Pentecost Water

What is it about kids and water? My four year old, Nathaniel, came home from nursery this week one day and told me that they'd had something really special that day. They'd had the water guns out. But there was one rule. No squirting people. They'd cleaned the garden furniture, sprayed the walls of the shed and watered the plants. As summer comes the plea for the paddling pool is heard once again, on every possible occasion. Kids seem to instinctively know something, that water is one of the most exciting things in the whole of the world.

Water is essential to life as we know it. It has a starring role in the first chapter of the Bible, central to the Creation of all that is, and it is also important in the last chapter, part of the description of the way in which the new creation will be. In between we find it again and again and again. It is one of the most potent images that we have for life and the life giving nature of God.

When God had called the people of God out of captivity and oppression in Egypt, they were led by Moses out in to the desert. As they travelled the horrors of the slavery, the murder of their sons, the forced labour began to fade in their memories and they began to focus on the difficulties of the journey and their fears overtook them. They missed the pomegranates and figs. They were thirsty and saw no source of water. In their lack of faith they rebelled against Moses.

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Tabernacles

I don't know if this ever happens to you, sometimes I get home from an evening meeting and my wife will be sat watching the TV. Now, if it's Casualty, then it's fairly straightforward. I know basically who everybody is, the plot is fairly predictable and so, if I wanted to, I could pick up what's happening and sit and watch it. If, however, it's an adaptation of a Jane Austin novel that I haven't read then it might take me a bit longer, and a few questions, to work out what's going on and who everybody is.

Sitting down to read this passage made me feel a bit like I was walking into the middle of a story, and quite a complex one at that. There's lots of characters, there's a whole cultural, historical, and religious context that I'm not that familiar with, and there's obviously some more immediate stuff that's been going on that I'm not aware of.

So, what I'd like to do tonight is to go through this passage and fill in some of the background, identify the actors and work out what's going on and what themes we can take and use to shed light on our own lives.

The setting is the Temple in Jerusalem at the time of the feast of the Tabernacles. This is a major, 8 day, festival in the Jewish calendar when the people remembered the tabernacles, or tents, that they lived in the desert following the flight from Israel. What is important for us is that this was a feast of pilgrimage. Lots of Jews from all over the known world had come to Jerusalem for the festival.

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Slavery and Freedom

This sermon was put together with the help of "Keystone", the youth group at St Peter's Church, Littleover. I really enjoyed spending some time with them over a couple of weeks, thinking about what it is to be Christlike, and particularly about this teaching from Jesus.

This passage is about freedom and slavery, truth and deception, and life and death. Jesus has been teaching in the Temple in Jerusalem for a week or so, going in every day, sitting there and holding forth to those around, engaging the religious experts in debate. In that time he's said some pretty controversial things about himself, and about the way that the people of God are living out their faith.

These things have provoked different reactions among those who have been listening. Some have decided that he is a dangerous rabble rouser, who threatens their power, someone who needs to be silenced. Others have had faith in him, have believed him, have wanted to follow him.

But Jesus is always clear about a couple of things. He's not very interested in head knowledge alone. He is interested in our whole beings and lives. He's an all or nothing type of guy. Throughout the gospels he makes it clear that choosing to follow him is a costly choice, it is a choice that must be made whole heartedly. It changes our whole lives. But the other thing is that Jesus offers freedom, life in all its fullness, depth. As good as it can be. Jesus is an all or nothing type of guy.

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