Thank you for your welcome and thank you for the invitation to share this Team Birthday Sunday with you. It seems to me that a birthday isn’t an end in itself but a milestone on an ongoing journey. I want to say something about that journey and about the way in which, as Christian people, we make progress on that journey.

In these weeks of Easter we hear readings from the early chapters of the Acts of the Apostles. We hear of some of the ways in which the resurrection empowered the apostles and helped to develop the early church. Clearly there is an ongoing challenge to us to model ourselves on the spirit-filled apostles on our Christian journey.  They thought that the events of Good Friday were the end of the story. They were hiding in fear until they discovered that Good Friday was a milestone and that Christ was alive. The journey, far from ending, had just begun. From a collection of frightened people, one of whom had even denied knowing Jesus, the apostles grew into a force to be reckoned with. They felt called by Christ not to go to church but to be church.

They were the nucleus of the Kingdom of God which came into being with the coming of Jesus. They had been trained by him in discipleship, and given the task of spreading the good news throughout the whole world.  The Kingdom of God had now come and they were no longer a collection of timid, fearful people, but men who were conscious of the power of the spirit, which they had never known like this before.

We heard this morning about the presence of the Holy Spirit amongst all those who heard Peter speaking [Acts 10:44–48]. The church wasn’t sitting on its resurrection laurels – it was moving on. It was moving on because of the new relationship that they felt they had with God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

The Church can never just stay as it is. The Church is always moving – moving onwards from where we are to where God is calling us to be. We will never get there because there is always another challenge round the corner, there is always more work to be done for the gospel.  As those chosen and called by God, we have a relationship with him. As we heard in our gospel reading [John 15:9–17] it is based on love. God loves us and, in his love, he created us. Jesus issues the command that we are to love one another, and to remain in his love, because he has acted out and will act out the greatest thing that love can do. He has appointed us to go and bear fruit.

So we have to ask ourselves how, in the light of that relationship, we should live our lives. Our calling – our vocation – is not that we should just ‘do a little bit’ for God – it is that we should live our whole lives in response to his call. This whole life activity involves all that we are and all that we have. We must see it in the context of relationship.

The aspect of this that we find most difficult to handle is the giving of our money to fund God’s mission through the Church. We often narrow this down to giving a bit to the Church – but our calling is to see all our wealth, all our money, all our possessions as coming from God and to be used in the way that he wants us to use them.  George Carey, the former archbishop of Canterbury, once said,

“The first question to ask is not – how much do I need to give? But, how can my giving reflect something of God’s love for me?”

That puts these seemingly secular things into their rightful, spiritual context. If we call ourselves disciples of Christ then we must accept the discipline of the master in our whole lives. And why should we give? Quite simply because those who have known the love of God can do nothing else.

But we live in a largely secular world and we allow the ways of the world to spill over into our understanding of the ways in which we handle our wealth and possessions and our money. We live in a consumerist world where we expect to get what we pay for and so we treat the church in the same way. We make our contribution as if we are buying ourselves something from the church.  The Archbishop of York put this attitude into context in his hard-hitting inauguration sermon last year when he said:

“The scandal of the church is that the Christ-event is no longer life-changing, it has become life-enhancing. We’ve lost the power and joy that makes real disciples, and we’ve become consumers of religion and not disciples of Jesus Christ.”

We are on a journey of discipleship:

• from being a part of a church organisation to being a part of the body of Christ

• from being consumers of religion to being disciples

• from running our lives according to the ways of the world to running our lives according to Kingdom values

• from struggling to keep up with the Jones’s to becoming Christ-like.

And the way we give of ourselves in love and service – and the way we give our money – is a part of the way that we make progress on this journey.  The journey starts with our baptism and we heard in our reading today about the importance that Peter gives to baptism, which he says we cannot withhold from those who have received the Holy Spirit. 

There is a story about the Vikings who invaded England over a thousand years ago. Although they often seem to have maintained their beliefs throughout the periods of their raiding, there was considerable pressure to convert to Christianity if they wished to have more peaceful relations with the Christians. So they were baptised but they kept their sword hand out of the water because, despite their conversion to Christianity, they were still going to raid and pillage because that’s what Vikings did!  Today, when we are baptised, do we hold our wallets and purses out of the water – because we don’t want them converted?!

If we cut corners in the way we live our lives, then we are not becoming the people that God is calling us to be. A part of the way that we develop is the way we live our life in response to that relationship that we have with God.  Let me tell you a story about a builder to illustrate this:  a rich man wanted to do something good and so he found a poor builder who had fallen on hard times.  He gave the builder the plans of a huge mansion and asked him to build it on a plot of land close by.  The rich man asked the builder to spare no expense, and to use the finest materials.  He said he was going away for a time and hoped that the house would be finished by the time he got back.

The builder saw his opportunity.  Others would skimp on the materials and the craftsmanship, so why shouldn’t he?  That way he could make more profit for himself and be able to look after his family better.  So he used cheap materials, he employed inexperienced labour and covered their mistakes with artex, and rubbery filler and paint.  But when the rich man came back, the house was finished and the builder handed over the keys.  “I’m glad it’s finished,” said the rich man and he handed the keys back to the builder.  “Here are the keys.  They’re yours.  I had you build that house for yourself.  You and your family are to live in it.”

And that is the parable of life.  We’re building the houses we live in for the rest of our lives.  Our character, our habits, our interests, our generosity, the things we enjoy, these are built day by day.  And the way we use and give of all the things we have is, according to Jesus, a determining factor in how the house is to be finished.  That makes my giving, then, a real privilege. As we give of the bounty and the gifts we have from God, we make ourselves more and more into the kind of people God wants us to be. 

Faced with a future in which the challenges and opportunities for the gospel are likely to be unprecedented, we must use its own best endeavours of heart and mind, our God-given gifts of imagination, skill, courage, committed discipleship, financial resources to fulfil God’s mission here for the future.  So we need to be inspired by the power of the resurrection and the power of the Spirit to stand up and be counted for our faith. We need to share the liveliness of the early Church and their faith and trust in God that helped them to believe that they could achieve what God was calling them to do.  Why has God called us? It is not because we are the best Christians. It is because he feels that we can be fashioned into his followers – his disciples – and that we can be members of his body here on earth.

As we become his disciples we move from where we are to where God is calling us to be. As we make progress we find ourselves looking less on the Church as an organisation that we’re a member of to looking at Christ and seeking to be like him in all that we do – with the giving of ourselves and the giving of our money.  I pray that may be your experience as you move forward from another Team Birthday on your journey of discipleship.