We’re getting John 3:16 wrong!

John 3:14-21

What if we have got the point of this whole faith thing wrong?
What if the thing we think is the most important part isn’t at all, at least not in the way we think it is? And what if because we’re missing the point we are concentrating on the wrong things?

Sam Well’s asks that very question in his book A Nazareth Manifesto. I spoke about this a bit at our recent congregational conference and I wanted to come back to it because I think this is hugely important for us all, and especially for our church.

So, I want to encourage you to really listen carefully… because this could… and probably should make you rethink a whole load of things.

Sam Wells poses a question that’s been asked throughout the centuries… Paul Tillich calls it the question of ‘our ultimate concern’. The question is simple… What’s the core of our faith? What is the most important thing? What matters most to you?

Wells suggests that our big obsession, our ultimate concern, both as a society and as individuals is mortality. Or to be more specific, avoiding the reality of our own mortality.

We spend billions of pounds on lotions, potions, diets, gym memberships, supplements, treatments, and even surgery to make us look younger. Companies will even freeze you in cryogenic storage until a remedy is found for whatever you’re about to die from and scientists around the world are researching a cure for aging.

But what does that have to do with our reading today?

When Jesus says “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” we’re absolutely in. Live forever? Oh… absolutely. Sign me up for that. It’s not an accident that John 3:16 is the most famous verse in the bible.

The next question then becomes ‘How do I get that eternal life?’ It’s THE question. It’s the question that frames how we think about faith. It’s the question that drives the church’s mission. And it’s the wrong question.

In Luke’s Gospel someone asks that question to Jesus. Love God and love your neighbour is the right answer. But that conversation ends up in a parable we call the Parable of the Good Samaritan. It’s a story about how loving God in a formulaic, ritualistic way gets in the road of loving your neighbour. It turns out that the key to this eternal life is living well now… but not as a way to earn some kind of reward where we are excused our mortality.

Seeing faith like that is a problem. If I only just believe enough…. If I only just do enough good things…. If I only just behave properly…

Perhaps we need to remind ourselves about what eternity is. Eternity is forever. All of time. Eternity is all the way back and all the way forward… and eternity is now. We are living in eternity. And that means our obsession with mortality as some kind of final end to be avoided at all costs really isn’t what we should be concerned about.

And Jesus says as much in John 3.

Jesus goes on to say ‘Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.  Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.

The problem has been that our fixation with the mortality problem has caused us to read this in the wrong way. When Jesus says ‘condemned already’ we turn that into ‘they are already condemned for all eternity’. And that’s not what it says or means at all.

It means what it says. That people who believe are not condemned and those who don’t are… but condemned to what? We need to keep reading:

And this is the judgement, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.  For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed.  But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.’

Jesus is talking about our response to Christ’s presence in the world. Here and now. This is a conversation with Nicodemus, the Pharisee who comes in the darkness of night to see Jesus.

Jesus is asking Nicodemus why he has to hide his visit. Why can’t he be open about a conversation? What forces is he afraid of? Who stands in opposition to Jesus and why is he standing with them?

This most famous of passages isn’t about solving the mortality problem. It’s about how we react to the realisation that the Word became flesh and moved into the neighbourhood. It’s about the implications of God being present in the world. For Nicodemus that’s a question about whether he can acknowledge that reality publicly. We will see at the end of John’s Gospel that Nicodemus is the one who asks for Jesus’ body so he can be buried before the light fades.

If the key to eternal life is to love God and love our neighbour then the next question is ‘how do we make that happen?’ The answer is only found in relationship with God and with each other. And remember, Jesus stretches the boundary of neighbour way beyond what anyone is comfortable with.

I think Sam Wells is right. Jesus came to end our self-imposed separation from God and from each other. That’s what leads to the darkness. Selfish deeds done in secret and in shame because they hurt or exploit or devalue other people.

Relationship is the key because solving the mortality question is about me. It’s about my behaviour and my belief. Solving the isolation problem is about us. It’s about what we believe and how we behave. It depends on the depth and quality of our relationships.

So, the real question, the thing that should take up all our energy and attention isn’t what the best face cream is or what fad diet I should try next. The real question that should occupy our imaginations is how we end isolation.

Too many people are lonely… and loneliness is caused by a deficit of relationship. And that’s something we can surely help to fix.

When we think that tackling isolation is the most important thing we can do then our activities and the importance of some of the things we already do should change. All of a sudden the coffee morning and the Hope Cafe and Messy Church become models for mission because they encourage people to get to know each other. Lunch after the Sunday service might just be the most important part.

Our invitation to people might sound different too. We find it so difficult to ask people to join us at church. I wonder if that’s to do with not really knowing what we are inviting people into. Come and… well come and what? Be saved? Saved from what?

There’s a strong hint of condemnation in that kind of language, isn’t there. And more than a little judgement. When we hear Jesus telling us that God doesn’t want to condemn the world then we should probably be a bit more hesitant about using those kinds of words… and about doing that judging too.

We should perhaps heed Richard Rohr’s reminder that we “are by nature a son of God, a daughter of God, a beloved of God. That’s not obtained by any exercise, performance, fasting, praying… it is your nature. Your true nature is God’s nature.” He goes on to say that we all have to experience separateness from God in some way to be able to re-chose that nature.

I think that means that we choose isolation. We wander off into the darkness. We focus on that mortality problem and that means we actually don’t really care that much about the fate of anyone else’s souls as long as we think that we and the people we love are ok.

And then we realise that being alone isn’t what we’re made for. That being in the light is a better place to be than being isolated in the darkness.

Light is a brilliant image for what happens to us and how this works. Darkness separates us from each other. It isolates us. It hides us from view. We cannot see or be seen.

But here’s the thing… Any amount of light, even the smallest flicker, makes the darkness disappear.

But where does light come from? Jesus tells us that He is the light of the world and that God’s desire is that everyone should live in that light.

So, as we deepen our relationship with God we rediscover our light. When we enter into relationship with others then our light dispels their darkness, even if they don’t have any light of their own yet.

So maybe that should be our priority? We should embrace our true nature, not as awful sinful people, but as God’s beloved…

And that is true even when we wander off into the darkness, even when we choose separation. Our job for those who choose that is to be their neighbour too. To refuse to let them be alone.

As we learn to embrace our relationship with God and delight in it we see the needs of our neighbours as our own needs, because their need and our need is the same. We all need to be in relationship with our neighbour. How else can we love them. Their concern is our concern because we are all God’s concern. We are all God’s beloved.

 

What’s your identity?

Exodus 20:1-17 & John 2:13-22

It is passover and Jesus has gone up to Jerusalem to the Temple. And when he gets there he is confronted by stalls and pens and cages full of lambs and pigeons and calves to be sold to the pilgrims to sacrifice. There are also money changers because you’re not allowed to take Roman money into the temple so it has to be changed into local currency… for a small commission, obviously.

And Jesus is clears them all out.

But why? People are required to present a sacrifice at the temple. What’s the problem?

Often this passage is explained as being about two things… the first is confrontation. Jesus is somehow setting himself up in opposition to the Temple authorities. We usually read this passage in Holy Week. The other three Gospels place this story there, so it becomes one of the things that just keeps piling on the pressure. But this is at the start of John’s Gospel.

The second is that Jesus is upset at what the temple has been turned into. A profit is being made from the people’s obligation to present a sacrifice.

Those two understandings are absolutely legitimate, and I agree with both, but I think there’s something even deeper going on here.

I think this is a story about identity, both Jesus’ identity and the people of Israel’s identity.

This happens at Passover.

Passover is the celebration of the liberation of the slaves from Egypt. It’s the day when a group of slaves changed their identity. They were set free. But we know that like many who have been imprisoned or enslaved, the idea of freedom can take a while to get used to. Not having structure, not having someone else tell you where to go and what to do, can be overwhelming, even if your previous circumstances have been pretty awful.

Having to work out a new identity is hard when it’s just you. Imagine what it’s like when a whole nation has to try to come to terms with their new reality.

We’re going to go all the way back to an important moment in that journey because without it none of the rest of this will make much sense…

This is what it says in Exodus 20.

God spoke, and these were his words:  “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, where you were slaves.

“Worship no god but me.

“Do not make for yourselves images of anything in heaven or on earth or in the water under the earth.  Do not bow down to any idol or worship it, because I am the Lord your God and I tolerate no rivals. I bring punishment on those who hate me and on their descendants down to the third and fourth generation.  But I show my love to thousands of generations of those who love me and obey my laws.

“Do not use my name for evil purposes, for I, the Lord your God, will punish anyone who misuses my name.

