Sermon ... Testimony!

a sermon preached in St. Molua's Parish Church on Sunday 27th March 2011 at 10:30

May my words and our hearts be always be acceptable to thee O Lord our strength and our redeemer. Amen

[[Intro & Greetings ]]

This morning we turn to our Gospel reading, a reading which speaks of our personal responsibility to share what God is doing in our individual lives.

growning up in Banbridge, which has a tradition of liturgical worship there is a word which never really entered in to my vocabulary untill my late teens ... it is a word which I certainly only associated with other christian traditions ... but it appears here in this reading ... the word is testimony.

It is a legal term, a term which presumes a witness to a particular event. It is a term which nobody can argue with - you either saw / heard something or you didn’t. In our particular tradition the idea of testimony doesn’t feature highly in our worship services. That said, it is something which is so vitally important in our world.

Personal story, personal encounters with God need to be shared, we need to be open to share what God means to us, we need to be open to share the hope we have in God.

One of the great things about my job is that I get to have conversations with so many different people both when I am “in uniform” or undercover! Just this week I was chatting to a member of this congregation over a cup of coffee. We struck up a conversation and we got chatting about the changes in the world over the last 10 years

Also a couple of months back I was buying a fish supper in the local chippie and once the person behind the counter saw I was a new church of Ireland minister we got talking about what the local churches were doing ... He handed me a leaflet about Christians against poverty and said he had heard that many of his customers had been in debt and he saw the change in them. The church doing practical things and telling others about them.

[[ a wee bit about CAP ]]

How we share our story, how we talk about our faith, our church is so important.

We could on one hand be so negative - consentrating on all the problems - awwh all the church is doing is looking for money, there are very few young people these days coming to church ... or whatever the negative quote of the day is

Or we could look at the age we are living in with optimism, with opportunity, using what is good in our society shouting about the love of God, the strength and purpose which Christ provides, serving those around about us, participating in random acts of kindness for people we know and those we don’t. Buying a random stranger a cup of coffee, smiling and saying hello to someone, shouting about the good stuff that is happening - CAP, diocesan appeal for food.

I began by asking about witness - what have you or I got to witness to?

We could witness to the support of this community - the love and the care

We could witness to the various groups which make up st molua’s

We could witness to the unconditional love of Jesus for everyone rich or poor, young or old

We could witness to the peace that passes all understanding

We could witness to the healing power of Jesus

The forgiveness of sins

The Samaritan woman had a choice - she could have gone back to her village and said nothing, just sat and got on with her life

I know that is what we all do day after day - I am as guilty of it as anyone else - doing nothing BUT we are called to take what we have been given and share it with others

Whoever calls themselves a Christian we are called to bring good news to whosoever we come into contact with.

I have met people who need people to speak truth into their lives, speaking about God, about church, about community. In a world which knows much secularism, loneliness, depression. We need to be people telling a different story - a story of hope, purpose, healing and eternal life.

Let us pray.