Podcast Summaries

It's good that you're saying hello to everybody. Graham's now going to read our Bible reading for us. Good morning, everyone. Today's Bible reading is from John's Gospel, chapter 11, beginning at verse 17. If you want to follow that in a church Bible, it's on page 108 of the New Testament section. When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days. Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, some two miles away, and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them about their brother. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, while Mary stayed at home. Martha said to Jesus, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask him. Jesus said to her, Your brother will rise again. Martha said to him, I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day. Jesus said to her, I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live. And everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this? She said to him, Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world. When she had said this, she went back and called her sister Mary and told her privately, The teacher is here and is calling for you. And when she heard it, she got up quickly and went to him. Now Jesus had not yet come to the village, but was still at the place where Martha had met him. The Jews who were with her in the house consoling her, saw Mary get up quickly and go out. They followed her because they thought that she was going to the tomb to weep there. When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. When Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, Where have you laid him? They said to him, Lord, come and see. Jesus began to weep. So the Jews said, See how he loved him. But some of them said, Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying? Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave and a stone was lying against it. Jesus said, Take away the stone. Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead for four days. Jesus said to her, Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God? So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upwards and said, Father, I thank you for having heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me. When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come out. The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, Unbind him and let him go. This is the gospel of Christ. Praise to Christ our Lord. A very good morning to you. Let me add my welcome to Julie's on this Mother's Day. And as we sit, let's pray together as we come to God's word. Let's pray. Lord God, we thank you that you are the one who breathes life. And we thank you, Lord, that you breathed life into your world this morning. We thank you for the gift of sun, for the gift of breath in our lungs. We thank you for the fact that you are life. And so we pray that as we sit here this morning, that we would know not just physical life, but that we would know spiritual life, life to the full. In your name we pray. Amen. Well, a real thanks to Graham for reading for us this morning, that passage from John. And we're looking this morning at what is perhaps a familiar story. Perhaps for some of us, we've heard that story before. Perhaps for other of us, we might not have heard that story, but it maybe kicks off some kind of associations with the story of Easter. The Bible full of stories, which perhaps is why we like it so much, because actually we are all storytellers, aren't we? I'm not sure whether you've ever thought of yourself as a storyteller. I was thinking about Caroline Owen during the week, working with accounts and thinking that if you're somebody who works with numbers and accountants, you might not necessarily think that you're a storyteller, but actually you chart the story of our companies, stories that you can track through their finances and their figures. It might seem like finances and figures, but actually in those finances and figures, there are stories going on of our business life. Perhaps you're an architect or a builder and you look to kind of build something in bricks and mortar that actually tells something of the story of the people. We're having a building project here at the moment. Part of that building project, all the energy really behind it, is actually what we want to do to serve our community as a church. It tells something of our story. Perhaps you're a solicitor or a doctor. You spend your life interacting as a nurse or a medical professional with people who come in with a broken story. And actually you want to be able to offer them a better story. That's why you get out of bed in the morning to do your work. Perhaps you're a parent or a grandparent and you're wanting to share the story of your family, the story of everything that you've learned as an individual with those in your family and in your care. Everyone is a storyteller. And that includes God. God created us in his image. And so part of what it means to be created in God's image is that God's a storyteller, just like us. I wonder if you could find a Bible in or around a chair in front of you because we're just going to do something and kind of like replay a little bit of the story of the Bible. We're going to start off right in Genesis chapter 1. But before we get there, let me tell you about one of my favourite books. A few weeks ago, you might remember, we were talking about stories and I talked to you about some of my favourite books and I bought some of them in. Well, here's another one. Gina, thank you for putting the slide up. Here's another one of my favourite books. It's quite a weighty tome. It's a bit of a doorstop. But it's called The Seven Basic Plots. And this chap, appropriately named Christopher Booker, has sketched out the seven basic plots that basically all of the stories that we tell fall in normally to one of these categories. There's overcoming the monster. There's tragedy, comedy, voyage and return, quest, rags to riches, rebirth. If you were Walt Disney, you've built an entire empire just off those storylines. And when we tell stories, often it's one of those stories that we're telling. The Bible is a book of many stories, but also it's a book of one story. It's got an unfolding picture. And actually, as the Bible works through, you can trace through all of those types of stories in the Bible. We meet the monster really early on. On page 1, you might be there in Genesis at the beginning of the Old Testament. The monster's there right at the start. The Bible tells us that God's eternal and he always has been. So he's kind of outside of time. God is before the beginning. It kind of like blows our mind. And he's there right after the end. So God is entirely mind-blowing. The Bible doesn't tell us when evil came into the picture, but it does tell us that actually darkness and evil were there right from what the Bible decides to start recording for us. You can actually see in verse 2, it doesn't take long for the monster to appear. The earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep. The words for formless void there in Hebrew are tohu and bohu. Now, what I really like about this, this isn't a French lesson. That was my previous career. But the word tohu in French, in modern-day French, is something that is quiet.