“Observe the Sabbath and keep it holy.  You have six days in which to do your work, but the seventh day is a day of rest dedicated to me. On that day no one is to work—neither you, your children, your slaves, your animals, nor the foreigners who live in your country.

In six days I, the Lord, made the earth, the sky, the seas, and everything in them, but on the seventh day I rested. That is why I, the Lord, blessed the Sabbath and made it holy.

“Respect your father and your mother, so that you may live a long time in the land that I am giving you.

“Do not commit murder.
“Do not commit adultery.
“Do not steal.
“Do not accuse anyone falsely.
“Do not desire another man’s house; do not desire his wife, his slaves, his cattle, his donkeys, or anything else that he owns.”

We know these as the 10 commandments. They are the rules God gave to Moses on the mountain. But I want you to hear them in a different way today. Not just as a list of things that we aren’t supposed to do, but as a statement about the identity of the people they were first given to.

It starts with an introduction. Hi. I’m God. I’m the one who freed you from slavery. I did that. Nobody else, so you don’t need any other gods. I’m the real deal. But this is about more than me. This is about you and who you are.

In the beginning I created humans. I made them in my image. You don’t need to make statues or icons or anything else to give you a clue what I look like. Just look at each other. Or look in the mirror. You are my likeness.

Imagine hearing that. Who me? I’m just a slave who doesn’t have a master any more. How can I be the creation of the God who made all things?

And God says, you’re not a slave any more. I’m nothing like your Egyptian masters. In fact, the only thing I’m going to command you to do is to have a day off!!!

Also, I want you to celebrate your heritage. Honour your ancestors. There is nothing there to be ashamed of, despite what you have been told. I made a promise to your ancestor Abraham and you are part of that promise.

All that should be enough. You don’t need to be jealous of anyone, angry with anyone or need anything. You are mine and I love you.

Can you imagine being told that?

Can you, even for a moment, wrap your head around what it must have been like for those escapees to be talked to by God like this?

Who us?

Yes. You.

Fast forward one and a half thousand years to Jesus, standing in the Temple in the capital city of the land promised to Moses and those slaves, at a festival celebrating that moment when they were set free telling them that they have forgotten who they are… and they have absolutely no idea who he is.

The Temple is important. It’s a symbol of identity. A place where God is worshiped at the very heart of the nation. So, what the problem? People, including Jesus, travelled for miles to worship in the Temple. Jesus calls it ‘my Father’s house’ so he doesn’t have a problem with the Temple as an idea. His problem is with who the people have become.

Let’s take the sacrifices as an example.

A sacrifice is something that is costly to you. It’s not a tip. It’s not a minor inconvenience. It’s something that is significant. So, there’s a big difference between when you are the one growing or breeding and feeding and looking after a lamb that you then take with you to the Temple as a costly offering than when you turn up and buy one from the shop. Sure, it costs you money, and you have worked hard for that, but it’s not yours. The cost is different.

The whole point of sacrifice is that it is a sign of gratitude. It’s a response to that statement by God that you are his and that all you have has been provided for you by him… because he loves you.

Sacrifice has become an obligation, not a response.
It’s become a business, not an act of devotion.
It’s become an imposition rather than a celebration of freedom.

Remember that amazing statement made to those newly freed slaves? You don’t need to make idols or images because I created you in my likeness. The people have forgotten that. They have gone back to thinking of God as distant, far off, locked in a room in the Temple where they need to go once in a while and make an offering so that God will not be angry with them.

How do you help people to see that God isn’t to be contained? Well, standing among them is a pretty good start, don’t you think?

Tear down this temple.
This body…
I am the temple.
And so are you!

The Temple isn’t about God being in one place and you coming to Him, although there’s nothing wrong with coming to worship God. But the lesson of the wandering in the wilderness was that God was with them wherever they went. They relearned the lesson in the years of exile in Babylon, but they have forgotten again.

This confrontation between Jesus and the Temple leaders is another one of those moments when everything the people believed about themselves and about God is turned on its head.

Tear down this temple…

This temple. This body. This place where God is.

God is there… standing among them, standing right in front of them, not locked in a room where no-one can go.

And when they ask for a sign Jesus tells them that God will show them what he always wanted for them. God will show them that sacrifice is something God is willing to embrace on the cross, but that sacrifice is not the end.

If it all ends at the cross then the whole thing has just been about God keeping us company in our misery. Which is nice. Helpful even. But that’s not all there is…

There’s more… so much more. Tear down this temple and in three days I will rebuild it.

Resurrection. The defeat of death. The end of fear. The sign that this life is not all there is.

And then there is ascension. After the resurrection, when Jesus ascends to heaven, only then is the sign complete. God’s plan is for us all to be united with Him, because we are his and he loves us.

This is who we are.
This is our identity!
And we should never forget it!

Facing your Fears

What are you afraid of? Like really scared of?

For me it’s heights. Actually, that’s not quite true. I’m not afraid of being up high. I’m perfectly happy sitting in a plane at 40,000 feet.

So perhaps I’m not afraid of heights… perhaps I’m scared of falling.

I’m sure there are many other things I’m afraid of but, to be quite honest, being crucified isn’t one of them. I have spent very little time thinking about the possibility because the reality is that me getting nailed to a cross is incredibly unlikely to happen. It’s just not a thing anymore.

And that’s a bit of a problem for us when we come to passages like this one where Jesus talks about his followers having to take up our cross and follow him. And not just because we don’t have any crosses handy to pick up…

It’s a pretty rubbish recruitment plan. Come and join us… and give up your life. Come and join us… and get brutally executed…. Come and join us… and have a life full of suffering.

Em, no, thank’s very much for the invitation… but I think I’ll give it a miss.

But the cross is so important to our faith. It’s the symbol of it. I’ve always thought it was odd that people wear an instrument of torture and execution as jewellery, but at least some of that comes from the importance of the cross to our understanding of who Jesus is and what Jesus came for.

In this season of Lent we’ll do quite a lot of thinking about the cross and why it is so important as we journey through the story to darkness and desolation of Good Friday.

This passage from chapter 8 of Mark’s Gospel is an important step on that journey. We should give it our full attention but we should also be a little bit cautious about it, and especially where we put our emphasis.

We need to talk a bit more about the idea and strategies of empire if we are to be able to make sense of this strange and often troubling passage from chapter 8 of Mark’s story of Jesus.

But before we do that I want to say something really important about what this passage is NOT about. The idea of taking up your own cross has been misused to justify all kinds of things for centuries. It has been boiled down to something like ‘well, everyone has problems so you just need to put up with it’. People were basically told to stop complaining and just accept illness, abuse and discrimination without complaint because, well, because everyone has a cross to bear. That’s absolutely not what Jesus is talking about here. In fact, it is pretty much completely opposite.

So, let’s find out why we’ve been sold this lie that we should put up and shut up because it’s what Jesus wants.

Jesus is in Caesarea-Philippi. It’s a city of the empire, in every sense a Roman city with temples and amphitheatres and columns and statues. And it’s built in the middle of occupied Israel.

That’s one of the things you do if you want to occupy another country… you import your culture and privilege it above the native one. That can take all kinds of forms, from banning local languages, religious gatherings, introducing a new currency, making people work in different ways, imposing new laws and enforcing all of this with a very harsh system of punishment.

And that’s exactly what the Romans did.

They operated a very sophisticated carrot and stick system. They made massive improvements to sanitation, water distribution, roads and farming. The Monty Python sketch that asks ‘what have the romans ever done for us?’ is funny because of all the eras in history the Romans might have made the biggest impact across most of Europe and north Africa.

But compliance was required. And the stick was one of the most brutal forms of torture and execution ever devised… crucifixion.

We don’t ever talk about the reality of what that is, so I’m about to. It is unpleasant so if that’s something you might not want to listen to then skip ahead a bit…

It takes a long, long time to die on a cross. You hang there with just enough support to keep you there but also to allow gravity to do the work. The strain is agonising and eventually your internal organs collapse. But not for hours, sometimes days.

Crosses were erected along the main roads and near the gates of cities so that to get anywhere you had to walk past them. It was horrific. And it was effective. It wasn’t a way that anyone wanted to die.

So, when Jesus suggests that people should take up their cross, it’s not hard to see how it is easy to jump to the idea that he must be talking about suffering. That’s what crosses are all about. But I don’t think that he is.

We also need to be really careful that we don’t read ahead and impose our understanding of the cross and Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection onto this conversation quite yet.

This is a bit of a leap… but have you ever seen the Disney Pixar movie, A Bug’s Life? It’s about a colony of ants who are bullied by much larger grasshoppers. The ants are forced to collect grain for the grasshoppers and if they don’t collect enough the grasshoppers do what bullies do… they threaten violence.

