Seeking Fame and Finding Faith (sermon transcript HMP Stafford 23/09/18)

HMP Stafford 23/09/18

Think back to the 1980’s, big hair, leg warmers, loud pumping music and this song…

Luke 10. 1-20. (excluding verses 13-15)

I got more in me
And you can set it free
I can catch the moon in my hand
Don't you know who I am

Remember my name, fame

I'm gonna live forever
I'm gonna learn how to fly, high

I feel it comin' together
People will see me and cry, fame
I'm gonna make it to heaven
Light up the sky like a flame, fame
I'm gonna live forever
Baby, remember my name

These are some of the words from the lead song of the 1980 film ‘Fame’ that later spawned a TV series running from 1982 – 1987.

The film was based around students at the New York Academy of Performing Arts.

As well as lots of singing and dancing the film also portrayed the angst and struggles of adolescence.

One of those is based around being known and hopefully liked as well.

It is about finding a place in the world, a time of growing up physically and also growing away from parents.

For some it can also be a time of great angst as the reality of your mortality begins to develop – hence remember my name.

Back track some twenty years earlier and to the UK and you would find me going through this type of adolescent angst.

A growing awareness that no matter what I did, or where I went, that one day I was going to die.

I knew something of death as my own father was killed in a road traffic accident shortly after my sixth birthday.

Following the custom of the time my father was laid out in the front room of our council home on the Kirkholt Estate in Rochdale, Lancashire.

The image that lived with me however wasn’t my dead father but his coffin lid standing to the side.

Like all coffin lids, and as a minister I have now seen hundreds of them, it simply had his name, date of birth and date of death.

That’s it – the sum total of a person’s life.  

They were born on …. And died on…

Ten years on from that tragic accident that left my mum having to bring up three young boys, I was preparing to leave school at the age of fifteen – and trying to deal with the demons in my head and the anxiety in my heart.

But not talking to anyone about it – that wasn’t the done thing then.

At that time I was very undeveloped and stood just four foot 10 inches and weighed six stone.

One day in the school playground I was chatting to my best friend James Masters about work after school life was finished.

James made an off the cuff that I ought to become a jockey.

That sowed the seed of an idea in my head to answer some of my anxious thoughts.

Yes, I could become a famous jockey, so that at least when I died, which was inevitable, people would remember my name and they would know who I was. 

Not simply a date of birth and death but a life known and celebrated.

I don’t how my mum arranged it, but on the same day a very famous Gordon Banks was defending England’s goal on the 30^th July 1966 at Wembley I made the long train journey from Rochdale to Newmarket to sign on for a Five Year 

Apprenticeship with Bruce Hobbs.

I had never ridden a horse in my life, didn’t have any interest in racing, nor did anybody in the family.

I was travelling hundreds of miles away from home in search of fame.

My life working in the racing game and living in the stables is a whole other story, save to say it was rough, tough, dirty and dangerous.

I did have one moment of glory at the age of 18 on my first ride when I won the Polar Jest Apprentice Handicap on Wandering Eyes.

And in some ways it my wandering eyes that led to any potential racing career come to a crashing end.

I became closely attached to a local girl – and it was the swinging sixties – and everyone was in party mood – and I was in what was probably one of the most conservative employments you could find, apart perhaps from the military.

In short, my attention shifted and I lost focus.  Another story for another time perhaps, but save to say that at the end of my five years as an Apprentice I left the racing game altogether.

Move forward ten years and I was married to the local girl and living in Newmarket and expecting our first child. 

In the interim period from leaving the racing game, I had mainly worked in hotels as a cocktail barman, but had also spent time working with a small demolition team and also had eighteen months living back in Lancashire and working in a cotton mill.

Back in Newmarket I was now working for Spillers, a Food and Nutritional Centre testing various human and animal feeds they produced on animals.

Here I met David, like me, a young man in his mid-twenties.

But David was a homespun boy and had never traveled or done much of anything really and David was a Christian.

But the sort of Christian I had never really encountered before – he really believed this stuff about God and Jesus and heaven and hell and all of that.

