Are there any perks that come with being a Christian, with following Jesus?

If there are, Paul in our first reading today makes clear that they have nothing to do with having an easy, comfortable, or luxurious life.

He himself, one of the greatest thinkers of his time, could easily have occupied a professor’s chair in Jerusalem, if not in the big academic centres of his time, Athens or Alexandria, but instead, Paul has a rather different life.

How does he describe his life?

He writes that his following of Jesus, his single-minded dedication to his Lord and Saviour, leads him through afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labours, sleepless nights, hunger.

Imagine putting that on an invitation to an Alpha Course! Imagine telling someone who comes to church for the first time that that’s the kind of life they may be signing up for.

But there are two big points of nuance to put with this: Such sufferings may happen to us as a consequence of following Jesus, but we are not called to seek out suffering and persecution.

And the second nuance is that suffering, struggling, beatings, are not an aim in themselves, and they are not in themselves the marks of a good Christian. Maybe they will be part of our journey, but it is not the aim of the Christian life to always have a terrible time and be persecuted and suffering.

Paul talks about these struggles for a very different reason.

His point is that especially through suffering and struggling, people are able to see that Paul is genuine, and a genuine apostle of Jesus. Through suffering especially people see in Paul the purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, truthful speech and the power of God. Because Paul’s life is built on Jesus Christ and not on any ease, comfort, or luxury in this life, he can show love, joy, peace not only in good times, but also in bad times.

It is in suffering and struggling that the foundations of our life are especially shown. It is then that Christians can show that their hope, their life, is built on something that money cannot buy, but is grounded in Jesus Christ, that He is our Rock in times of trouble, that his love is our anchor in the storm, as we sang earlier. Don’t get me wrong, this does not mean we don’t struggle or question God about what’s happening. Every Christian going through suffering experiences the question the disciples asked in our Gospel reading: ‘Master, do you not care that we are perishing?’ We can pray that prayer.

But in the midst of that, the aim of the Christian life is to live in that joy, that purity, that kindness, that holiness and love, regardless of what happens in our life, because we live life as followers of Jesus and citizens of heaven for whom the stay on this earth is temporary, until we are home with God.

Christians don’t necessarily have an easier life than others, but they live their life differently, and in the rest of this sermon I want to talk about three such persons.

It was a strange week for us at St Nicolas, as we bade farewell to two dear friends and sisters in Christ. They were both great women of faith, women of prayer, Diana and Gladys, and even though I’ve only been here for a very brief time, I have seen how their faith and their faithfulness both in good times and bad times made such a difference in their families, among their friends, here at St Nicolas and in this village, and I want to very briefly say something about them. 

On Monday we buried Diana. Many of us are aware how the last year in her life was marked by pain and suffering, which she carried with the patience and holiness Paul was talking about. And just two months before she passed away, she sent me an email asking me if I had heard of Lee Abbey in Devon, told me that she gave her life to Christ there at age 13, and whether the young at the church would be interested in going there. Even then, when she herself was suffering so much, her focus was on others and on the young people in our church and village, and helping them to find the love and joy that only Jesus can bring.

And on Wednesday, we buried Gladys, another woman of great faith. When I visited her in the hospital a couple of months ago, I was struck by how grateful she was for everything, and for the nurses, and for family and friends who took such great care of her. I am sure that any nurse who went through a difficult day was greatly encouraged by this wonderful, warm and grateful woman who when struggling herself was talking mostly about how kind and good everyone around her was.

And there is another person that has been a lot on my mind in the last few weeks, perhaps because it’s almost a year since his passing, perhaps because we’ve named our daughter Astrid after him by the initials of her middle names that spell DJ. Many of you know that my dear brother DJ died last summer just after I arrived at St Nicolas, after a year and a half battle with cancer. Never complaining, making the most of every day he had, praying for a miracle and trusting in God through all the pain, he continued to trust in God and faithfully held on to Jesus even when he knew he would die at the unfair age of 44 and leave behind a wife and three young daughters. Even with all that, in my last one-on-one conversation with him, only three days before he died, he took a great interest in my move to Cranleigh and in my difficulties and struggles.

My brother’s memorial stone says that he is now at home with God, the faith in which he lived and died, and the faith in which Gladys and Diana lived and died. It is the faith that means they will now live for ever and ever. 

I am sure you all have your own examples. Of people who showed that purity, that holiness, that love, that joy in good times and in bad times. People who showed that their life was not built on anything in this world, but on Jesus Christ.

At a funeral I wonder always what kind of person I am and what kind of person I would like to be. And isn’t the life, the character, the person of these three people, four if we include Paul, far more attractive and meaningful to us than anything that an easy, comfortable and luxurious life can offer to us?

May we follow Jesus as they have done before us, and may we after the blessing and struggles, the joys and the sorrows of our own lives be reunited with them when we ourselves will be home with God.

Amen.