It’s a brilliant example of how empire works. There are only a few grasshoppers and thousands of ants, but the whole thing works on fear. One ant could never take on a grasshopper. They are just too big and too strong, and they can fly. But 100 or 1,000 ants… that’s a different proposition altogether. But for that to happen something has to change. The ants have to no longer be afraid. And that’s what happens. It starts with one ant exposing the lie that the grasshoppers are stronger.

I’m going to use the words Government and Empire interchangeably for a few minutes. I know they are not the same. Not every government is also an empire, but our’s is.

Both government and Empire work on the same principles… people are either satisfied enough that making trouble is too much hassle or they are too afraid to bother… or not enough people join in to make it effective. Governments all over the world still spend their days working out how much their citizens will put up with. Will they pay this much tax? Will they wait this long for treatment? Will they put up with this much unemployment and this much benefit support? How many children need to be living in poverty before people start to bother? Will people pick up the slack through food banks and charity?

It takes a lot to change the mind of a government.

But Jesus isn’t inciting a riot. Far from it. So, what is he doing? Because he’s absolutely talking about what we might now call regime change!

Empire is one kind of kingdom. One system. But there’s another way. An opposite way. Jesus calls this other way ‘the Kingdom of God’ and it is in complete contrast to the Empire.

The kingdom of God is based on love, not hate. Joy, not fear. Peace, not violence. Sharing, not greed. Compassion, not selfishness.

But that seems so far away from the way things are. How do you make the change from one kingdom to the other?

Well, the question Jesus poses is this… what is that you are afraid of? What’s the worst thing that could happen? The answer is simple. You could end up nailed to a cross.

The cross is the thing that hold power. It is the symbol of fear, or suffering and of oppression. It’s the symbol of Empire. It’s not for us. Now the cross symbolises something very different. But to make the switch people need to not be scared of it anymore. They need a way to embrace the cross and to take away their fear.

And Jesus gives them it…

Life.

So, when Jesus says, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” he’s talking about leaving behind the selfish system of empire where the measure of the wellbeing of a society is the profit it made and the increase in wealth.

When Jesus says  “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it” he means that our lives as we know them will be completely different. We will step away from our self-destructive ways of living and regain the life that God intends for us. Jesus is talking about life and death, or rather living and dying.

He’s talking about the things that matter.  He’s talking about the life that God wants for us.

This is a call to embrace life. To not be afraid of the systems of death and destruction but to step away from them and live a different way.

But that has consequences.

People will point and stare.
People will call you mad or weird or dangerous.
because the system doesn’t like rivals.

People will call you all sorts of names.
People will undermine you and accuse you
because the system can’t stand when someone points out the lies that it is based on.

Jesus will eventually find himself nailed to a cross by the empire.
But in that moment,
even in that darkest of moments,
Jesus show that he was telling the truth.
The cross has no power.
Death is not to be feared.
Life wins because love wins…
love wins every time.

This isn’t easy. I can’t even stay off the chocolate for lent or get myself out the door for a run, even on a sunny day. How on earth am I going to completely change the way I live?

Perhaps by having an example. A role model. Someone to follow who has been there and done it all.

I said earlier that the people hearing Jesus say this didn’t have our knowledge of how the story ends. But the readers of Mark’s Gospel did. The people who believed and started to follow did.

The cross was transformed by Jesus’ life and death and resurrection from a symbol of torture and oppression and death into a symbol of hope, of forgiveness, of life.

Why would you not want to take up that cross, and in doing so step into the life God has prepared for each of us.

Start!

Mark 1:9-15
In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptised by John in the Jordan.  And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him.  And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’

And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.  He was in the wilderness for forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.

Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’

Sermon
Sometimes, when we have trouble getting to sleep we listen to one of these sleep meditations on an app called Headspace.

It always starts the same way… Here we are, where the ocean meets the land. A lovely beach, surrounded by rocky cliffs… and in moments we’re asleep. Well, I’m asleep. The calm voice and the repetition with a breathing exercise thrown in seems to be enough to soothe us to sleep. It’s become almost a bit of a joke. I’m asleep before the end of the first sentence. Avril wants to stay awake to find out what happens next!

Repetition… familiarity… they can cause us to relax and that can, of course, be a good thing. But we can also become so familiar with something that we take it for granted.

So, here we are again… Back at the same verses of chapter 1 of Mark’s Gospel for the third or maybe fourth time in just a few weeks. I’ve said before that there are 10 sermons in every passage, but this is really starting to put that theory to the test. We’ve spoken about Jesus’ baptism, about John and ideas around confession and forgiveness. We’ve also spoken about Jesus’ mission. So, what’s left?

It’s the first Sunday in Lent so we have this reading again because of 2 verses. 12 and 13. “And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.  He was in the wilderness for forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.”

We always get readings about the temptation of Jesus on the first Sunday of Lent. I’m guessing that’s because we have had four whole days of giving up chocolate or crisps or alcohol or whatever you might have chosen to go without for Lent and we all know that making it beyond the first few days is the hardest part. So, we get Jesus, alone in the wilderness for 40 days, surrounded by wild animals, with nothing to eat. I think that’s maybe supposed to be encouragement? Look, Jesus managed 40 days with nothing, so step away from the M&Ms!

And of course there is something in all of that. We fast in lent to help wake us up from our regular pattern. The grumbling tummy is supposed to point us back to the purpose of fasting… to help us focus more on God. For us, the constant battle where we unconsciously go to the fridge and the voice that reminds us that we have given up the thing we are going for is supposed to have the same effect. Oh… I’m not eating this… and that’s because I’m supposed to be focussing on God… and now I am. At, least that’s supposed to be how it works.

And that’s all fine. In fact it’s good. Anything that reminds us to think more about God must surely be a good thing.

The other thing that’s missing is an account of the three temptations Jesus faced. You need to look in Matthew and Luke’s gospels for those. Mark, as usual, takes a much more sparse approach. So, to boil these two verses down to giving up crisps would be to miss out on more than a packet of cheese and onion.

As usual Mark packs an amazing amount into just two sentences in verses 12 and 13. Although I think he cheats a bit with the second one with all the semi colons, but still… his economy with words is impressive.

Mark tells us that immediately after Jesus’ baptism “the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.”

Drove him out.

This wasn’t a decision by Jesus to go on a silent retreat. He was driven by the Holy Spirit, out into the wilderness.

But why? Why not just get on with his ministry? After all, God has just said that he is pleased with Jesus.

Perhaps Jesus is a bit like an athlete? You can be fit, but not quite competition ready. In football they call it ‘match ready’. Jesus has been preparing for this his whole life, but now is the time for that final preparation.

The wilderness is a place of huge significance. It’s where Moses and the Hebrew slaves became the nation of Israel, God’s people. But it took them a while to work it all out. 40 years of mistake after mistake until they finally realised that God was serious about them. But they didn’t leave behind the slavery of Egypt without some persuasion.

The story tells of the angel of death killing the first born Egyptians and as the Israelites crossed the water they were chased by an army. They were driven into the wilderness too. There was no choice. No going back.

It’s not a place you would choose to spend any length of time, never mind 40 days! Jesus didn’t pack for the trip. We don’t hear that he pitched his tent, set up his camping stove and settled down in his down-filled sleeping bag to enjoy a good book.

He was in the wilderness for forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.”

Forty days. That’s the biblical number for ‘ages’. Longer than a month. Longer than the time it took for the moon to complete a full cycle because out there in the wild that’s pretty much the only thing to mark the time. Day after day after day of… well… days.

They say the devil makes work for idle hands so perhaps it’s no surprise that Jesus was tempted by Satan, The Accuser. Unlike the other gospels with their three big moments of temptation for Jesus to turn a stone into bread, to jump and let the angels catch him, or to bow before Satan and rule all the kingdoms of the world, we only have this short mention that he was tempted but it seems that the temptation lasted the 40 days. Which for me seems more likely. Temptations aren’t often one time only things, are they? If I was to give up chocolate then every time I saw the bag of M&Ms chocolate with peanuts sitting on the table I’m going to be tempted. And sometimes that temptation will be stronger than others. But unless I throw it out it’s still going to be there… with its bright yellow wrapper and delicious chocolate filled with crunchy peanuts…

But I don’t think chocolate was Jesus’ problem. He was there with the wild animals.

This is where we really start to miss stuff. Yes, there are wild animals in the wilderness. Lions and wild dogs and even bears. So on one level, their mention is just an acknowledgement that they are there and the wilderness is a dangerous and unpredictable place, but there’s more.

