Sunday 3 March 2024 - Waterslides

Close your eyes. Mine are closed too. Who here, if they’re honest, carries some level of hang-up around sharing who Jesus is to them? Keep your eyes closed and put your hand up if that’s you. Put your hands down, and open your eyes.

I can imagine the scene in this moment from today’s story. Jesus is hanging out with his disciples and he’s asking two questions, to which he likely already knows the answer. The first, especially: who do people say I am? Phew, think the disciples, we can answer this one….to which they give various responses – a prophet, like Jeremiah, or Elijah, or some people think you’re John the Baptist take 2. OK, says Jesus, but who do you say I am? Cue the awkward silence. The tumbleweed. The tweeting of birds and the chirping of crickets.

As you might know, I’ve always found Peter a bit of a kindred Spirit. He’s got a penchant for the brain fart comment, and I get the impression also that, like me, he’s got a tendency to fill awkward silence with noise. One commentator called Peter’s answer to Jesus a ‘blurt’, which I appreciate. He says: Jesus, you’re the Messiah. You’re it. The big cheese; the real deal; the reason for the season.

I love how emotional Jesus seems in this moment. As Peter has blurted from his heart, Jesus’ response seems equally heartfelt; one of huge blessing: a new name, promise spoken over him, mana increased. I wonder if this is how God feels when we draw a deep breath and declare who Jesus is? Because when we declare who Jesus is, even if we feel that what we’ve said is a total brainfart, it actually has real power. Jesus tells us here that there’s a spiritual connection between the declaration of the name of Jesus as Lord, as King – bound on earth, bound in heaven - and we partner with God in that power; with Jesus who builds the church; in the confidence that nothing, not even death itself, can come against it. It’s pretty cool. We are people who have, as Bishop Justin said last week, declared our allegiance to this king Jesus, and in doing so have inherited such a declared power, so we can have courage as we share who Jesus is for us. Like we read in Psalm 27 today, just one of the many, many encouragements throughout the Bible:

The Lord is my light and my salvation— whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life— of whom shall I be afraid?

So in light of all that I’d love to share some of the things I’ve been reflecting on this week. Last Sunday we enjoyed having Bishop Justin with us last week, preaching about the moment when Jesus became king on the cross; the example of leadership that we give our allegiance to. It was really interesting to follow on from there to have lunch together with Bishop Justin and our broader leadership team. Justin extracted from us what we thought our particular strengths and weaknesses were as a church body, and then offered some reflections that he had observed.

One thing that stood out from our reflections was just what an awesome culture we have as a church whanau. We’re pretty good at loving each other well and making everybody feel like they have something to contribute. When there are ways to take part in kingdom work, we’re really great at pitching in and being present in our community. This is actually really rare and absolutely worth giving thanks to God for and celebrating.

With that, the IN and OUT sides of our discipleship triangle are looking pretty good. With that great culture in mind, Bishop Justin then asked us to reflect on why it might be that it’s taking some time to grow as a church.

And that was the key God moment. It was a wondering whether we need to strengthen our spiritual temperature; whether we need to re-centre ourselves around the person of Jesus; remembering who Jesus is and who is to us. And to become more confident in sharing Jesus with others. I know I personally always need to remember to re-orientate myself like this, and we need to do this in three ways:

The first two things are prayer and reading the Bible. Really pray. Hera helped us do this on Wednesday at morning prayers in the Lighthouse, but you can do this anywhere, any time and there are great resources out there to help you get good habits. In the same way, really draw strength from reading and studying the Bible. Spending time talking with God, exploring who God is in the person of Jesus, being in relationship together so that we draw our water from the source.

The third thing is to have courage and practice sharing who Jesus is to us. Because, as we see in today reading, it has such power. It is a really normal thing especially in the Western church – to get comfy being a really great community together but sometimes forgetting that it’s the amazing transformation of lives through relationship with Jesus, that’s right at the heart and centre of everything.

For those of you who love stats and data, here’s some results from the question about sharing faith from the 2023 NZ Church Life Survey which helps us understand that we’re not alone when we feel awkward sharing about Jesus. Only 20% of Christians noted that they actively look for opportunities to share their faith; only just over half felt comfortable talking about faith if it came up in conversation. Whilst 73% invited friends and family to church in the past, only 34% did so in the last year. It’s pretty sobering eh?

I think there’s lots we can dig into about why people don’t feel confident sharing who Jesus is, but in general I think many of our hang-ups are due to our fear of rejection. But as Justin reminded our vestry team on Sunday; the cultural landscape has changed so much that often our worry that people will reject us is unfounded.

The Wilberforce Foundation’s Faith and Belief Survey also taken last year asked people to place themselves on a sliding scale of openness to Christianity: those who declared themselves ‘warm’ or above was 57%. There’s way more openness out there than you might think.

And here’s another amazing statistic from that same survey that should encourage us – that those people who are warm to spirituality aren’t looking for Christians to be able to debate and have the right words, or for amazing spiritual leaders, or even for miracles, signs and wonders. People are looking for authenticity – Christians who go alongside people in the times of their deepest crisis (75%); who help others explore spiritual practices (68%); and who provide access to a first-hand, lived-out, faith (66%).

That’s really encouraging, because it’s a lot of what we do already; we just need to add more Jesus in! Because Jesus promises Peter after his testimony of faith, that Jesus will build his church, and nothing can stop that. Put another way, if God is for us, who can be against us?

So we’ve talked about increasing in prayer and reading God’s word, but what about some practical ways of sharing who Jesus is with others?

One: relatively easy off the cuff. If you are in conversation with someone and they mention something tough going on for them, offer to pray for them, then and there. You will be surprised how few people turn you down. I tried this at Veggie Co-op on Tuesday and it was amazing and opened up a whole conversation about who God was. You don’t need to have fancy amazing words. If could be as simple as “X, I bless you in Jesus name and pray today that you will know how loved and known you are by God.”

Two: Learn how to say what Jesus means to you and practice saying it. Like anything, it’s a skill and it needs practising. It can feel forced to think I need to practice saying what Jesus means to me, as if on some level it should flow from some emotional space within ourselves. But practising what we would say about Jesus as a skill doesn’t make what we say less genuine. So, that’s what we’re going to do now.

We’re going to answer Jesus question for ourselves: who do you say I am? Answer who Jesus is for you ideally in no more than 2 sentences. You can write it down on a post-it note. And then I want you to be brave and share it with the person next to you.

Challenge yourself: this week I’m going to have at least three conversations in which I mention who Jesus is to me.

Last Sunday we also had our first Sunday Sanctuary when we explored the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well; Jesus as the living water.

At our Wednesday prayers I had a picture of our church family being at the top of a waterslide. Being with Jesus is like waiting at the top of the waterslide. The living water is already flowing, but it’s green light for go time. It’s going to be scary, sometimes it might hurt, but with this living water it’s going to be so, so good. Let’s feel the fear and do it anyway. Amen.