The Chelmsford Group of the
 United Reformed Church

Leaders Letter

July 2008

From Revd. Jon Sermon, minister of Church of Our Saviour LEP,
and Danbury, Great Baddow and Howe Green United Reformed Churches.
(extracted from the joint newsletter of
Danbury, Great Baddow & Howe Green URC's)

Surprising (Scary?) Adventure

Peter was one of the first followers of Jesus Christ. He had seen for himself some of the most dramatic events of human history! He had been a friend of a man who seemed ordinary, like anyone else in many ways, but was also more extraordinary than anyone else has ever been. He saw the power of God at work through this man – healing, showing authority over the forces of nature, teaching so clearly that people were able to connect with spirituality! He really made a difference!

Then Peter witnessed this man arrested and brutally tortured to death, after a mock trial on trumped up charges. Imagine his devastation!

Even more surprising, exciting (and scary)... Peter found that for Jesus, death was not the end. Three days after he had been severely flogged then left hanging, nailed to a cross for six hours while his life drained away, Jesus was alive again!

Of course, that is unbelievable in our sophisticated age – isn’t it?

Incredible, surprisingly, exciting, scary – and yes, unbelievable!

Yet it happened!

The scary adventure got even more dramatic and exciting, in a way that proved this unbelievable truth: Peter and his mates were downtrodden, scared and disillusioned after the man they had followed, who they had come to see, quite literally, as God living a human life, was violently destroyed. But they became bold, confident outspoken leaders of the greatest spiritual movement in history! And God equipped them for this, empowering them as he had empowered Jesus – (you can read how and why this started, on the day called ‘Pentecost’ in Acts chapter 2).

Is this, already, much more surprising, exciting (and indeed scary) than paragliding when expecting cycling? It gets more so!

Peter, like all his mates (the first Christians) was Jewish, both racially and in terms of religion. They genuinely thought that the way God was transforming people in this great spiritual movement was for the Jews only. Their background had taught them to believe that foreigners were beyond God’s blessing. How wrong could they be...

A man called Cornelius, a Roman (Italian in today’s terms) and a member of the occupying army that suppressed the Jewish people, had a supernatural vision. He was being told to send messengers to find Peter, bring him back, so Cornelius and his mates could hear God’s message through Peter. And God also supernaturally prepared Peter in a vision, so he could realise the surprising, exciting and scary (for him) truth, that God’s blessing, through Jesus, is for everyone, and not just the Jews. You can read in Acts chapter 10 and 11, to see just how scary, exciting and surprising it was!

And what might God be calling us into? Firstly, that the blessing and empowerment of Pentecost, received also by those foreigners who Peter thought so surprising, is on offer to us! Secondly, if we are Christians, already engaged on the exciting, scary spiritual adventure of being equipped by God’s Holy Spirit, might there be surprises for us? Just as Peter realised that God was bigger than the religious structures of his day, might not God be at work beyond our familiar ways of being church today? That was the challenge that Steve Chalke brought in the run up to the Chelmsford Christian Festival,

  Jon Sermon