Mark’s Gospel is linked closely to some other writings in the Bible and those links might also give us some hints about what could be going on here.

Mark quotes the prophet Isaiah just a few verses earlier and Isaiah paints an amazing picture of what’s known as the peaceable kingdom, where the lion and the lamb will lie down together. So, Jesus, sometimes called the lamb of God, could be literally living side by side with the lions, in harmony. It’s a sign of the coming of the new kingdom where peace and harmony will reign. After all, Jesus is the Word who was with God at the creation of all things.

Mark’s Gospel is most similar to the book of Daniel in the Old Testament. They are both what we call apocalyptic writings. And remember, apocalypse doesn’t mean the end of the world in some disastrous fashion. It means revelation. These books reveal something important about God.

If I was to ask you what story about Daniel you remember I’m guessing it’s Daniel in the lion’s den, the story where a man faithful to God was put in a lion’s den, but no harm comes to him. So this mention of wild beasts in Mark’s gospel could be an echo of that story, showing us that God is with Jesus, protecting him.

But the wild beasts might also be a metaphor for the world. Mark has already set out his challenge to the empires of the world from verse 1. The dangerous beast and wild animals could be the kingdoms and rulers of the world who Jesus has come to challenge with this radically new way of thinking in the kingdom of God which has come near.

The final part of the puzzle is that the angels waited on him. That’s the same thing we are told about Simon Peter’s mother in law when she is raised up from illness and the same way Jesus will describe his own ministry… a ministry of service.

John the Baptist called on people to repent and believe. Repent means to change your way of thinking. To have your mind blown! These two lines of wilderness temptation are conformation that the empires of the world have been given notice. Things are about to change.

But how will that happen?
How could such powerful nations, such powerful ideas, be overcome?

Our usual response to something dangerous is to either run away or avoid it or to kill it. Jesus isn’t about to take either approach. He will confront the empire head on… with love.

So, repent and believe because Mark, once again, in just two sentences, manages to blow our minds with an idea that is at the same time wonderful and terrifying…
The kingdom of God has come near… so hold on to your hats!!!

Jesus’ true identity revealed!

This is the last Sunday in what we call the season of Epiphany. Epiphany itself is the 6th of January, the day we remember the Magi visiting Jesus in a house in Bethlehem after looking for him in the royal palace in Jerusalem. A discovery that Jesus wasn’t that kind of king. We keep going with that theme of discovery, revelations, these little glimpses into who Jesus is and what that means for us until we get to Lent and Lent begins on Wednesday.

On this last day of Epiphany we remember a strange event with a name that before Harry Potter we might not have been that familiar with… transfiguration. That just means when the outward appearance of something changes. So in Happy Potter that means turning into a cat or a frog. That’s not quite what happens in this story about Jesus though.

Jesus takes Peter, James and John up a hill, and there on the mountainside Jesus is changed. Transfigured. But instead of being changed into something else, what happens here is that Jesus’ true nature is revealed. He is, I think, in this moment the same Jesus that the other Gospel writers will describe Mary meeting at the tomb on Easter Morning, and the same Jesus the disciples will meet in a locked room. He is, in this moment, the eternal Christ revealed.

One of the things that always amazes me about this whole happening is that these three disciples are invited to be a part of it. We have often seen Jesus wander off into the wilderness alone to pray, to rest and to spend time with God. But this is different.

Over the last weeks we have been invited to catch these glimpses, these little epiphanies, helping us to piece together just who Jesus is. That’s how the disciples had to do it too. Jesus didn’t sit them down and lay it all out for them. He invited them to follow him and see for themselves. And they did.

They saw healings and miracles. Jesus fed 5,000 people and then later another 4,000. He has walked on water and calmed a storm. He has healed people in public and in private, he has exorcised demons and he has told these strange stories called parables.

They heard Jesus teach and transform the way they thought about God, and the world, and their place in it. They heard Jesus’ radical reimagining of how the world should be and he has openly challenge the religious authorities and the empire.

And they were the good guys. They had a ringside seat to all that had happened and was about to happen.

Peter thought he had worked it all out. By the time we get to chapter 9 Peter had made his declaration about who he thought Jesus was. You are the Messiah.

But it’s one thing to know something and something very different when you actually experience it.

We all know that. Having to endure your friend’s holiday snaps and hear all their stories about wherever they have just can get pretty boring if you’ve never been there. It’s nice for a while, and you’re happy (and maybe a little bit jealous) that they have had a great time, but the photos and the stories are never going to sum up what it’s like to stand on a glass shelf 153 stories up in the Sears Tower in Chicago
or to cross the Golden Gate Bridge
or look across the Grand Canyon
or come face to face with the space shuttle.

Mark’s story of Jesus is what’s called apocalyptic writing. We have come to use the word apocalypse to mean the end of the world, usually is some kind of disastrous fashion with an action hero trying to save the day, but apocalypse actually means something quite different. Apocalypse means an uncovering or discovery of great knowledge. Apocalypse is actually very close in meaning to epiphany, just bigger!

So, as Mark’s story unfolds there are these apocalyptic moments, events that reveal something much bigger. Something huge and important.

The first one is Jesus’ baptism when God speaks. “‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased”. Bits of information don’t really come much bigger than that, but at Jesus’ baptism we are never quite sure who hears these words from God. Mark suggests that the experience is Jesus’ experience alone. In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptised by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him.  And a voice came from heaven…. An apocalyptic moment for Jesus… Confirmation of who he is. And now an apocalyptic moment for us through the retelling of the story.

But I want to suggest something about this story we call the transfiguration. I think it’s in the wrong place. And once you realise that, and why it’s in the wrong place the whole thing makes much more sense.

Have you ever watched a film or read a book that starts with the final scene and then explains how we got there? I think this might be what Mark is doing here. If you have a Bible handy, if you flip to the end of Mark’s Gospel you’ll find that there are two endings. A short ending and a longer one. The short ending stops before anyone meets the risen Jesus. And that’s just odd… Why would you do that? That’s obviously what everyone else thought and so there is a longer ending that is an account of the risen Christ meeting the disciples. But what if there is already an encounter with the risen Christ in the story? What if that encounter is somewhere else? Like in chapter 9… right in the middle.

But why?

One of the strange things about following the lectionary, the readings for the week, is that when the church year changes we bounce about the story. We have spent the last few weeks working through chapter 1. All that stuff has happened in just one chapter so just imagine how much has gone on by the time we get to chapter 9.

Jesus has been healing and teaching and has started to talk about the end… It’s all getting pretty dark. He speaks about how he has to suffer and die and how his followers have to take up their own cross to follow him. It’s the only way. But the disciples aren’t listening.

Or rather, they don’t want to listen.
This isn’t what they signed up for.
Why can’t we just keep doing the healings and miracles and having everybody love us? Love you… we mean love you!

Is that how we feel? The journey to the cross is one nobody would choose to make.

It makes sense then for Mark to present us with the risen Christ here at the transfiguration in the middle of the story before taking us on that road to the cross.

We’ve spoken before about how the joy of Palm Sunday and Easter Day are hollow without the darkness of Holy Week. Mark, I think, agrees.

Mark is writing to a group of people who are most likely in Rome, right at the heart of the Empire, and who are and will continue to be hated and persecuted, tortured and killed for their faith, so for Mark it is hugely important to show his readers that this suffering is part of what Jesus calls us into. Jesus tells his followers to take up your cross… leave behind all that you know… sell all that you have and give the money to the poor.

Mark’s gospel is a hard and painful journey that leaves us much closer to the foot of the cross where Jesus dies, screaming in agony, wondering aloud why God has forsaken him. Peter himself will travel to Rome and will be crucified upside down there by the empire.

So, when you look at this strange transfiguration story as an encounter with the risen Christ, the universal christ, the Christ who was and is and is to come, it all starts to make much more sense.

Mark tells us this story to show Jesus’ place in things, in the Kairos of God’s time rather than the chronos of our time, by placing him there on the mountain with the other major figures of the faith story, Moses and Elijah.

Moses, the one, who despite all his misgivings and lack of confidence, led his people out of Egypt to the threshold of a new land and along the way met God on the mountain where God passes him by, just like he did with Adam and Eve in that story of the paradise of Eden. And Elijah, the prophet who spent his days holding the king and queen to account for all that he had done wrong, who after lying down under a bush and wishing to die because it was all just too hard, was cared for and restored to health by God and then met God on a mountain, not in the noise and fury of fire or wind or even an earthquake, but in the overwhelming silence, taken up to heaven in a chariot of fire. These are the greatest of all the prophets, who the stories say will return when the Messiah arrives…

The disciples are terrified. Who wouldn’t be?

