I don’t know what it’s like where you live but where I live in Kentish Town it’s very difficult to get a newspaper delivered to your door. We have only one supplier and it’s touch and go as to whether or not he survives.

This is all very different from my childhood. We had groceries delivered to our door, a milkman who delivered daily, a baker who came twice a week, a butcher once a week. We even had a laundry man who’d collect our linen and return it to us clean and nicely pressed the following week. Of course we’ve got the likes of Ocado, Sainsbury’s and Tescos who are very willing to deliver to us but it’s hardly the kind of personal service that I remember as a boy.

Given my hankering after a bygone era you’ll understand how much I appreciate my paper delivery. Being able to scan the headlines over breakfast is a real convenience for me because it means that I’m up to date with the news by the time I get into work. But as I said, it’s touch and go as to whether our newspaper delivery man survives. The reason is quite simple: there’s very little money in newspaper delivery and as I know from running my own, small business, cashflow is everything. Our newspaper delivery man needs to collect his money fortnightly to keep going but his business is in jeopardy because people simply won’t pay him on time. Unsurprisingly he’s very grateful to those customers who do pay on time – and yes, I am one of them! Equally, I’m very grateful to him for his prompt and efficient service. In short, we have a relationship that is built on trust and mutual respect such that when we meet up we always have a friendly chat. It may not be about anything much in particular but it does help lighten the load of the day.

Relationships of trust are fundamental to our quality of life. Think of our marriages and family relationships. Think of our relationships with work colleagues and those we do business with. One of the reasons for the outpouring of anger about the financial crisis was the sense of betrayal, a feeling that some of those to whom we’d entrusted our money had not kept their side of the bargain.

If trust is the hallmark of worthwhile human relationships it’s also at the heart of our relationship with God. In today’s Old Testament reading from Jeremiah God makes him promise that a descendant of King David will one day rule Israel with justice and righteousness. It is, of course, a promise that we believe is fulfilled by Jesus, the celebration of whose birth begin to anticipate today.

The idea of a God who makes promises to mankind is something we take for granted. But if you think about it, it’s really rather extraordinary. Why would God feel it necessary to make promises to mankind? Why not just let us stew in our own juice?

The idea of a God who makes promises is something that Christians and Muslims owe to the Jewish faith. Quite a few of us have been studying the background to the New Testament in our autumn study groups and this point underlines just how important it is that we understand that background.

The Old Testament is marked by a series of promises – or, to use biblical language, “covenants”. The most famous of them all was the Sinai Covenant in which God handed down the 10 commandments to Moses. This was, in effect a deal struck between God and the people of Israel whereby in return for the promise of protection and salvation the people of Israel were expected to observe God’s law.

This was truly revolutionary. Until then ancient religions had conceived of God as a cruel despot. And then along come the Jews with their experience of a God who does deals with humanity. This is interesting and important for what it says about us as much as it says about the nature of God. As the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks has put it, the God of Judaism not only gets involved in the world but crucially, our of regard for mankind, makes space for us to get involved in the work of his creation as well. And in so doing he confers a remarkable dignity up on us. We are not, in other words, helpless slaves cowering under the shadow of a tyrannical God but men and women free to choose whether or not to accept his gracious offer of relationship. As St. Paul put it in his letters to the Corinthians, we are nothing less than God’s fellow-workers in creation.

You only have to think of Jesus’ ministry to see the point. Did he come along and take over the show entirely? No, he taught for three years of his life only, showing the disciples what they should do and then left them to continue his work of building what he called “the Kingdom of God”. Given how often they come over as silly, vain and confused in the New Testament, this was an act of extraordinary trust. It is very humbling to think that this trust extends also to us as the Jesus’ church.

Now, familiar as this God of the bible is to us, there was nothing inevitable about Christianity accepting this Jewish conception of God. The early years of the church were marked by huge and often very bitter disputes over who Jesus was and what he stood for. Easily one of the biggest was caused by a second century theologian called Marcion. Marcion completely rejected the God of the Old Testament. He believed he was a lesser God to that revealed by Jesus in the New Testament. Given this, he wanted to jettison all of the Old Testament and most of what’s come down to us as the New Testament as well. This is because he wanted to get rid of all reference to the Old Testament and the God revealed in it. In Marcion’s hands the bible would comprised only a severely edited version of Luke’s gospel and Paul’s letters.

What drove Marcion wasn’t necessarily anti-semitism but a very different idea of God from that of the Jews. He believed the world was so full of evil that it must have been created by this lesser God of the Old Testament who also must have been the original source of evil. By contrast, what he saw as “the placid, mild and simply good and excellent God” revealed by Jesus was an entirely spiritual entity that had nothing whatever to do with this world.

Had Marcion had his way our faith would have been unrecognisably different from what it is today. Where in Jewish-Christian tradition the world is God’s good creation to be cherished, in Marcion’s view it was evil and grubby, something to be turned away from. Where in the Jewish-Christian tradition man is made in God’s image and human relationships are reflective of God’s love, in Marcion’s view there was nothing in this world that could tell us anything about God at all. In short, there’s precious little of value here on this earth and we can only hope for release from it, whereas in the Jewish-Christian tradition we are required to love and get involved in the world precisely because God himself does.

The key point I want to make here is that what you believe about God – or what you don’t – really does matter because it determines your view of the world, your place within it and what you do in it. When the early Church succeeded in seeing off Marcion’s challenge it couldn’t possibly have anticipated the impact it was going to have on the world. The Jewish-Christian belief in the goodness of creation and of the dignity and nobility of mankind has influenced us in countless ways. It underpins our law, our politics, our business life, our music and our art. In short, it has shaped our society and our culture.
But just as there was nothing inevitable about the early Church adopting this belief, there is nothing inevitable about its continuation. Here in the west at least, it seems to be in retreat to a materialistic view of the world which, in denying God or seeing Him as an irrelevance, diminishes mankind such that we become defined by the bare functions of human existence: getting, spending, eating, procreating with each individual left on his or her own to work out what on earth all this adds up to.

So, as we begin this advent season and anticipate the coming of JC, the Prince of Peace, we should be under no illusion. There are some - maybe many - who will come through the doors of this church for whom our worship here will be no more than a cosy, yuletide entertainment. But we should equally be under no illusion that the story of which we speak is one that mankind ignores at its peril. For it is the story of the God made man, the God in whom we can trust and who – unbelievably - also puts his trust in us.

Amen