Sermon Tone Analysis

Church is now

Our series is ‘more than’, rather than ‘not’.

Last week Tony spoke about how church is about Sundays, but also about more than Sundays.

Briefly explain own background - not a parent.

Today’s passages - Explain why readers chosen.

The first, from Deuteronomy 6, is perhaps one of the best known passages from the Jewish scriptures.

It contains the Shema - the great declaration of monotheism:

Context - in Egypt - in slavery.

The 10 plagues, each one targeting one of Egypt’s gods.

The great rescue - the first Passover.

The parting of the sea.

And now, the giving of the Covenant on mount Sinai.

So God is one.

Maybe we don’t think that’s so radical.

When we want to quickly understand if someone is religious, we ask ‘do you believe in God?’, not ‘do you believe in gods?’, at least in Islamic nations and in the West.

But of course for the people that Moses was leading here at Mount Sinai, that was not a natural assumption.

For most of their neighbours, most of the time, there were many gods.

But at Mount Sinai, the One God told the people His name.

If you’re reading your Bible and it says LORD in capital letters, that’s actually the translator being polite to our Jewish brothers and sisters, who don’t speak God’s name out loud, though that is a more recent tradition.

So in Deut 6:1

Deuteronomy 6:1 (NIV)

1 These are the commands, decrees and laws the Lord your God directed me to teach you to observe in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess,

He told them His name, which was something like יהוה and He made a covenant with them.

He told them how to live.

No trial and error here, like the other nations around them - a clear, unambiguous way of life, with 10 commandments at the heart of it all.

The first commandment is linked to that great Shema:

And the people are told to really dwell on this.

Do stuff to remember it:

SUMMARISE

Basically, really internalise it.

And right in the heart of the first commandment is the reminder of what God did for them.

So that first passage we heard goes on to say don’t forget, and tell your children!

Here we have a lovely script: SUMMARISE

Now look at the attitude of this kid in verse 20.

He wants to know the meaning of what he has seen and heard.

Questions are a really good thing.

I don’t think that there are bad questions.

But there can be bad attitudes.

We can question from a place of cynicism, or from a place of genuine wonder, puzzlement even.

When a young child asks their parents a question, inherent in that process is trust.

Trust that there will be a good answer, and trust that the parent is good.

I have never met a sarcastic, cynical toddler.

Perhaps we could learn how to ask questions like children?

And how does the parent respond?

”because I said so’?

NOPE.

The parent responds with the story.

‘Because I said so’ or ‘because God says so’ only works where there is trust.

Only works where the ’I’, or God, is known.

Example of drinking poison/chemotherapy.

Using Bible in council.

Our society doesn’t know God, so why would it do what He says.

Not that there aren’t reasons, but first and foremost, the character of the order-giver is central to the trust.

Maybe we need to tell children, our friends and neighbours, the story of who God is, so that they’ll want to know what He says.

What covenant?

Now we should be clear that in this passage from Deuteronomy that we’ve been reading, the focus is on telling future generations what God has done, what the covenant or relationship with him looks like.

We are not living in the same covenant as those people.

God is still the same, and the story of what God has done in the world is now a longer story, but the start of it is the same as it was for them.

God’s goodness, or righteousness, hasn’t changed.

But we are not living in the same covenant, or promise.

However the same principle applies of telling the future generations about the covenant that we, if we are Christians, live by.

It’s one based on what God has done for us, and it consists of putting our trust in Jesus, seeking to live as He taught us.

How can we encourage great questions about this from our kids?

How can we learn to ask great questions ourselves, from a stance of trust and with a sense of wonder?

What if we don’t pass it on?

We included the passage from Judges that Liz read, because it illustrates what happens when the next generation aren’t taught.

BUT

The Baals were their neighbours’ gods.

Remember the most basic, first commandment?

Remember the Shema?

Fail.

What’s interesting to me is that it says in verse 10 that they did not know what God had done for Israel.

And maybe that’s important.

If we are seeking to pass on moral guidance without any relationship, without any reference to the story of who God is, future generations will jettison those things.

After all, if God has done nothing for me, why should I care what He thinks about how I choose to live?

The Bible is many things, but at its heart it’s the story of a great rescue.

Jesus and His early followers saw his mission in the light of the Exodus, in the light of the deliverance from Egypt.

So we tell the story - of what God did in history, but also we tell about what has happened in our own lives.

But when we tell our own story, we need to anchor it in the story of God that we know from the Bible.

Sometimes we don’t even know our own story.

Example of dad’s ‘collapse’.

We can’t tell people the story of a God that we made up based on some stuff that happened to us.

Sometimes things get better because things get better.

So we anchor our own stories in the reliable story.

How are we passing on the story of what God has done?

Today has focused a lot on telling the next generation, but one of the unique things about the church family is that people get born at all ages.

If you’re asking how that’s possible, you’re not the first.

This is an encounter that Jesus had with a prominent religious teacher, called Nicodemus.

Nicodemus didn’t understand what Jesus said about people needing to be born again, or from above.

People enter the family of faith at different ages.

There are children and young people in the church who have been believers for longer than some of the adults.

They’re still children, still developing their emotional maturity, and I for one am not going to be advocating that we put them in the pulpit, but some of them have their own stories of what God has done, and we can benefit from those.

So we invest in the future, in church being more than now, by teaching the next generation, passing on what we know of what God has done and the covenant, to those who are young in flesh and those who are young in spirit.

If I had more time, I would love us to think about other ways that church is more than now.

After all, all of us are here because someone else thought beyond themselves and their immediate, daily life, and invested in the future.

We are in this building because someone believed in the church to come, and built it.

Husk history and plaque.

Arguably, I’m here because someone travelled from the Roman Empire to my pagan ancestors in Poland and Scotland and Northern England and told them about Jesus.

When we share our faith, at home or abroad, we build the church of the future.

When we pray, we connect our now with the not-yet, ultimately trusting that God is good.