Peter blurts out something about making shelters because, perhaps, there in the wilderness Moses had built a tent, the tabernacle, where God would come and meet them. But he calls Jesus Rabbi. There, presented with the Christ, the Messiah revealed in all his cosmic glory, Peter tries to put Jesus back into his ordinary box… rabbi. Teacher. One of many rabbis. Just a man. I can cope with just a man, even if he’s a man who does all kinds of stuff I don’t understand… but this… I can’t cope with this.

And in the middle of this apocalyptic moment where the disciples are full of doubt and wonder in equal measure, God speaks. ‘This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!’

This is who Jesus is, the son of God. The disciples heard it straight from God. The disciples can’t un-see of un-know it. This moment will travel with them way beyond the things that are recorded in Mark’s story.

But what of us? Are we left with the snapshots and second hand tales of an experience we might never have? Only three disciples went up that mountain. The other nine, just like us, didn’t share in that moment. But they, like us, still encounter this Jesus. This universal Christ who doesn’t only live on the pages of a book.

We meet him every day,
in the wonder of creation,
in the eyes of a friend or stranger,
in moments of compassion,
in a word of consolation.

Nobody ever said that following Jesus would be easy. Jesus himself said it would be difficult, costly even. But when the whole point is to completely transform the world then what would we expect?

Personal Jesus

Mark 1:29-39
As soon as they left the synagogue, they entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John.  Now Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told him about her at once.  He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.

That evening, at sunset, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons.  And the whole city was gathered around the door.  And he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him.

In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed.  And Simon and his companions hunted for him.  When they found him, they said to him, ‘Everyone is searching for you.’  He answered, ‘Let us go on to the neighbouring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.’  And he went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons.

It’s still light. Still daytime. The sun has not yet set.

Jesus has just been to the synagogue in Capernaum where he taught with authority and then performed his first public acts. He had authority they had never seen before and then to show what that authority looks like in practice he calls an unclean spirit out of a man who was also there with everyone else at worship.

Immediately after…
Mark is so frantic in his telling of the story, but it matters that it’s still the Sabbath.

Immediately after Jesus goes with his brand new disciples, Simon (who is so new he hasn’t even got his new name yet), his brother Andrew, and also James and John, all back to Simon’s house where they discover Simon’s mother-in-law is in bed ill with a fever.

It’s probably important to say a bit about how houses were arranged in Jesus’ time because I think we probably imagine that they are like ours with lots of separate rooms. From childhood now we value our private spaces where we can spend time alone in our room, but life just wasn’t like that in Jesus’ time. People lived in one or two rooms, much like we did until fairly recently in our history. Houses were open plan. That meant privacy as we understand it just didn’t exist. People lived communally. Extended families lived together. If people were rich they might build more homes next door as the family grew, but in the main people lived all together in one place.

That’s has lots of implications, not least the problem of infection control. We have grown very used to the language of self-isolation in order to stop the spread of disease but that wasn’t a practical option in those days. Contagious disease was a huge issue and the only way to do something about it was to banish sick people. They were sent away. And because there were very few effective treatments something like a fever could be, and still is, very, very dangerous.

At once they tell Jesus about her. Again the urgency. At once… But that begs a question… why?
Why do they tell Jesus?
He hasn’t healed anyone who has been sick like this. So what are they asking for?

Again we need to think about what these people believed… and to some extent still believe… about the cause of sickness.

The cause of sickness was sin. People got sick because they had done something wrong. The worse you had sinned the greater the sickness. And if Jesus could rid someone of something like an unclean spirit then he would be able to cure Simon’s mother-in-law because both in their limited understanding were about removing sin.

That’s an idea that Jesus will challenge. For him sin is the stuff we do that damages our relationship with God and therefore limits our lives.

I love the description of how Jesus helps Simon’s mother-in-law. “He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.”

It’s so simple. So stripped back. And yet like everything Mark writes it is so full of meaning.

Jesus takes her by the hand and lifts her up. And in so many ways that’s exactly what Mark’s gospel is all about. He lifts her up out of the thing that is limiting her life. He renews her. Jesus recreates her.

And people see it happen.

There’s always a sense that everything Jesus does is very public. Jesus is always on show, always in the public eye, always scrutinised by those watching. But this moment reminds us that in every encounter there is a personal Jesus there just for us.

It’s one of the great paradoxes of our faith. We recognise that our faith is found in community, in communion with God and with each other, but at the same time our faith is personal. Personal because our relationship with Jesus is ours… That’s personal… but I’d suggest that our faith is never private.

It doesn’t matter how many others are present, Jesus is there for each person.
And as Simon’s mother reaches out, through the touch of faith she is restored to life.

It quickly becomes obvious the wagging tongues have been busy. The Sabbath is over not when the clock strikes midnight but when the light fades and dusk comes. They have been waiting for the night to come and as the sun sets people start to arrive at the house all looking for Jesus. They want freed from all the pain they have become used to. The pain they have carried for too long.

And Jesus does the same for each of them as he did for Simon’s mother-in-law. He meets their needs. He lifts each one of them up.

The sick are healed and unclean spirits are driven out and silenced. Each person gets what they need from Jesus because to him each of us is somebody precious. Each of us is an individual with our own hope and dreams. Our own problems and issues. Our own joys and sorrows.

We should never presume to know what someone else feels. Even if we wanted to, you couldn’t walk in my shoes and I couldn’t walk in yours. Our experience is unique. It is ours and ours alone. But that never means that we are on our own.

Jesus attends to each of the people gathered there in turn. He treats each of them with compassion and dignity.

But it’s exhausting for Jesus. It takes a toll.

So, early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus gets up and goes to a deserted place to pray, to enjoy the silence away from the clamour and demands of the crowds. Again and again we see Jesus do this. Taking time out to recharge, to reconnect with God. It’s so important for him. I wonder if it is for us?

All of this takes place on the Sabbath and on the day after. The day of rest is followed by the first new day… the day where Jesus will rise from the tomb in the ultimate act of re-creation.

Sabbath is a hugely important idea. It’s not just a day off. It’s not even just a day where we worship God. Sabbath is holy. It’s the day of rest and recovery. Sabbath is a day of re-creation.

It used to be that everything stopped on the Sabbath. No work that wasn’t absolutely essential was done. That was taken to extremes and that’s an argument Jesus will have again and again. Keep the Sabbath holy is one of the commandments. It’s higher up the list than do not kill. I wonder how we managed to loose the sense of the importance of sabbath?

Other things crept in. I’m not at all for chaining up the swings and not letting anyone do anything at all on Sundays, but I do wonder if in our rush for convenience and ever increasing workloads we have been conned into seeing sabbath as a luxury rather than something that is completely fundamental to our wellbeing.

Walter Brueggemann suggest that we should think of Sabbath as an act of resistance. Doing nothing, producing nothing, buying nothing, is so counter-cultural we find it hard to even imagine what that looks like anymore. Practicing sabbath is standing against everything the world tells us is important and choosing instead to focus on what God tells us is important.

When you are training to run rest is included in any good training plan. It’s arguably the most important part. Without it you can’t improve. Without rest you can’t function properly. We all know the difference a good night’s sleep makes.

But the disciples come searching for him. Everyone is looking for you. They want more miracles. They just can’t get enough. Their need is so great. Their burdens are so heavy.

Restored by prayer and communion with God, Jesus is restored. He’s ready for what’s next.

Those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength,
they shall mount up with wings like eagles,
they shall run and not be weary,
they shall walk and not faint.

‘Let us go on to the neighbouring towns,’ says Jesus’, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.’  And he went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons.

I wonder if all that we do is rooted in our connection with God?
If we take the time to pray and to rest in God before we begin any task?

On this last Sunday of Epiphany perhaps this should be our realisation.
The authority Jesus has is God’s.
The strength Jesus has is through God.
The Good News Jesus proclaims is about God.
And all of it is so that we can restore our relationship with God.
So we can be renewed and lifted up into life in all its fullness.

What possesses you?

Mark 1:21-28

The first demonstration of power by Jesus in each of the gospels matters. They matter because they set out the theme of the Gospel. In Matthew’s Gospel Jesus preaches a sermon about the law. In Luke Jesus resists the temptations before being rejected when he preached in his home town. In John’s Gospel Jesus turns water into wine at a wedding, an act full of meaning and symbolism of his coming death and resurrection.
But in Mark’s Gospel the first thing Jesus does is perform an exorcism.
So for Mark what possesses us matters.

That might sound like a really strange thing to say but as we work our way through this brilliant Gospel this year we’ll discover, I hope, just how true that it. And why it’s so important.

