be that as it may, and Luke certainly doesn’t hesitate to tell us that things soon started to go wrong, the striking thing about this passage is all the togetherness it describes. ‘They devoted themselves to fellowship… All who believed were together and had all things in common… They spent much time together.’ Lockdown is the inverse of this picture. We devote ourselves to self-isolating. All who believe keep apart, living in our own little bubble. We spend no time together. Some church leaders have worried that believers will lose the habit of meeting together, because churchgoing is a habit and it can easily be lost. Others have worried that we’re becoming self-regarding and inward-l...