Urban Vineyard

In this first sermon in our new series, Jonathan introduces the idea of prayer as 'opening' to the God who is already speaking. Following David Benner and Eugene Peterson, he looks at the promise of prayer as a means for us to unite our lives to God, not as a means of religious achievement, but as a way of becoming human.

Are humans merely flesh and blood or is there a vital part of us that can't be measured by microscope and test-tube? People all over the world and right across the great span of human history have unanimously claimed that we are more than the sum of our physical parts; we are also spiritual. However, beyond that claim any agreement breaks down and quickly splinters into a million different 'spiritualities,' some which elevate matter over spirit and others which elevate spirit over matter. In all such 'spiritualities' and religions, all we find are broken signposts which hint at something true but which lead us around in circles. So, what does the Bible have say about how body and spirit work? And even more particularly, what does the life of Jesus tell us about true spirituality? In this sermon, Lloyd makes the case that God has, from the beginning, always intended heaven and earth, body and spirit, to function as an integrative whole. Where death severs this unity, Jesus has come to restore us to wholeness, not by making us 'super-spiritual' people who float above the material world, but by bringing heaven and earth together in his body and ours.

Jonathan continues our series on finding our way in the wilderness, leaving behind broken signposts, and finding our way with Jesus. In this sermon, Jonathan looks at the longing for truth and the problem with our inability to secure it. Using the Gospel of John, he shows that Jesus' ministry was centred on revealing truth and casting out lies. Jesus both embodies truth as its source and pure expression, but he also challenges lies that lead to death. For us, we are invited to follow Jesus and to establish ourselves in his truth. Jonathan closes the sermon with a lectio divina (sacred reading) from Jeremiah 17 to help us hear God's voice inviting us to plant ourselves in truth again.

In this second sermon in our Lenten series on broken signposts, John Peachy offers us wisdom on the topic of freedom. Freedom is a universal longing, but as the story of the Bible and the story of human history goes, we don't often know what to do with it. Framed in the negative ("freedom from" rather than "freedom for") we tend to default to pleasure seeking. This, ironically, leads us into a different kind of slavery – slavery to our disordered desires. But God has given us a glowing neon sign in the desert – first in the form of the passover meal, and then in its fulfilment in the cross of Jesus. What we discover, as we look to Jesus, is that our longing for true freedom can only be met as we open our hands and hearts to receive his guidance and lordship. "But when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another." – 2 Corinthians 3:16-18

Lent is an invitation to 40 days in the wilderness with Jesus. The wilderness is a place of simplicity and stripping away. In the wilderness we carry only what is essential to our survival and we journey beyond what is familiar and comfortable. The wilderness is also a place of disorientation and reorientation – where the easy pathways are obscured and where we must learn to navigate by different means. This Lent, at Urban, we are reorienting our lives toward Jesus because we believe he has everything we need. We recognise that our hearts, like all hearts, long for truth, beauty, love, justice, power, freedom, and a deeply grounded spirituality but that these things are hard to come by. Indeed, following the argument laid out in NT Wright's 2020 book "Broken Signposts: How Christianity Makes Sense of the World" we recognise that these seven longings of the heart are fundamentally out of reach. Try as we may to navigate our way toward them, we find that the path is marked only by broken signposts. But as we turn to Jesus and journey with him to the cross, we come to see, in a shocking way, that in this most unexpected person and place, love, truth, beauty, justice, freedom, power and true spirituality are finally and fully put on display. Lent invites us to redirect the longing of our heart away from broken pathways and broken signposts, toward Jesus, the only one in whom our hearts find their true rest.