Jesus has ended up in Capernaum. It’s a little fishing village on the north shore of the Galilee but it’s one of those places with some pretty significant geography. Moving things by water was much quicker than by land so the lake was busy with cargo going north and south between Lebanon and Egypt. People passed through.

It was also just round the lake from the Roman garrison at Tiberius… just far enough away to not have to worry too much about the soldiers. In the other direction to the east of the lake is Gentile country. Capernaum is quite literally on the edge in all kinds of ways.

The other thing Capernaum is close to is some natural hot springs at Tagba. Hot springs were, and still are, a place sick people go to try to get well. To get rid of the things that cause them pain.

So place is important. Capernaum will become Jesus’ base for his ministry and it’s position will allow him to spend time with all kinds of people from all kinds of places. But what matters first here is even more important.

Have you ever had an ear worm? You know, a song that gets stuck in your head and just won’t go away? Annoying, isn’t it! But think… if something so silly and meaningless as a song can get stuck in your head, then imagine what it’s like when something more sinister gets in there and won’t go away.

Possession isn’t like the horror movies. Possession is an idea that takes over your mind. This man is in the Synagogue, among his friends and neighbours. He’s there at the time when he’s supposed to be worshiping God, but his thoughts are elsewhere on whatever desires or obsession fills his mind. He’s thinking about what he wants, what he can have, what he can control.

The use of power and violence has become acceptable. Encouraged at some levels even. But when someone challenges you, suggests there might be an issue, a problem, then the reaction can be pretty strong.

Let me give you an example about the use of power. In the TV debates we now get during elections Jeremy Corbyn when he led the Labour Party was asked a question that potential leaders have been asked for decades now. Would you press the button? Would you sanction the use of nuclear weapons? His answer caused shockwaves… He said ‘no’. And people were appalled.

Now there are plenty of problems with Corbyn, but not being willing to obliterate another country and cause what would almost certainly result in a nuclear war that would destroy the world was apparently something that meant he was unfit to be Prime Minister. Just let that sink in for a moment. Not being willing to take actions that would at the very least kill millions and leave vast areas uninhabitable for decades was a problem.

Or, to give a more current example, there is little doubt that what is happening in Gaza is an appalling use of force… and the world is standing by, allowing it to happen. To happen with bombs and bullets made here.

Isn’t it amazing how ideas take root. Isn’t it fascinating how power takes over.

Jesus’ reaction to what possesses this man is straight forward. Come out. Leave him alone. It’s a healing. The end of his torment. The triumph of God over evil.

But like most of Mark’s Gospel this is about more that one man’s problems.

Here, right at the heart of this religious country, in the very place and at the very time where God is supposed to be first in people’s thoughts, is an unclean spirit.

This story is the story of Israel. The religious authorities collude with the Romans and with their own local leaders to maintain their own status and power. The people are distracted from God by all the things that still distract us… worry, self-reliance, pride, arrogance, fear…

For the rest of Mark’s Gospel Jesus will battle with all of that. He will stand up against all of the things that possess people’s minds: power, corruption, greed, ambition, fear, domination… Mark sums it all up in the idea of Empire. A whole system created to keep people in line, to direct their thoughts away from their problems by providing small distractions.

The Romas called it bread and circuses. Make sure the people have just enough to eat to keep them working hard. And when times get tough and they start to complain you give them some extra along with some entertainment. Some kind of spectacle to distract them. Add into that the idea of a threat to your way of life from ‘outsiders’ which only we can keep you safe from and you have a pretty heady mix that’s hard to resist… especially when there is also severe punishment for not towing the line.

But it’s all a lie. A great big illusion. It’s an idea that possesses us. So much so that 2,000 years later we still can’t imagine another way, even though we know it’s not right!

Our religious life is often no better. There’s a man with an unclean spirit there in the middle of their worship. He doesn’t turn up at the end. He’s there with everyone else. And they don’t notice.

Perhaps they don’t notice the unclean spirit because they all have the same issues. They are possessed too. They have all bought into the same lies.

Nobody can see the problem until someone so different, so outside of the system comes along. And as soon as they see Jesus teach with the authority, the power of God, they see the problem. It’s so obvious. The contrast is so great to what they have been told until now that they all see it.
And the man with most to loose reacts.

I think we all have a bit of that.
We know.
We know the things that get in the way of God. In the way of the world being how God intends it to be. And perhaps we are in our own ways possessed too by those things because we can’t or won’t stop. By a way of life that is absolutely and undoubtably destroying the planet.

It doesn’t have to be like this.

The Good News is that Jesus has authority over all of it.
We are not alone.
We are never alone.
Even when things seem at their darkest.
Even when things seem hopeless.
Even when it’s all to much…
God is there.
With us.
In us.
Loving us.

perspective

Jonah 3:1-5,10 & Mark 1:14-20

Perspective is another one of those wonderful words that has two meaning. It can mean: the art of representing three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional surface so as to give the right impression of their height, width, depth, and position in relation to each other.

Matt Skinner of Fuller Seminary tells the story of his high school biology teacher who made them draw a pencil at the start of each class to help them be able to draw field notes of flowers and animals when they went out. Drawing the pencil helped them to get the perspective right.

One day one of the students handed in this…

Slide of circle with a dot.

The teacher was confused. What is this? I asked you to draw a pencil.

It is, Sir, said the student. It’s the end!

And he was right. It was just a different point of view. A new perspective.

We know immediately when we look at a drawing or painting if the perspective is off. Mostly. And when we don’t, like in an optical illusion, our minds are scrambled. But perspective also means a particular attitude towards, or way of regarding something. Perspective is a point of view. And we all have one of those.

I wonder what has shaped yours? What has influenced what you believe and how you think about the world? What has informed your point of view?

This week I’ve been teaching the latest two groups of people who (like Anne and Yvonne) are learning about leading worship in their own churches and that’s one of the questions we were thinking about. Why do you think and believe what you think and believe and where did that come from?

The question is based on the idea that each of us is in some way everything that has ever happened to us. We are a collection of experiences and all of it, to a greater or lesser degree, makes us who we are.

That can be anything, from what someone said to us in the playground when we were 6, to the words of a song, the pages from a book, your parents, the films you watched, the places you have visited, the people you are related to, the people you are friends with, the newspapers and magazines or websites you read, and the jobs we have done. All of it influences us. It colours how we see the world. All of it creates our point of view.

It affects how we understand the world. Things like relationships, what we think is fair, our attitudes to power, money, sex, family, justice, race, gender… all of it… even what we think about God, is seen from our own particular perspective that we have developed throughout our life.

So, for example, when we hear the story of Jonah what comes to mind?

Maybe two things.
‘Being a Jonah’ is to bring bad luck.
And Jonah was swallowed by a whale.

When you hear the story of Jesus calling the fishermen to follow him, some of you will hear in your head the song you learned in Sunday School or sang at school assemblies… I will make you fishers of men if you follow me.

All you see is that bit of the story. The part someone else has told you about, probably a long time ago… and it has stuck. We think that we know it and so we don’t need to bother looking at it again because there’s nothing new there… is there?

I like when people tell me they don’t believe in God because then I get to ask them why not. What is it about God you don’t believe in. Mostly people say stuff I don’t believe either. And mostly the last time they gave any real thought to who or what God might be was a long time ago. It’s odd, because I’m pretty sure we don’t decide whether we believe in gravity when we’re 12… or quantum mechanics, or love, or… well pretty much anything really.

It’s a bit like thinking that a circle with a dot in the middle is what a pencil looks like. It is, but it’s far from the whole story.

If we do that then I think we have a problem. We won’t ever learn anything new. We won’t ever reconsider. We won’t ever change our minds.

Brian Cox, the physicist, was asked in an interview if he believed in God. His answer was brilliant. He said something along the lines of I haven’t seen any evidence to disprove the existence of God, so as a scientist I can’t say no, no matter how sceptical I might be. I have to be open to the possibility that new evidence will come to light.

We live in a world where that kind of openness is rare.

And that’s a huge problem for us today because reconsidering, learning something new, changing our minds is exactly what we are being invited to do.

Jonah is a brilliant story.

Johan is minding his own business when God tells him to go to Nineveh to tell them they are doomed if they don’t change their ways. Jonah didn’t want to do what God asked him because Nineveh was the worst place anyone could ever go. It was a terrible place full of violence. They have invaded their neighbours and committed awful crimes against them. Why would anyone want to go there?

And more to the point, why would I want to go there and tell them they are all doomed! That’s not going to end well for me. The only person who will be doomed is me!

So Jonah runs away in the opposite direction.