It's essentially French. I love it. It's the sound of a cacophony of car horns blasting themselves off in chaotic anger and darkness. And I love the fact that the French have got a term for that because it's so much part of their national life and culture. They've taken the Hebrew words because actually that summarizes something of what's going on here, a sort of a chaotic, kind of white noise emptiness that is both chaotic and dark and horrible and angry and not really a place that we want to be. That is what God speaks into at the start. The monster, wherever that monster's come from, is already there. But then if you see, God overcomes that monster. He speaks, verse 3, let there be light. And there was light. And obviously where there's light, there's life. God puts in place clear boundaries. There's order. Chaos retreats. The white noise of cacophony becomes the ordered noise of birdsong and seas roaring with joy as we look through Genesis chapter 1. God forms the world and he fills the world with authoritative love. Tragedy isn't far off. Actually, Gina, we can have our next slide up because rather than looking at just the seven basic plots, actually I've got a picture of the Bible there, which is what we're going through. So if you put up the next slide, that's brilliant. Same thing, different image. Tragedy is not far off. We know that as we flip over the page, literally, in front of us to Genesis chapter 3, that humans have a fatal flaw. Our fatal flaw is that we want to self-govern. We want to self-refer. We want to self-identify. Humans have fundamentally got an identity crisis. We like to think that we're God and actually we're just not equal to the task. And in reaching out to take charge of our own destiny, a bit like reaching out for a tantalizing apple, and in trying to be masters of our own destiny, we've turned away from God as the source of light and life. And it's a sadly comic scene. I'm not sure whether you know how comedy works. When I was at university, I had to read a book of French philosophy which was entitled The Laugh. It was the most dull book I have ever read. It told us why we laugh. But anyway, I'm going to repeat some of it for you now just so that I can share the pain with you. Laughter and comedy is basically, this sounds very academic, the subversion of the expected. So basically, when you see somebody walking down a street and they suddenly smash into a lamppost, we laugh because actually what we expected them to do was to walk in a straight line down the street and to miraculously avoid everything. The fact that they smash into a lamppost is not what we expect. It's not what they expect. And so we find it funny. So comedy isn't necessarily always funny. It's probably going to lead to their injury. But actually, we find things funny, inverted commas, comedy, because it's not what we expect. The story of Adam and Eve is not what God expects. We don't want an imperfect world. We don't want to wake up in the morning and hear the news headlines from the Middle East. We want life to go in a straight and a balanced line. That is what we hope for. That is what we expect. And so there is something tragically comic when actually we look at the world and we see that it's not going in that way. We look at our leaders and we think it's like there's some kind of tragic comedy playing out around the world. And that's true equally in the Old Testament. If you flick on a bit to page 66, I could have picked out any kind of page reference really. But 66 is where we hear about Pharaoh. Pharaoh is like a pantomime type of figure. He's like a