My schooling at a Church of England Secondary Modern School had left me with a deep fascination with Jesus, primarily as a great moral and social activist.

I met David in March 1974 when I began working at Spillers. We talked, argued, discussed as we worked closely together looking after rats, rabbits, guinea pigs and ferrets.

In November 1974 David gave me a Bible to read and I had begun to attend ‘meetings’ – I was beginning to think that there might actually be something in this after all and it was worth exploring.

And then I read Colossians 3.3…

‘For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.’

In this setting I will chose my words carefully, but to me, these words were the key to unlock the prison I was in.

Of course I had made myself comfortable and largely forgot about death, dying and not being famous.

But there was still that nagging question that came up every now and then.

Is this it, we are born, we live and we die – big deal. 

This verse helped me to see that in effect I had to die to my own plans, ideas, aspirations and dreams – because my true self, my life, all of this was held in God’s keeping.

And that if I got to know Jesus - who I was truly destined to be would be revealed to me day by day.

On the 1^st January 1975 I made a New Years’ Resolution to become a Christian.

Of all the decisions I have ever made in my life that was by far and away the best and most important decision I ever made.

Throughout the Scriptures you will find reference to the Book of Life or someone being noted as a friend of God.

Particularly we find this in the Book of Revelation.

‘And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Then another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, according to what they had done.’

Back in 1966 I wanted my name to be known, I wanted to gain a kind of immortality through being famous so, as the saying goes, my name might live on.

But I discovered there is only one place that you need to ensure your name is written – in the Lambs Book of Life and as a friend of God.

And that is what Jesus says to his disciples when they return from a missionary trip.

They were well made up at the things they had seen and Jesus was well pleased for them – but then he went on to say,

‘Nevertheless, do not rejoice at this, that the spirit submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.’

Now that doesn’t mean that having asked Jesus to write my name in the Lamb’s Book of Life that I need not do anything else – that I can continue to live my life how I should choose.

One of the images Jesus uses is that of being ‘born again.’

And that is a useful picture – we are born again into a new way of life - we are born again into a new family – we are born again so that our past does not have to define who we are and determine our future.

And from my experience being born again does not automatically mean that struggles and stresses won’t come upon you. It is a daily battle to live according to God’s ways rather than the way of the world.

It isn’t for nothing that the words often used at baptism say, ‘fight against sin, the world and the devil.’

Within eighteen months of my becoming a Christian I had been squeezed out of my job at Spillers and my wife had divorced me on the grounds of my being a Christian.  Almost ten years to the day I found myself once more walking through Newmarket with my world in a suitcase about to begin a whole new life.

However, the same year that Fame the TV series began in 1982 I got married again and we have been together for 36 years and have three wonderful children and grandchildren.   

God called me to work in ministry with the Church Army back in 1978 and since that time I have dedicated my life to encouraging people to ensure their names and written in the Lamb’s Book of Life and that they then live out fully their new Christian lives to God’s glory and praise.

Like the disciples of Jesus, they may see, hear and do many marvelous things – but most importantly they will know that their names are written in heaven.

I tried to capture something of my journey to faith in a little poem, not by any means good poetry, but nevertheless I want to share it with you now and invite you to think about your name being written in the Lamb’s Book of Life.

The Book of Life

I used to worry that when I was old,

Mine would be just another tale never to be told;

But Jesus came and spoke to me,

He said, there is only one place you need to be,

That’s in the ‘Book of Life’.

Now he holds my hand as we walk along

Sharing my gladness, sadness and song;

And I know he is leading me on

To the place He has gone

    to write ‘The Book of Life’.

He forgave me sins and set me free,

To learn not to say ‘I’ but we;

To start a journey back to the one

From whom all things come from,

That’s why with his blood he bought

     the ‘Book of Life’

And when this world is over and gone,

Jesus will show he is the one;

Why wait until it is too late,

And find yourself outside the gate,

He is asking you now, do you want your name

    in the ‘Book of Life.’

© Gordon Banks 1980