Palm Sunday All Age Sermon outline

Palm Sunday 1st April 2012

Psalm 118 – Who you gonna call?

·         We’ve just watched a comical video,  advertising a telephone number enquiry company 118 118 (Who remembers the names of the original song, singer and movie). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZw87CSV-o4

·         The advert tells us that when you have any kind of problem or you need specialist help, 118 118 can put you in touch with the help you need (for a price of course!)

·         Our Bible reading from Psalm 118 has bigger worries and concerns in mind. It is a prayer and a song, written in troubled and anxious times by an oppressed people. Against this dark background it is an extraordinary song of hope – hope that God will one day intervene personally, directly and powerfully to put right all that is wrong in the world.

·         It is a psalm which is still sung by  Jewish people all over the world, sveral times each year, at their most important religious festivals – including the Passover, which Jesus was about to celebrate one final time in Jerusalem with his disciples.

·         The Jewish people are still waiting for their Messiah but for Christians – both Jews and non-Jewish people like most of us, who have come to believe in and follow him, Jesus is the fulfilment of the promises in this psalm. He’s the answer to this prayer.

·         Verses/fulfilment … (focus especially on Jesus being the stone which many people reject but is the cornerstone for us all, verses 22-23 and the gates of righteousness being opened for us, punishment and even death not lasting for ever, verses 17-21).

·         The people behind 118 118 can help some people sort out some problems some of the time. The person behind Psalm 118 is the answer to all the deepest needs of every single person who has ever lived.

·         Even better, it is a free gift of grace – no 69p a minute or whatever. You don’t have to earn God’s love – although the best way to respond to it is in a life of serving others, which will be costly but worthwhile.

·         The love of God endures forever, it is everlasting and never gives in. Never stops seeking, healing, putting things right, clearing up the mess we have made  – a strong promise which we can build on securely, knowing that the one who has promised can be trusted!

·         Prayer

Marketing God

John 2.13-22 All Age Sermon

Part 1 – At the Market

• ·         Who came to the Church Clothes Fair yesterday? Look at the bargains I found! Isn’t it great when we turn the church into a market for the day?
• ·         Bible reading…
• ·         So Jesus was really angry because the Temple had been … turned into a market. Oops! Do you think he’s angry with us too? WWJD if he’d come here yesterday? Would he have tipped over all the tables and chased us out with a whip?

Part 2 – What was Wrong?

• ·         The pilgrims arriving in Jerusalem for Passover were being sold the things they needed to be allowed to approach God for forgiveness/healing/love.
• ·         In other words, people’s desire for God was being used as a money making opportunity. A kind of Pay as you Pray scheme which made some people rich and many people poor and resentful.
• ·         Making money had even become more important than helping people meet God, so that the Courtyard of the Gentiles, which was meant to be a “house of prayer for all nations” had become a busy shopping mall – prayer couldn’t be allowed to get in the way of profit, so it was simply crowded out.
• ·         Jesus challenged what was wrong in dramatic actions, reminding people what the Temple was meant to be for – in Matthew’s version of the story he made the point even clearer by healing a load of blind and disabled people while he was there.
• ·         Jesus was effectively saying – “This Temple isn’t working any more – you’ve ruined it. You need a new Temple.”

Part 3 – Jesus’s Answer

• ·         Jesus didn’t just HAVE the answer, he claimed to BE the answer. When he said “Tear down this Temple, and in three days I will build it again” he wasn’t talking about a building, he was talking about himself.
• ·         So now it’s by meeting Jesus rather than going to the Temple that people receive God’s forgiveness and healing and love.
• ·         Jesus also predicted that his followers would continue to do the same things he did, being his body in the world, taking on that Temple role of connecting people to God to receive forgiveness, healing and love.

Part 4 – Conclusions

• ·         So St George’s church building is not a Temple, which means it might be OK to have a market here! Having a market here can actually be a way of showing kindness, loving our neighbours, helping people buy good things they need for a low price. But it mustn’t just be about making money for the church.
• ·         You see, this building is not the Temple but we, the followers of Jesus, ARE the Temple.
• ·         What I mean is that our purpose in life is to connect people to God. Money might play a part in that, but the money must never become more important than connecting people to God.
• ·         We, the followers of Jesus, are to be the community, the family where people meet God and are welcomed and forgiven and healed and loved.
• ·         That’s what the original Temple was supposed to be for and it is what we are supposed to be for. May God help us to become what he has called us to be.