pantomime villain. There's something comic about him and it would be comic if he wasn't such a tragic villain, imprisoning God's people, making them slaves for 420 years, refusing to let them go. And chapters 13 and 14 are basically when he decides to let them go. And then in a little bit, sorry to be slightly political, but a little bit like Trump changes his mind at the last minute and decides to go racing after them to the banks of the Red Sea. The unfolding picture of the Old Testament, we've seen overcoming the monster. We've seen tragedy. We've seen comedy. We get a picture through the Old Testament of a voyage and return, starting really in that picture in Exodus. God's people are freed from slavery. They go out into the desert. But time and time again, they sort of turn away from God as their guide. Guide me, O thou great redeemer, pilgrim through this barren land. They follow God for a bit, but then they turn away. I am weak, but thou art mighty. Guide me with thy powerful hand. And so then they turn back to God, realizing that he's mighty, but then they turn away from God again and then they turn back to God. And if we flick on a little bit further to page 336, 336, we get the book of 1 Kings, followed by the book of 2 Kings. There's something desperately logical to that. 1 Kings, 336. We're not going to read it all, but you can take it from me that there is the record of many kings there, some of whom follow God, but most of whom turn away from God. The story of God's people is a story of voyage and return, traveling away from God and then returning to God, traveling away from God and returning to God. As people quest, let's turn over to page 553. 553. Well done if you're tracking through the Bible with me. 553 to Psalm 23. Psalm 23 will be familiar to quite a lot of us. The Lord is my shepherd. What King David was saying as he was writing this as the king of Israel is, God, we recognize that we just want to be led well. I wonder whether you've ever thought that in the last two weeks, looking at the news headlines. Lord, we just want to be led well. We want kind of what seemed like pretty basic things. We've got an entire planet that is just crying out for peace. What's going on with our leaders? It's not that we want everything. It's just that we would like everybody to have enough to be able to survive. What's going on with our leaders? We look around the world and that's what we pray for our leaders because we recognize it's a difficult job. But nevertheless, we think, actually, what a mess we're in. And shepherds in the Bible are kind of used as images of leaders, kings, prime ministers. And so we say, actually, the Lord is our shepherd. We're questing for a perfect leader. Well, the unfolding picture of the Old Testament leads God's people on that kind of ongoing journey of voyage and return, looking for a great leader. They turn away from God again and again and again. And ultimately, they are put into exile. And if we turn to page 898, towards the end of the Old Testament, 898, God's people are in exile. God has had enough, really, of them sort of like going away from him and coming back and going away. And in hoping to teach them a lesson to bring them back to himself because he still loves them, he allows them to be taken off into exile. But then we get this most amazing story of rags to riches. Literally rags, almost the kind of the most deathly type of rags, the most impoverished type of rags you can imagine. The prophet Ezekiel is led out into the desert by God and sees a valley of dry bones. Nothing apart from dry, fallen apart human skeletons.

