The Choice is Yours

It's been an unusually full week, including a visit to Liverpool just for the day on Friday. We were returning to the parish in Everton we left 23 years ago! The man who was Head Teacher in those days has died, and left instructions that he'd like me to take his funeral. At the start of the service, I felt quite overwhelmed, not just at losing someone to whom I was professionally quite close for several years, but also also at standing where I had stood for so many years in the past, seeing familiar faces, still recognizable after all this time.

Preparing the sermon was an interesting experience, as I reflected on the 1980s. What changes we had to negotiate then. It was the 'Hatton' era, of a Militant City Council versus an intransigent Tory Government, with Merseyside Churches caught up in it all, striving for the soul of Liverpool, under the firm and inspirational leadership of Archbishop Worlock and Bishop Sheppard. I recalled the introduction of LMS - Local Management of Schools - when for the first time, governors were entrusted with their own budget and a variety of new powers. This thing called a 'computer' arrived on the desk of head teachers, and a whole new era had begun. Almost overnight we said goodbye to hand-written ledgers and typewriters; soon we would have wireless telephones too. Gordon and his colleagues had many changes to negotiate.

Today is Passion Sunday, and we are coming towards the end of Lent. With it comes the last in our series on the Sermon on the Mount. It's unlikely this was the sermon as preached - no means of verbatim recording in those days - but we can be confident these are the very words of Jesus which Matthew has compiled for us. As they stand, Jesus has:

• raised our aspirations, telling us whose company we should seek: the poor, the justice-seekers, the peace-makers, the pure in heart etc
• challenged our previous assumptions, calling us to a new righteousness - indeed, perfection like our heavenly Father
• warned us against making a show of our religion, teaching us how to give, to pray and to fast
• identified 3 enemies of spiritual growth: greed and acquisitiveness, worry and prejudice and demonstrated how to overcome them

Throughout, as noted last week, we have been reminded of our heavenly Father. Christian discipleship is a relationship not a religion.

Therefore, we have to make a choice: to follow a narrow way rather than a broad one, to build on rock rather than sand. As it happens, my reading from Henri Nouwen this morning was on the same theme: The core message of Jesus is that real joy and peace can never be reached while bypassing suffering and death, but only by going right through them.

Last night, Riding Lights Theatre Company was in town, with a performance of Crosslight - reflecting on the discipleship of Peter. It was profoundly challenging and moving. One memorable scene was when the apostle John insists on recounting what happened at the cross, since Peter had deserted. It was only by facing what he had tried to avoid that he could eventually find hope to live again. The final words? - 'Follow me.'