All Saints Church, Worcester

Morning Communion - Acts 1:6-11 and Matthew 28:16-20

Calling Out - Week 5

On this Remembrance Sunday we want to celebrate the fact that we have a Gospel of Peace for all the world. That's something which ties in with our continuing series on evangelism entitled Calling Out. We aim to give space to a short Act of Remembrance at 11.00am.

Let me begin with a question: What do you think is God's chief tool, his secret weapon for evangelism? Not J John - not Alpha - not the Internet - not Christian TV/Radio - not Church Buildings or the parish system but this: PEOPLE!

But where should we be doing that? Let's look at the promise of Jesus in Acts 1: 8 - "When the Holy Spirit has come upon you, you will receive power and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, throughout Judea, in Samaria and to the ends of the earth."

That's a good description of how the gospel was actually spread by the early church, but it has insights for where we are to be witnesses too!

Firstly, To Jerusalem - the Inner Circle

Jerusalem was to these Jewish believers in Christ not just the centre of the world, but the centre of the universe! It had the advantage of being the place where they were but it also had the disadvantage of being a place of discouragement and failure! It was the place where Jesus had been tried and crucified, whilst they had displayed betrayal, doubts, misunderstanding, fear, cowardice, denial and more… Jesus says, "Start in the place of your greatest failure." - the one place they would have preferred to avoid.

Our Jerusalem is the place that is most immediate to us: our closest family, friends and contacts, who we meet through our kinship, our work or our leisure. They are the people we are on first name terms with - be that through immediate locality or through the networks in which we live and move. The challenging question is how much of the Good News have these people seen and heard through our lives and lips?

Immediately we might feel guilty - because we might realise that this is a place of failure or denial for us too! These are the people who really know what we are like after all! We may well fear that they will think badly of us if we come across in the wrong way with our witnessing. We may find it hard to believe that some of these people closest to us could ever become Christians but we should also have hope that the God who can reach us can also reach those close to us however far away they may currently seem from God.

Jesus knows this is a hard place to begin - there were times when his family thought he was out of his mind so we are in good company. With all their failures in Jerusalem this was still the place which in the early days of the faith saw the most dramatic growth as time and again the people of Jerusalem were amazed at what they saw God doing through those who named Jesus as their Lord and Saviour! And today too the offer of prayer can lead to the possibility of breakthrough…

Who is in your inner circle? How could you point them towards Jesus during this coming week, joining your desire with that of our Father in heaven that they are brought into the kingdom of his Son? But their mission didn't stop there, it went also to:

Judea: The neighbourly neighbours.

This was the immediately surrounding area including people with the same culture and language but who were less well known to the disciples. We can think of this area as those people just beyond our inner circle that we see regularly but are not as close to as the first group - our acquaintances and more distant relatives. We might even struggle to remember their name when we meet them, after all this is a potentially very large group. The good news is that they are less likely to have seen our deepest failures. The down side of that is that it may be harder to speak naturally to them about personal and spiritual things. But then sometimes it is the little things that really break through. Remembering names is a really powerful sign of our love and care. One young person who went on an annual camp gave this testimony: "I came last year and didn't think anyone noticed that I was around. But when I arrived this year, one of the leaders called out my name. This week I have given my life to Jesus because I thought if someone cared enough about me to remember my name, then what they believe in must be true!"

The next area is Samaria: the not so neighbourly neighbours!

These people were geographically just as close as those in Judea but there was a history between Jews and Samaritans which meant that there were racial, religious, cultural and political differences which had led to a strong hostility between them. But Jesus said they were to take the gospel there too, and indeed he had set them this example already.

Our Samaria is anywhere there are people with whom we feel uncomfortable. It is where there are people with whom we have racial, political, cultural or religious differences. There may be a history of family or community hostility or they may be just different to us. Those whose lifestyle, language or loves are totally at odds with ours - Jesus says the gospel is for them too! Who would you least like to hear Jesus send you? Because he may well do so - he has a history of sending the unexpected! Pharisee Paul was sent to the Gentiles; Egyptian-raised Moses was sent to set Israel free. It's as if God deliberately gives us opportunities to encounter one another and love one another across our man-made boundaries - well that would make sense wouldn't it! Today is a day when we remember the effects of clinging to our human divisions at all costs, after all!

Jesus' last category is that we shall be witnesses to the ends of the earth!

From the very beginning, Christianity has looked outward. Only when it has been distorted is Christianity introverted and closed. In less than a quarter of a century this people, not previously known for having a penchant for exploration, had taken the gospel to the capital city of the most powerful nation in the world. It had overcome every barrier of language and race and was now free to spread indeed to the ends of the earth.

In our ever smaller world we too have a gospel imperative to the whole earth - which must include both those literally far away and also those who we only think are far away! No one is excluded. God's love is not relevant for just one social group, or one nation, or one race, it is for all. We need to give our support and our prayers to the work of mission going on throughout the world and we are building our partnership links in order to make us more effective at doing that! We need to ensure that none of us have any kind of filter built into our willingness to witness which presumes any individual or group is not part of the world which God so loved that he sent his Son.

We think about peace on this day - we long for peace on a human level where nation no longer fights against nation or ethnic group against ethnic group. But deeper than any of those is the peace which comes between us and God and between us and each other. We are the bearers of a gospel of peace. Shall we carry that gospel to the Jerusalem of those in our immediate inner circle? Not stopping there shall we move it onto the Judea of our friendly neighbours, and then on into the outer circle of those we might otherwise keep well clear of? And indeed not stop at all until we have reached the very ends of the earth! So that people both near and far at the moment may be able to say of us: "They built a bridge from their heart into mine which Jesus was able to walk across."