Christian Pathway

As I speak to you today our country is filled with angry people doing senseless damage  ransacking shops and hotels, in one case full of nurses, looting greggs,  I saw an infant school had been damaged, mosques guarded by police, ordinary peoples livelihoods wrecked.  Community libraries ransacked,  and so on , all of which does nothing.


Looting Greggs  is a symptom , its emptiness and frustration, anger venting on our streets. 

To ransack an infant school or a kebab shop to get yourself into a place where that seems like a thing that may have a result apart from Jail requires something missing.

These are symptoms, not the cause

I personally think the problems go much deeper than simply the ones these people call out as the reasons in quote they espouse.

We as Christians are taught to love one another as we love ourselves. Jesus held up the immigrant, the person from another land, another religion when he held up a Samaritan as the hero of the story.   He anonymized the victim meaning that could be anyone from anywhere that needed our love.

The Samaritan is the stranger from a strange land helping an anonymous victim.  This is the outsider being held up as an example by Jesus. Excessive altruism as Martin Luther king said

This excessive altruism , love for all comes from the holy spirit, and is imbued on those that know Jesus.  This is the bread of life.

The bread that feeds that empty space that can only be filled by his love. People that know his love cannot act are not angry and frustrated enough to act in such a senseless and barbaric way.

When we don’t have him in our lives we fill it with stuff, or physical excitement, anger, or drugs, consumer goods, or alcohol , all seeking to fill the void that only he can fill.  These things become the numbing agent, for the emptiness, however they quickly come back, and this repeated cycle breeds frustration.

This is precisely what he meant by “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

He was not meaning a tiger loaf from Tesco’s.  The hunger and thirst that these people have never had fulfilled, the fulfilment  of discovering the unabated love of jesus. the love they have never felt, the thirst they have for the filling of the emptiness of their lives has gone on for so long its become like an open sore.

The attempts the futile attempts to fill it lead to frustration and anger as each new try ends in failure. Because they are looking to fill a spiritual and emotional gap with things you can buy or touch or  you can blame for its absence.

Only Jesus love the maker of everything can fill that space. Jesus says God is love and everyone that knows love knows God.   Then I abide in them and they abide in me.

They have long ago stopped listening to that still small voice that contradicts the lessons of a consumer society.  Every advert tells us we need things to avoid the emptiness,  they drive fear into our lives by telling us that unless we buy X or Y we will be exposed, or lacking, or jealous or humiliated.

So we spend our hard earned cash on stuff that goes in the bin a week later, with that emptiness made even more real by the fact this new thing didn’t fill it. 

This frustration is what you saw in our streets last week, yes they may think they have had other drivers, but there’s clearly something missing in their lives when you get to a point where you smash up a kebab shop or a school or a Greggs, or a library.  This mindless violence is of the enemy, the thing that is the void, the empty space that is left when we don’t know the bread of life.

this makes our mission and the mission of the church so vital, to let people know where the thing that’s missing can be filled, the purpose and context it puts our lives into when we know him. Society has forgotten and we need to remind them

It’s pretty clear that every person that follows Jesus teaching has to reject these acts entirely and whatever motive lay behind it. We are here to promote love to all.

The love that fills that void. The love that filled that void, Jesus called bread, the thing that satiates the hunger we feel without it.

So when you go about your daily lives and you hear people trying to justify hate, thinking that will fill the void of hate they feel.

Then know your job is to say to them , nothings going to fill that void except love, and if you want a Christian nation that is what should fill that void because god is love.

Anger and emptiness caused the scenes we have seen this week. Some of them call themselves patriots.

We are all patriots in this room today, but patriots of a different nation , of the kingdom of God.   The name the first Christians called themselves translates to “resident alien” that is resident and contributing in a nation but owing ultimate fealty to another lord. So we have to listen to his voice, not the voice of anger. Become agents of his love.

Jesus is love and the antidote to emptiness and the only cure to the illness that our society exhibits when it acts like that. The bread that brings love and fills the hunger nothing on this earth can satiate.

we have to spread that love, and fill that void with our lord as best we can.