He gets on a ship and sails away. But there is a big storm and the sailors think it’s because of Jonah… so they throw him overboard. And then a big fish swallows him. And he’s inside the belly of the big fish for three days.

The fish spits him out and God tells Jonah again to go to Nineveh. And so he goes. Nineveh is massive. It would take 3 days to walk across the city. So Jonah walks for a day and in the morning he starts to tell the people that they have 40 days to shape up or God is going to destroy their city and all of them… and much to Jonah’s annoyance they believe him and they change their ways. Jonah goes and sits under a tree and sulks because God hasn’t obliterated Nineveh. Why? Because he doesn’t want them to change. He wants them to be punished!

It’s a morality tale. A lesson for all of us about the possibility of change even for people we either don’t think can change or who we don’t want to change because we wouldn’t know what to do with them if they did… We would have to change too.

There’s a great scene in the movie The Commitments when a two of the newly formed band meet at the dole office when they are collecting their unemployment benefit. Saxophonist Dean tells Jimmy “It feels better being an unemployed musician that an unemployed pipe fitter!” Perspective…

I wonder about the perspectives of those four fishermen Jesus meets.

They’re mending their nets getting ready for going back out on the Sea of Galilee to fish at night. It’s all they have ever known. They are fishermen. It’s not just a job. It’s their identity. They work with their family. James and John are with their dad, Zebedee when Jesus walks along and invites them to see the world differently. Come with me and I’ll make you fishers of people.

Come with me and I’ll help you to use what you are, what you know for a different purpose. Come with me and I’ll give you a completely new perspective.

The word that means change your perspective is repent. It means to re-think. To change your understanding. To get a new perspective. Come with me and I’ll open your eyes to how all this really works. I’ll show you why empire is a lie. How power and violence and wealth are illusions. How fame is false and how religion has been corrupted. And once you see it you can’t ever un-see it.

But to help them understand Jesus doesn’t use a load of big fancy church words. He talks in their terms. I’ll make you fishers for people. But that’s not the only option.

I wonder how that would sound for you? When Peter speaks on the day of Pentecost people hear his words in their own language. We’re surprise and confused by that but it starts here when Jesus talks fishing on the shores of the lake. What would Jesus say to you? hey you… yes you… come and follow me. Bring all that you are with you because we’re going to need it. Some of it will help you speak to people who have had the same troubles or the same joys. Come and see. The world looks different from Jesus’ point of view.

Listen To God!

1 Samuel 3:1-20 & John 1:43-51

The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.

I wonder if that is how it is today too?
I wonder if the word of the Lord is as rare in our day as it was in Samuel’s?
Is it true that visions are not widespread?
Why not?
Has God really stopped speaking?

Samuel was just a boy. And by that we’re talking Primary school age having not yet reached 12 years old when he would become a man. He lived in the Temple and it seems he sleeps right beside the Ark of the Covenant. That’s the box containing the tablets of stone Moses had brought down from the mountain with the 10 commandments on them. These are the most holy of holy things, the box that contains the promises of God… and Samuel is allowed to sleep beside them because he is a child and children were incapable of sin. To sin you had to have understanding, capacity. Children didn’t have that so Samuel was allowed where among adults only the High Priest would enter.

Samuel was already unusual. He had been dedicated to God by his mother, Hannah. She had prayed and prayed for this child and when he came she promised he would serve the Lord. When Samuel was old enough he went to live in the Temple as God’s servant. Samuel was the opposite of Eli’s sons who, despite being in line to become the High Priest, had no regard for God.

The boy Samuel would have been involved in the daily tasks of the Temple. He would have watched and learned as Eli, the High priest, went about his work; leading worship, presiding at the Festivals, accepting sacrifices, and settling disputes. Samuel literally eats, sleeps and breathes Temple life… but Samuel did not yet know the Lord.

How could that be?
How could a boy who was a gift from God, an answer to prayer, a child dedicated to God, a boy who spent every moment of his life in the Temple, who slept beside the Ark of the Covenant, how could Samuel not yet know the Lord? How could Samuel be around all that religion and not know God?

It’s a good question. It’s a question we might ask these days too. The answer might explain why the word of the Lord was rare and nobody had visions…

Observance.

Observance is one of those words with two meanings. It means “the practice of keeping all the requirements of law, morality, or ritual”. But it also means “the action of watching or noticing something”.

The first one is doing what you’re supposed to do. Keeping the rules. No more, no less. Observing the requirements doesn’t really suggest any kind of passion or even attachment. It’s just doing what you have to do.

Observing as in watching is kind of similar. You’re detached. You might be really interested in what you are watching, but it’s not yours. When we observe, we watch someone else’s practice or behaviour.

Observance is one of the things Jesus challenges. Sure, you might observe the law, you might do all the religious practices, but do you live it out?

Observance is doing the things because that’s what you’re supposed to do.
Observance is saying the prayers, singing the songs, attending the services.
Observance is watching, being present but not really taking part.
Observance isn’t any guarantee of actually meeting God, and it’s absolutely no guarantee of any kind of relationship.

Samuel’s daily life is both kinds of observance. We could say that Samuel is observing observance. He sees people rehearsing the required rituals, saying the stipulated sentences, and lending lip-service to the liturgy. They are quite literally going through the motions. Their hearts aren’t in it, never mind their souls. They are just doing what they have been told they need to do. Doing what is required.

One night Samuel is asleep in his usual spot, next to the Ark of the Covenant, when he hears a voice calling his name. He assumes it’s Eli because, well because who else would it be? He goes through to where the old man is sleeping and asks what he wants. Why did you call me? It wasn’t me. Go back to bed.

This happens again… and then again. It’s on the third occasion Eli realises what’s going on. What Eli does then is insightful and generous. It’s God. It’s God who is calling your name. When it happens again say, ‘Speak Lord, your servant is listening.’

I say it’s insightful and generous because God hasn’t spoken for a long time. Eli could just have sent the child back to bed. There’s nothing there. It’s just a dream. Go to sleep and leave me alone. But he doesn’t. Instead Eli prepares Samuel for something that he himself will not receive. God has already told Eli that he will be the last of his line. He will be the last High Priest of his house because Eli’s sons are a bad lot and Eli has done nothing to stop their blasphemy.

Eli could have been jealous of Samuel.
He could have tried to stop it happening.
He could have tried to keep control.
Tried to hang on to whatever power he had left.

But Eli doesn’t. Samuel, go back to bed… and wait.

Samuel does what he’s told. He goes back to bed and waits.
Ok. Sure. No problem.
I’ll just go and lie in the room with the box that the armies of Israel carried before them into battle. The box that laid waste to whole regions. The box that contained the very tablets God had written…
Go back to sleep next to that box and when the God who did those things speaks to you just say, ‘speak Lord, your servant is listening’.

I wonder what you would do if someone told you to go and lie down and wait for God to speak to you?

But Samuel does. He goes back to bed and waits. And God introduces himself. And Samuel listens. And their relationship begins.

And what a start it is…
The Lord said to Samuel, ‘See, I am about to do something in Israel that will make both ears of anyone who hears of it tingle’.

What an amazing image! Something is going to happen that is so amazing, so unexpected, so unbelievable that when people hear about it their ears will tingle. Our equivalent would be the hairs on the back of your neck standing up… or goosebumps.

Something incredible is about to happen!
But first… I need to tell you what will happen to Eli and his family.

When God is finished speaking to Samuel Eli wants to know what was said. He wants nothing but the truth because Eli knows that God is God, and whatever God has decided is the right thing to do, even if it means something difficult for him.

Eli wants Samuel to be able to tell him, one of the most powerful people in the land, the High Priest himself, that God has passed judgement on Eli and his family. If Samuel is going to be a prophet then has to be able to speak truth to power. He has to be able to tell the people what God wants, even to Eli who has been like a father to Samuel.

Hundreds of years later, someone else encounters God in an unexpected way.

Nathaniel is sitting under a fig tree. A fig tree is the symbol of Israel in John’s Gospel. Jesus himself says of Nathaniel ‘Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!’.
But Nathaniel is hesitant.
How do you know me? Because I don’t know you… apart from what my friend Philip has just told me. And he says you’re from Nazareth so, to be honest, my hopes aren’t that high!

Nathaniel is observant. An honest man who keeps the law and all the religious requirements, a man who watches what’s happening, but Nathaniel, just like Samuel, doesn’t yet know God.

I wonder if we assume that watching or listening each week to the hymns I choose, listening to the prayers I choose, hearing the bits of the Bible I choose, enduring 15 or so minutes of me talking at you about whatever I choose… I wonder, do you think that mean you know God?

