TRANSCRIPT FROM SUNDAY 19th JANUARY 2003
Rob's talk at the three Special Services
I would like to share a few thoughts with us. I just want to acknowledge this morning, the family. I want to acknowledge that there are police colleagues here of Steve’s and I think it’s right to acknowledge those who were with him on that fateful day and those who also were injured and those who came away without injury, the shock and the horror it’s been to every single one of them, I want to acknowledge them as well and pray for those who still suffer from wounds that they, indeed, will find healing.
I want to acknowledge all friends as well for whom this has been a devastating loss and I know that, when I received the news, Marion and I with others from Poynton were at a conference in Derbyshire. And I suppose like most of us, we just sat down when the phone call came through and I said, “Look I’m going to phone back in five minutes because I don’t think this can be true”. And I just sat and the world came to a stop, and that’s much more so for others, but I’m with us in the grief.
It’s a real privilege for Mark and myself to be able to lead these times and when the funeral comes, because it’s not like leading something for someone you didn’t know, but someone you know personally and so very well. Lesley was Administrative Secretary in this church for many years and worked alongside me and that was a great privilege, so it’s a very keen moment for me as well as everybody else. And I suppose questions form in people’s minds and hearts and it’s that that I would really like to grip, just for a few moments.
Let me share these few thoughts. I don’t think you give a title to a few thoughts but I wanted to because I wonder if it’s the kind of question that is forming in people’s minds. I want to say immediately that to these questions I am going to ask, I do not have any answers that will satisfy everybody. Indeed I have no real definitive answers, but I would like to give a few guidelines and I would like to sum it all up. I’m being very vernacular when I speak like this, but I want to sum it up under a question and this is the question, “Okay God, so what were you up to? When it comes to the events of Tuesday, Okay God, so what were you up to?”
Under that title, I want to ask three other questions. “Why the good ‘uns and the young ‘uns?” Second question, “Where were you God?” Third question is, “So is it worth living for you God?
I want to ask those questions because I believe in there lies reality. Because too often we give simple answers and particularly Christians can sometimes be guilty of saying ‘Oh of course in God it is wonderful and it will work out well’. I have no doubt that God will work things out well, but we need to take great note of human grief, we need to take great note of where there may be anger, we need to take great note of the fact that we cannot answer these questions, but they spring to us whether we like it or not, whether we have a Christian faith or not. We are all the same people and the questions can spring.
Why the good ‘uns and the young ‘uns?
That came home to me when, as you know, we’ve been facing much of the press and media this week. One of the newspaper Editors, who will remain nameless, asked one of the questions over a telephone interview that was an obvious one, “Why does it seem that God takes the good ones and the young ones and leaves the (beep, beep) ones?” I think they forgot they were speaking to the Minister in a Church Office! Nevertheless, I won’t repeat the words, but the sentiment was there, why does He seem to take the good ones and the young ones?
I don’t know how to answer that but I’ve got a few guidelines. I think very simply this, we all live in the same world, good or bad. We live in a world that finds itself at the moment racked by warfare internationally, racked by all sorts of problems, locally and nationally, and some of the good ones do die and some of the bad ones die as well. Sometimes the good ones live and some of the bad ones live. Sometimes the young ones die and the old ones die. Sometimes and usually the young ones live and the old ones sometimes live on. Not everybody has cancer, some do and some don’t. Not everybody has a car accident, some do some don’t. Not everybody has their marriage fall apart, some do some don’t. Not everybody has their children causing them anguish and grief as they seem to go away from family values, some do, some don’t.
We live all of us, whether we love God or we don’t know God, in the same world with the same problems, every single one of us. Just imagine for a moment if all those who love God were immune from suffering, it would be us and them. It would be like a kind of cosmic BUPA, a kind of cosmic Private Patient’s Plan, where you pay something in faithfully and if you pay in you get far better support from a private hospital if you need it. As if God has got a plan so that, if you pay in enough righteousness and good deeds and enough religiosity, somehow or other when it comes to suffering God will actually keep you from that when everybody else has to pay and suffer because they haven’t paid in to the plan. It’s not like that, God hasn’t got queues of goodness and badness, God loves every single person the same and we live with the same effects of a world that is sinful and selfish and gone against God. And we don’t want people to find faith in God because they will be immune from suffering. They are not immune, we are not. Steve wasn’t, in other words nobody in his family is and none of us here today are.
And anyway, if we are talking about somebody who was good let me just bring a note of honesty, I’m sure Steve wouldn’t mind this. He wasn’t perfect. Was he Lesley? He wasn’t perfect. He was great, but he had weaknesses and strengths, he spoke to me about some of them. Occasionally, he played the wrong note on the trumpet and everybody knew it! He wasn’t perfect. Yes, he was a great man and had integrity, thorough integrity. But if we were to say that if you were good, God looked after you how good would you have to be? Well I suppose you’d have to say that you had to be perfect, otherwise where’s the pass mark? So why the good ones and the young ones? Well, because simply we all live with that sense of danger and risk in this world today, whether we are good, bad, young, old, whether we love God or we don’t. Simple guidelines.