Romans 12.9-21 All Age Talk

Romans 12.9-21 (All Age)

Introduction

• Just a list of right and wrong ways to behave?
• A powerful and vital lesson in how to live in relationship to other people – especially those we may regard as enemies. The key word is love and it all flows from God’s abundant and merciful love for all people (11.36-12.1).
• In this short talk I want to concentrate on the first and last verses of the passage;

Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good. (12.9)
Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. (12.21)

Sincere Love

Who can explain what “sincere” means? (Hint: use your spanish to work it out. Sin cera = without wax.) What’s that got to do with love? Here’s a vase of ours which has been accidentally knocked over and broken a few times. It looks pretty good and it is fine to use because Billie has repaired it with superglue. But dishonest Roman merchants used to repair their cracked vases with coloured wax and then sell them as new. Why was that wrong? (…) How could it be detected? (Hint: what happens to wax when it gets hot?)

So when our Bible tells us that love should be sincere, it means it should be without wax, without pretence, without a mask. Let me give a few examples and I want you to use your “wax detectors” (kids have rattles and bells) to spot whether the love is sincere or not …

• We tell someone we will pray for them but we don’t actually do it.
• We smile when someone is speaking to us, but without really listening.
• We visit a sick friend in hospital instead of going to watch our favourite football team.
• We give some food and clothing to a needy family without saying who they are from.
• We say nice things about someone when we are with them, but when they have gone we say bad things about them.
• We tell someone to call us any time, but when their number comes up on our phone, we don’t answer.

All these examples, and the others we heard in our Bible reading show that love is not just about what we say, but what we do.

Who is Lovable?

There are lots of reasons why we don’t always find it easy to love sincerely. We are so busy, self-centred and insecure for example. We also come across the problem that people are not always lovable. In fact people can be nasty and act so badly towards us that they deserve to be hated instead of loved. But notice what the Bible says: Hate what is evil (not WHO is evil); cling to what is good (12.9).

So we are to hate the evil and bad things people do but we are not to reject or hate people, who are all made by God in God’s image. In fact we are to cling to people, as God does. Because God’s mission is to rid the world of evil, not of “evil people”. The way God destroys his enemies is by turning them into friends, as we will see.

Vengeance and burning coals

This leads us into the most difficult and misunderstood part of the reading. We are challenged to bless the people who persecute us, to hold back from taking revenge on bad people but to leave them for God to sort out in his wrath. God is (ominously) quoted as saying: It is mine to avenge; I will repay (Deut. 32.35). Some people think this is like when someone trips you up and steals your bag, and you don’t chase after them because you know your big brother or your Dad is going to find them and beat them up later.

The problem with this is that it makes God somebody who is inconsistent; who does not treat people the way he tells us to treat people. It is very hard to respect and obey a parent who is like this (examples … "don’t laze around in front of TV eating chocolate" … "don’t push in front of people in queues"). God’s love for “bad” people would be fake rather than sincere.

Our love for certain people would also be fake, just giving them a false sense of security. We would be meeting our enemy’s hunger and thirst temporarily, knowing that they were going to have burning coals poured onto their heads later.

But God in fact loves all his creatures with a genuine, sincere love. The burning coals of kindness are to shame our enemy into changing. They are like a furnace which burns away the impurities from metal – hating what is bad and clinging to what is good (b.t.w. John Wesley interpreted this verse like this).

Perhaps you can remember a time when you said something hurtful to someone and they responded with kind words which made you blush, your face burning with shame! Maybe that experience changed you, “burning away” something bad from your character.

When the Heat is on

For a perfect example of God’s love in action we can look at Jesus, who put it into action sincerely, consistently and without any pretence or hidden agenda. It is not easy to love people as they express their hatred of you, spit at you, nail you to a cross. But Jesus kept loving them to the end, hating the evil but loving the people, all of them.

And what kept him going was not the thought of the revenge he would take on them later, it was the knowledge that they would all be transformed in the end by God’s perfect love.

There is a Greek myth in which Icarus flies too near the sun and the wax holding his wings together melts. In a similar way, the nearer we get to Jesus, the more the wax in our lives – all the pretence and fear and selfishness – will be melted away, leaving only a pure love for God and for all people.

What can you do this week to show sincere love to others?