kind of the absolute definition of lifeless rags. And the Lord says to him, Prophesy. Speak to these bones. And as he speaks to this valley of dry bones, this valley of kind of human rags, the rags of human life, what happens is that those bones become skeletons and those skeletons start taking on flesh. And as Ezekiel prophesies to the breath and the wind, God's Spirit breathes into those dry bones. And in front of Ezekiel are stood an army of thousands of living people. What the Old Testament tells us is that there is a monster that tragically we have collaborated with in a way that if it weren't so serious, would almost be comic. That we've spent our life so often travelling away from God, realising really that we want to be back with God again, looking for somebody. We realise our lives need leading and we want a good leader, but we realise when we look at our lives and look at the world around us, that it's basically tattered rags. And so we get to a point with the prophet Ezekiel, that with the prophet Ezekiel, we think we really want to live again. Is that possible? That is all a very long prelude to getting to John chapter 11, which you'd now like to turn to our passage for this morning, which is John chapter 11, which we're not going to spend quite so long in as usual. But all of that background is quite important. So John chapter 11 is on page 108, if you'd like to follow it through with me. You'll be aware that over the last few weeks, we've been looking at the I am statements of Jesus. And the reason those statements are so important is because of the way they capture in seven basic statements so much of what we've been looking at just in those last few minutes. The fact that Jesus starts off seven times to say, I am, is deliberately claiming to be God. Jesus is saying, I am God. If you remember back with Moses and Pharaoh in the Old Testament, that story that we were taking, Pharaoh was sat there thinking that he was sort of like the one puffed up with power. We can imagine lots of leaders around the world like that at the moment. I am the one kind of in control. And Moses said to God, what is your name? And Moses said, my name is I am. I haven't got any identity crisis as God. I define myself. I am. And so when Jesus starts off saying, I am, he's claiming to be God himself. I am the light of the world. The one who spoke light into being at the start. Jesus said, I am the light of the world. I am the good shepherd. I'm the leader that you've been looking for. I am the resurrection and the life, Jesus says. I am the life that you've been looking for. And so that poses us, Gina, let's have the next slide. That poses us a couple of questions. Jesus saying, I am the resurrection and the life. Well, it asks us two questions. One question about Jesus, with what justification, Jesus, are you saying I am the resurrection and the life? And it asks us a question. Are you, am I, truly alive? Do I want to be truly alive? Do I believe, do I want life before death, not just life after death? Let me just ask you that question again, because lots of people think that Christians believe in life after death. As a Christian, I do believe in life after death, but I actually believe in life before death as well. Do you believe in life before death as well as life after death? Well, let's have a look at the passage and we'll see how Jesus answers that first question. What justification have you got, really, for saying I am the resurrection and the life? Have a look at verse 17 on page 108 of the New Testament. We meet the monster of death straight away. When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days. Some people in Jesus' time believed that a person's spirit could kind of hover around their physical body for three days after somebody had physically died. But even people who believed that believed that by the fourth day, that was a done deal. This was a very dead Lazarus in front of Jesus and the mourners. The presence of the mourners further confirmed the fact that Lazarus had died. Mary and Martha lived very close to the centre of Jerusalem, so actually there were lots of people who were able to be there. They lived about two miles outside Jerusalem. If you go to the city walls of old Jerusalem even today and look up the hill, you can see the town of Bethany, the village of Bethany, just on the top of the mountains two miles in the distance. Martha rushes out when she sees Jesus coming along, verses 20 to 24. She's not entirely in the dark when it comes to who Jesus is. She's got an inkling, more than an inkling, really, of who Jesus is from looking at his life, from looking at his healing, from looking at his friendship to them as a family. She says to him, Lord, if you'd been here, my brother would not have died. She believes in the hope of the resurrection at the end of time. She understands that Jesus is the Messiah, God's special promised king, even if she doesn't understand all the implications of that yet. So she's got some understanding going on. Jesus now makes the implications of him being God plain to her. Verse 25, Jesus said to her, I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live. And everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Jesus is making two points. I am the resurrection. I am the life. I am the resurrection. So basically, he who or the person who believes in me, even though they die physically, will live, will be resurrected, will be raised to life again. And he also says, I am the life. The person who believes in me, even though they die, will live. And everyone who believes in me will never die. i.e. as soon as you start believing in Jesus, because he is light and because he is life, actually you'll have life right from that point. You can have life before death as well as life after death. Jesus is where real life is found. Well, verses 28 to 37 take us back to what we've already seen. Mary comes rushing out, Martha's sister, and she replays some of that conversation with Jesus. Verse 32, she says exactly the same thing. Lord, we know that you're life. So actually, if you'd been here, my brother would not have died. She says exactly the same thing. And the crowds have got an inkling as to who Jesus is as well because he's been going around healing people. So verse 37, they say exactly the same thing, really. Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying? Jesus, confronted with the scene, is filled with emotion. The Bible slightly gently says Jesus weeps. Actually, the way, really, that's better translated is Jesus burst into floods of tears. This is not a gentle weeping. This is an overwhelming sense of sad emotion. And in verse 38, you might see the word disturbed. Jesus is disturbed in spirit. And again, that's a little bit sort of like English kind of being sensitive with how we translate things. Basically, Jesus is properly annoyed. Jesus' spirit is so stirred to anger at the sight of death. It's so kind of antithetical to who he is. He explodes emotionally with righteous anger at death in front of him. He is a ball of quite correct emotion, deep agony of pain and loss and incredible anger at death. I wonder whether that helps some of us who, when we're thinking about our own grief, feel like those huge emotions, agony of pain and terrific anger at the sense of the injustice and the awfulness of death. Well, if 20...

