A Place of Prayer

I’d like to take you on a journey this morning. As we travel we will stop off at various places, meet different people and hear what is being said. As we travel, I’d like to encourage you to think about similar journeys that you have taken, or maybe that you are on at the moment.

As in Doctor Who, the first stage of the journey is the one that will take us the furthest through time and space, but it’s the one that I am going to spend the least time talking about. Will you come with me back about 2,000 years and 1,500 miles south east of here, to city called Philippi? We land in this Roman colony in Greece, in the street. It’s dusty and hot, there are people everywhere, going about their daily business.

We spot a little group of people, obviously walking somewhere together. Paul and Silas are part of the group, going to the place of prayer. The place of prayer wasn’t a Temple or a synagogue; it wasn’t a special building, but a spot on the riverbank, outside the city, where people gathered to talk together and to pray. They had gone there when they first arrived in Philippi, and had met Lydia, who had believed the message that they had bought, and decided to follow Jesus. Now they were staying at her house and had got into the practice of going back to that spot, to pray and to share the good news further.

But, there is opposition to them going to the place of prayer. Every time they head off to the place of prayer, they are harassed by this girl, shouting after them, trying to distract them.

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Love and Obey

I’ve just finished reading a novel which took the form of a parable of a man’s journey to faith. This guy is a technology whizz kid, and at one stage he decides that the best way for him to help people follow Jesus is to go through the Bible and draw together all Jesus’ teaching into a computer programme so that anybody facing a difficult decision can load it up, input the details, and the software would tell them what to do, based on all the information from Jesus’ teaching. The angel who is guiding the man doesn’t think that this is such a good idea. He explains that following Jesus isn’t about following a whole series of complicated rules, and much more about knowing and being known, loving and being loved, fighting and dying alongside Jesus so that we can also live in his triumph.

When I was preparing for this sermon, it struck me that if we were going to demonstrate our love for Jesus by obeying his commands, then it would be good to know what they were. So I did a bit of a search on the internet and found lists that people had very helpfully prepared by going through the gospels, and every time Jesus says “I tell you” noting down what he said. Most of the lists had around 50 commands on them.

But as I read them the points that the angel in the book made came back to me. Surely following Jesus isn’t about pinning up a list of rules in church, or on your fridge at home and making sure you stick to them. We know from the whole of the story of the people of God through the Old Testament that maintaining a relationship with God on the basis of rules doesn’t work. People can’t do it. We know that the only way that we can walk with God is by the gift of Jesus, it is only by grace, God’s riches at Christ’s expense, and not by works, not by the things that we do, that we are rescued from the darkness of our own selfishness.

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Heights of love

I was up at Northwood Stadium the other day, and I saw some young people being coached in high jump. The coach had laid out some cones in a half circle, and was asking the athletes to run up to, and past, the high jump bar in a kind of “c” shape, without actually jumping. Then, when they’d got the hang of that, he started to get them jumping over the bar by flinging themselves backwards over it, arching their backs and legs. Now, I don’t know about you, but if I’d never seen the high jump on the TV, I don’t know that I would have worked out that this is the best way to jump over a high jump bar. In fact, people had been jumping over bars for a long time before anybody did try this way of doing it.

In 1968 Dick Fosbury won the Olympic High Jump Gold Medal. As he did so he changed the sport of High Jumping forever, because he did so using the Fosbury Flop.

It was a game changing innovation. For centuries people had been jumping over bars to see who could go highest, but Fosbury, without changing the rules of sport, changed the heights that could be achieved. You had to be willing to take off and jump backwards, and land on your shoulders or head, but if you were up for it, athletes who changed their technique found that they could jump higher than they could previously.

What was it that allowed this to happen, this radical change in this sport? Firstly, there was a trail blazer who proved that it could be done, and showed people how to do it, there was a new champion. Secondly, it took advantage of new circumstances (the introduction of softer landing mats), and thirdly it required the athletes to step up to the new challenge of a different way of doing things.

In our reading from John’s telling of the good news of Jesus, we heard about something new that Jesus gave to his followers. Jesus gave them a new commandment. He told them to love one another as he had loved them.

But hold on a minute, how is this a new commandment?

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