Gathered together in freedom

It’s good to welcome everyone to our worship today and to give a special welcome to friends from St Luke’s as our two churches once again get together to share worship.  It begs a couple of questions.  What’s the point of getting together to worship?

It’s a bit like different parts of a family getting together.  Each of our churches is made up of a different set of people.  We do things differently.  We think differently.  We have a different history behind us.  But we share one faith in Jesus Christ as our Lord and Saviour and we are part of the one church that is his body not just on earth but here in this part of Cheltenham.  That makes it important to get to know each other, to share in different ways and above all to sense we have the same mission to serve and make real the love of Christ in our community.

So, in the interests of getting to know one another let me tell you a little bit about Highbury.  In the early 1800’s there was a real movement of the Spirit throughout the land and in many, many churches to spread the Christian faith.  Among those who shared that passion were some who belonged to Highbury Congregational College in Islington in North London.  At the time new towns were springing up in different parts of the country and they wanted to plant churches in those new developments.  By 1827 Cheltenham was rapidly growing and ripe for church planting.  So it was that they teamed up with well-established Congregational churches in Stroud and Painswick to plant a church here in Cheltenham.

They purchased a church building that had been put up about fifteen years before but the church congregation had come to nought.  It was on what is now Grosvenor Street – with Cheltenham’s Open Door at one end and Malham’s auction house at the other.

With preachers riding over on horse back form Painswick and from Stroud services were held Sunday by Sunday and the building took on the name of the college back in Islington – it was known as Highbury Chapel.

That gives rise to the question – when’s a chapel not a chapel?  When it becomes a church.

After they had been holding services for five years there came a moment when about a dozen people who were coming regularly felt ready to make a commitment to each other, share their own confession of faith in God and Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour and enter into partnership with each other to form a Church.  They called in Highbury Congregational Church.

What they did is right at the heart of our understanding of what a church is.  Our first records don’t actually use the word.  But lots of churches do.  They made a covenant with each other.  What bound them together as a church family was a sense of partnership in a shared faith, a shared gospel, a shared mission and a shared vision.

They shared in a ‘covenant’ together.

That goes right to the heart of the Bible story and what it means to be the people of God in God’s world.

From the very outset the people of God are in a partnership with each other, in a partnership with God, with a shared faith, a shared message, a shared mission and a shared vision.

Last year at Highbury we had a focus on prayer.  This year we have a focus on the Bible.  A good number of us are following a Bible reading plan with the IBRA and using Bible reading notes called Fresh From the Word.

This week we have been reading through the Ten Commandments.  I can remember at school committing them to memory from the Authorised Version of Exodus 20.  I couldn’t recite that now – but I do sometimes try to go through the 10 and get them in the right order!

Two things struck me in reading through those commandments one by one over the last few days in Deuteronomy 5.

First, the commandments are an expression of God’s covenant with his people.

Hear, O Israel, the statutes and ordinances that I am addressing to you today; you shall learn them and observe them diligently. 2The Lord our God made a covenant with us at Horeb.

God’s covenant is not just a historical thing - what is significant here is that the covenant partnership God makes is a living thing made with living people –

3Not with our ancestors did the Lord make this covenant, but with us, who are all of us here alive today.

That for me is the most exciting thing of all about thinking of Church as a covenant partnership.  The partnership we are in is not a human one – it’s a partnership that’s initiated by God – and it is a living partnership as God is in a relationship with each one of us today.

We shouldn’t think of the 10 commandments as way to gain points and gain favour with God – they are simply the expression of that partnership God delights in having with us, a partnership that draws us together with each other too.

The whole story of the Old Testament is the story of God’s wonderful partnership with his people in covenant together.  And that reaches its climax with the new covenant that Jesus ushers in, written on the heart, deep within us.  A covenant partnership.  And again, the commandments are not a means of winning favour with God, keeping on the right side of God, they are an expression of that partnership.

10 2 1 The ten commandments are summed up in 2 – Love God, love your neighbour.  The two are summed up in one.  Do to others as you would have others do to you.  And they all boil down to a new commandment ‘that you love one another’.  One word emerges – love.

That’s the first thing that comes home to me – that the commandments are an expression of that wonderful living partnership we have with God.

And the second – is that they are not a burden.  They are not a burden because they are for people who are free.  That’s a wonderful insight for us all.  It’s in the context of the commandment about observing the Sabbath day that this becomes important …

15Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day.

The commandments give a framework for people who are free to live their freedom to the full.  That’s why there is a rhythm to life that calls for a breathing space – the value of the Sabbath day in that rhythm of activity.

Jennifer Smith in our IBRA notes quotes Walter Breugemann, an Old Tesatment scholar, who describes Sabbath-keeping as an act of cultural-political resistance.  “His observation is that the culture of twenty-first-century Western life treats people like machines to be worked and used, we become commodities to be traded and exploited in a never-ending 24 hour news and economic cycle that prevents us from being present to each other, let alone to God.”

Treasure the Sabbath day’s rest – or campaign for it – it’s what sets you free!

And freedom is at the heart of the partnership Christ draws us into.  Don’t allow the commandments to become a straitjacket – instead see them as an expression of a covenant partnership and see them as an expression of the freedom God gives us all – a freedom that has a framework that sets us free.

And for us as a church family at Highbury that's important too.  We are sometimes described as a 'Free Church'.  For us that means that we are free from the state as we believe in a separation of church and state, we are free from bishops, councils and synods as we gather together in the presence of God in Christ to shape all that we do together.

So covenanted together in a partnership with each other and a partnership with God we are free in Christ to follow the guiding of the Spirit in shaping all we do as a Church family.  A selection of verses from Galatians 5 and 6 captures that spirit of freedom.

For freedom Christ has set us free.

Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.

For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters;

only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence,

but through love become slaves to one another.

For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment,

‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’

If, however, you bite and devour one another,

take care that you are not consumed by one another.

By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is

love, joy,

peace, patience,

kindness, generosity,

faithfulness, gentleness,

and self-control.

There is no law against such things.

And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.

If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit.

Let us not become conceited, competing against one another, envying one another.

Bear one another’s burdens,

and in this way you will fulfil the law of Christ.

That covenant partnership that makes us church and the commandments that are an expression of that covenant partnership?

That framework for freedom that boils down to love that’s prepared to bear one another’s burdens?

None of it is possible in our own strength.  Let’s not think of the commandments as something to struggle with: let’s think of them as the out-working of the presence of God within us, as the fruit of the Holy Spirit.

love, joy,

peace, patience,

kindness, generosity,

faithfulness, gentleness,

and self-control.