Verse 37 takes us back, verse 38 takes us forward. And this partly is the answer to that question, Jesus, with what justification are you saying, I am the resurrection and the life? As we look at verse 38, we see a tomb, we see a cave, we see a stone rolled in front of the cave, we see strips of cloth. I wonder whether that reminds you of a scene that we're gonna be thinking about in a few weeks' time. In the coming week on Wednesday, do pray on Wednesday. We've got several primary schools coming up here for our Easter trail. As they go round the Easter trail, they will be seeing an interpretation of a tomb and a cave and a stone and strips of cloth. And they'll be thinking about the Easter story and Jesus' own death and resurrection. And so in verse 43 of our passage, the light of the world who spoke light and life into being just by saying, let there be light in Genesis, the one who is the good shepherd who calls his sheep by name and whose sheep hear his voice and follow him, commands Lazarus to come out and to come to life simply by speaking. Jesus doesn't need to do anything magic. The universe obeys his words and his command. And so the good shepherd King speaks and Lazarus hears his voice and Lazarus comes out of the tomb. Just moments ago, he'd been dead. Now he is fully alive. And now he knows a quality of life that surpasses anything that he's known before. Eternal life is not so much a quantity of life. People often think that eternal life is a quantity of life, life that goes on forever. Eternal life, that is part of the picture, but eternal life is a quality of life that can start now before death as well as after death. The Christian good news is that it is possible to have life before death by knowing Jesus. The implication of that is that if we don't know Jesus, although we're physically alive, actually we're not necessarily spiritually alive. Where Jesus is, there is life. The monster of death has been overcome and defeated. The tragic comedy of human sinfulness has been dealt with. The rags of mourning have been exchanged for robes of life and we can be reborn. And so I guess the question for all of us this morning is really that second question. In light of all of that, are you truly alive? Do you know Jesus? Jesus is where life truly is. So often I meet up with folk, and I guess we all do in our daily life, and think, okay, I know that you're physically alive, but actually there's something here that's not quite working. It's as if you want to come more fully alive. I meet lots of people, both in church and outside of church, who say, actually, I sort of, I believe things in my head. I've got some kind of faith in my head. I sort of, I believe in some kind of higher spiritual power, but actually that doesn't seem to make a difference to my life. Inside, I still feel that I am on a quest. Inside, I still feel that actually my life is fairly ragged, if I'm honest, and I want it to feel more steady, better led, more secure. I want to feel that I have kind of a life that is less chaotic, is more ordered. Jesus says, come to me. I am the resurrection and the life. I'm not just there for you when you die. I'm there for you before you die. I want you to believe in life before death as well as life after death. If you'd like to come alive this morning, if you'd like to pray with somebody to say, actually, I want more of that. Actually, I do feel alive, but I want that more and more. Our prayer ministry team are on hand this morning to pray with you. Julie, Gemma, I, we're all around. We'd love to speak to you after the service and so to listen to what your story is and where you might like to pray into that. There are books on the table just on the way out of the church here that talk about Christian faith. You'd be really welcome to pick one of those up totally for free. But the invitation is there this morning to come alive. Please do reach out and grab it with both hands. Amen. Thanks, Simon. Let's just pray.