Sermon ideas

• Popular perceptions of the commandments are to do with ‘thou shalt not’. Jesus’ summary of the law, the Shema, with which every synagogue service begins, affirms that love is at the centre of Jewish and Christian belief and practice. These words provided an inspiration, and then a framework, for some of the great social reform movements in Britain in the nineteenth century – the abolition of slavery, prison reform and the provision of universal elementary education – and also the part played by the churches in today’s food banks and night shelters.
• Jesus enjoys the rabbinic practice of arguing over the interpretation of Scripture and is unafraid to ask hard questions of the text before him. This is central to Jewish traditions of study, depicted well in Barbra Streisand’s film  Yentl, about a young woman who poses as a boy in order to study the Talmud. The opening song begins with the words, ‘There’s not a morning I begin without a thousand questions running through my mind…’. ? 
• The ‘Son of David’ was imagined by Jesus’ contemporaries as a military figure, who would win freedom from foreign forces. However, Jesus, as David’s Lord, is a figure of vulnerable, self-giving love, not violence. This understanding, along with the convoluted line of deduction, challenges simplistic and preconceived notions of how God makes himself known in the world.
• Jesus unequivocally locates the foundation of holy living in loving God and loving your neighbour, but other strands of belief are open to investigation and interpretation. He demonstrates how questioning and wrestling with knotty problems of Scripture enriches faith. Not knowing a clear-cut answer to everything does not denote ignorance or lack of faith, but invites the Spirit to bring understanding. ?
• Love is at the very heart of the gospel and we see this worked out in the very non-religious context in Paul’s evangelisation of the Thessalonian leather workers. Paul makes no claim to Scripture among these pagan labourers; he needs to embody and enable the love of God and love of neighbour that Jesus proclaims without reference to a religious tradition they did not share. Their community is a work-based group of low-paid labourers living in communal lodgings. This freshest of expressions of church was an intimate community that discovered together, day by day, what it meant to live with the love of Christ, demonstrated by another manual labourer, Paul the tent maker, who lived among them ‘like a nurse tenderly caring for her own children’. Paul lived the gospel as much as he preached it, and did so in communities with no historical predisposition towards the values of the gospel. How might his Thessalonian experiences shape our proclamation of the gospel in our ‘post-Christian’ society?