Second question is this. “Answer me this God, where were you on Tuesday?”
Well I believe there is a very simple but profound answer to that question. I believe God’s answer would be this, “I was there and I felt the whole thing”. You see I said before we are not immune from suffering. We are not saved from suffering, but we are safe through suffering. In other words, God holds our hand. In that well known Psalm, Psalm 23, there’s that well known verse, “Yes though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for you are with me, your rod and staff they comfort me”. God was with Steve; God was with every single one of those police officers at that time. God was there in that place. But as I’ve spoken before, we are not immune from suffering. God does not come down and stop everything. God was there, holding Steve’s hand.
You might say, “Well that’s all very well for you to say that God was there, that still sounds kind of jargony. If God was there, why didn’t he just stop it?” Let me ask a question. If God was to stop suffering, what suffering would he stop? Would he stop people starving in Africa, yes maybe. Would he stop what happened to Steve, yes maybe. Would he stop when we fall over and break our leg, yes maybe. Would he stop it when we’ve got a cold or a headache, yes maybe. In other words if we begin saying when does God stop suffering, when does he stop stopping? At what point does he do it? At what point does he step in? If he steps in for one but not another isn’t that totally unfair? So when we ask does God stop suffering, we have to actually say, God saves us through suffering. Steve knew his God and knew his God I guess right at that very moment because God was there with him. God is there with Lesley and the children. I’ve seen what the children have written in the books, what they wrote on the cards, on the flowers, what Lesley has said to me and written. Their hope is in God. They’re saying we will see Daddy; I will see my husband; Robin and Chris, we will see our son again in heaven! Because God is there with the family now, they are not on their own, they are not bereft, it’s not just suffering alone. There is a sense of God being there, he walks with us.
And anyway, let me ask one more little question under this main one. Wasn’t God there with a man? Now I don’t understand all the details, please forgive me some of you were much closer than I was but, as I understand, Steve stepping into that situation, I believe from what I hear, stopped probably what could have been far worse results. Don’t you think that is God being with a man? Giving him the braveness to stand in the line of duty and face what came his way. I would say that was God with a man 120 % actually. God was there. And by the way, it reminds me of another man 2000 years ago who stepped into a situation and saved people from far worse results. I speak of Jesus Christ, who as we remember at Easter, died on a cross in order that we might not face the punishment that is due to us because we’ve walked away from God. It reminds me of 2000 years ago, that the Jesus that Steve loved actually did the whole thing, that Steve has done in that one day, for all of us.
My final question. “So is it worth living for God then?”
“If this kind of thing could happen even to a Christian, is it worth living for God?” Well, you work it out for yourself. Look at the evidence. Look at Steve’s integrity. He was the same thing at work, as he was at home, as he was in the Church. Work it out for yourself. Look at the man, look at his zest for life, look at the way he loved his wife and his children, his family. The way he lived for God as a police officer and here at church, look at his life, work it out for yourselves. You don’t need me to tell you, the evidence shouts. Is God worth living for? Most definitely. His passion, his zest for living, his sense of humour, even his way of teasing, which was never nasty, but always fun and always sought to rescue you if you felt you’d been too gullible! Of course the evidence is there. Hope for the future, hope for the future because we will see Steve again one day. Those that love Jesus will live with him forever and ever when he comes back again.
Great hope.
It reminds me of just one more person. At twelve minutes past three on January 8th, 1956, five missionaries were found on the banks of the Curaray River in Ecuador, they were missionaries that had taken the Gospel to the Aucas. They were found killed, not with knives but with spears. They gave their lives for Jesus Christ. One of them, Nate Saint, the pilot, and I’ll never forget these words, and I know Steve would echo them absolutely - this is what Nate Saint said, sometime before he died, little knowing what was going to happen, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose”. Jesus said that those who find their lives (meaning in a kind of selfish way) will lose them, but those who lose their lives, for his sake, will find them. Steve has found his life now with his Lord Jesus and his Father in heaven.
The question that I will finish on is a simple one, what is my response? What is your response? We can’t watch a man of faith do what he did and go away as if nothing has happened. We must ask the question, if Steve believed that strongly in God, there must be something in it. I cannot possibly go without thinking about it. May God be with you. May God help you to answer the questions.
Rev. Rob White, 19th January 2003
With her children beside her, Lesley Oake stood up and spoke to 300 people at the end of the first of three services at PBC.
She said: "I want you to know that this God is real and that he is sustaining me. I've had a most fantastic life with my husband and I don't have any regrets. Now all these memories are helping me.
"We had a super marriage and we've got a super family. We are a good close unit."
Then, in a message to the community, she urged others to look at their own relationships.
"For every husband and wife to tell each other every single day that they love each other - because that's what we did - it gives you no end of joy."