The answer is no. No it doesn’t. This is absolutely no guarantee that you know God.
It could just be observance.
You could be just going through the motions.
You’re the only one who will know if that’s the case.
Are you observant…
Here, but not really?

Or are you like Samuel or Nathaniel… open to meeting God. Keen to follow up on the introduction…

The Bible talks often about fruitfulness. Jesus tells parables about a fig tree that doesn’t produce any fruit. Paul talks about the fruits of the Spirit.
Knowing God makes a difference. Things happen. Fruit is produced. Others are introduced to God.

Eli helps Samuel hear what God had to say.
It was the same for Philip… come and see… introducing Nathaniel Jesus. Come and see!!!

Philip couldn’t help himself. Come and see who we have found!

But Samuel could have ignored Eli and the voice calling his name.
Nathaniel could have just stayed sitting under his tree. Just carried on as normal.

I had supervision the other day and my supervisor Jane called me out on something. She asked me a brilliant question that I’ve been thinking about ever since. It’s such a simple question.

She asked me how my actual practice differs from my potential practice? What do I do… and what could I do. And why am I not doing all that I could do?

I’ve been wondering about it ever since. Why do I do what I do in the way I do it? Could it be better? How? And if I know it could be better… what’s stopping me?

I was chatting to my wife Avril about it for ages afterwards and eventually she asked the one question I’d been avoiding… have you prayed about it?

No. I hadn’t prayed about it. I hadn’t prayed about it at all.

We both burst out laughing. It’s not like you’re the minister…

That’s observance. Instead of being the first thing I did, prayer was the last option. If all else fails break glass…

But isn’t that what we do? God can be the last person we want to hear from. It’s not because God isn’t saying anything… We just don’t listen for God speaking.
I don’t think that’s because we aren’t interested. You are. You don’t need to be here. Nobody is making you come.

So is it because we just haven’t been introduced properly yet? That we don’t really know God? We’ve never moved beyond observing from a distance?

I think its hard to listen well because the world is full of noise. More than ever we are bombarded with images and sounds. Our lives are almost never quiet. People claim all kinds of things and steal our attention from what truly matters.

Kenda Creasy Dean tells the story of a class she taught at Princeton Theological Seminary on communicating the Gospel. The task was to think about how we could spread the Good News. How can we tell people about Jesus above all the noise?

The answers might be ones you would suggest. We could have adverts on TV and radio. We could have our own youtube channel, instagram, facebook, x, threads, tiktok… We could stand on the street corner with a megaphone…. or a great big set of speakers… So that’s what she did. She set up a room with all that noise, speakers, TVs, computers… and someone standing reading the bible. Of course the person reading the Bible couldn’t be heard over all the cacophony.

So, how could they make themselves heard?
What’s the answer? Make an even bigger noise? More advertising?

The answer that came from one of the students was profound in its simplicity… we need to get close enough to whisper.

Knowing God is about getting close. Close enough that we can share our hopes and dreams and worries and hurts and close enough that when God answers, when God whispers in that still, small voice, we hear. We listen. We pay attention.

And in that conversation a relationship grows. We get to know God. We get better at talking to God. At being honest. At being vulnerable. At listening and then acting, together with God.

Nathaniel’s life would never be the same. He blurts out a crazy declaration about who Jesus is… Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel! because that’s what the books say. That’s the right answer. It’s the right words. It’s exactly what an observant person should say.

Jesus tells him he’s going to find out what that actually means. And it is more than Nathaniel could ever imagine. And he will find out by being close to Jesus. By experiencing, not just observing from a distance.

For Samuel his closeness to God meant a life of telling the people the truth. And God let none of those words fall to the ground. And those who heard them… their ears tingled because Samuel was speaking God’s words.

I wonder what it would mean for you and for me? There’s only one way to find out. You could stay sitting under your tree… Or you could come and see… come and see what God is doing… listen for what God is saying, get to know God and spend time with God. Invite your friends, your family to come and see…

TRUTH Revealed

Christmas doesn’t last long, does it? We get the big build up in the long wait of Advent and then in just twelve days we come to Epiphany, where we remember the visit of the Magi some significant time after the birth of Jesus. But we remain in the season of Epiphany for several weeks.

Epiphany means ‘A moment of sudden and great revelation or realisation’ so, that’s our lens for this and the coming weeks. What will we realise? What will be revealed?

Today we are catapulted back into a story we have already heard at the start of Mark’s Gospel.

John, this charismatic prophet, is out on the edge of the wilderness, heralding the coming of one who was much greater than him.

The Messiah was here.
Now.
And they didn’t even know.

Jesus comes to John and asks for baptism. calling on people to confess… to tell the truth about who they are and what they have done so that they can begin the hard work of forgiveness and reconciliation. That’s an important task and it seems like there is a real appetite for it as people come from all over.

But there is a reason John is calling on the people to sort themselves out beyond it being a good thing to do, which it is.

Something is about to happen that will change everything…
Or should that be ‘someone’ is about to happen?

We started reading at the beginning of Mark’s Gospel again today, just to remind ourselves how quickly Mark moves to the arrival of Jesus on the scene but before we get to what Mark tells us, I want to say something about how he tells us.

Mark is the oldest of the four Gospels, these stories about Jesus we find at the start of the New Testament in our Bible. And that’s something we take completely for granted… that we have bibles, ebook, apps or websites where we can just go and read this story. Until the invention of the printing press in around 1440 almost no-one had a book. Just for some context, the index of books in Cambridge University Library in 1557 lists fewer than 200 books. It now has over 8 million.

When Mark started to write down the story of Jesus it was at a time when nobody did that. It was hugely expensive. The materials were hard to come by and so things that were written down were precious. Instead, people memorised stories. We call it an oral culture. Stories are told and retold in a format that is easy to remember. So writing down the story of Jesus is in itself a revolutionary act, something fitting for a Gospel that is probably the most revolutionary of all.

So, this written account means that new believers will have a written text to make sure they get the stories right and that people don’t start making stuff up or getting confused or all the things that we know happen in the passing on of information. Send up reinforcements becomes sent up 2 and four pence…

So, these words are all important. Mark doesn’t waste a single one. His writing can seem brief, almost too short sometimes, but he manages to pack in much more than we often see at first glance. I’ve spoken before about how the first sentence, The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God is one of the most politically loaded sentences ever written and Mark just keeps on going.

We’ve spoken about John the Baptist, so let’s spend our time today looking at what happens when Jesus enters the story, and what sudden and great revelation or realisation we might discover.

In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptised by John in the Jordan.  And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him.  And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’

Perhaps we should start with what’s missing. John doesn’t say anything. In Mark’s telling John the Baptist says the stuff about not being worthy to untie Jesus’ sandals before Jesus even appears. There is no conversation. No identifying of Jesus as the one. Nothing. We are told where Jesus came from and that John baptised him in the Jordan.

There’s an unspoken question that hangs around this story. What was Jesus doing before this? I mention this question, not to be flippant, but because this is the first time we have met Jesus. Mark has no story of the birth and at first look there is none of the preamble of John’s Gospel about all that in the beginning stuff. Fully grown Jesus just wanders up from Nazareth and gets baptised.

Why?

Why would the Son of God need or want to be baptised?

We speak of Jesus as being without sin, so what is he doing taking part in a ritual that is about confessing your wrongdoings?

But that’s not primarily what is happening, is it? Confession if you remember back to when we spoke about it at the start of Advent, is actually about truth-telling. Confession is one of those words that we use in different ways. We confess what we have done wrong, but we also confess what we believe. And both of those are about naming the truth. Naming the truth is the start of something, the first step.

So, when Jesus comes for baptism, it’s not because he has a long list of stuff he needs to get off his chest. For him this is a moment of truth-telling… God telling the truth about who Jesus is.

But look at who does that. It’s not John and it’s not Jesus either.

And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him.  And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’

Right. Ok then. That was unexpected!

There’s a lot going on in those two sentences.

Let’s start with ‘The heavens are torn apart’. I’ve already said that Mark’s gospel is revolutionary, and not just because Mark has written this stuff down. Mark’s gospel is a highly charged political statement advocating a complete overturning of how the world works. So, we have to ask, how does that happen? How do things change?

It starts with truth-telling.
Someone tells their truth, their experience of the world and the way that something impacts on them. So, for example, in any civil rights movement, people speak out about an injustice or the application of prejudicial rules and how that affects them.

But telling that truth isn’t the only thing that happens. Just like where confession is the first step, it needs to lead to change or what’s the point? Change comes when the people hearing that truth realise their part in that and decide to work to get rid of the unfairness or prejudice.

These great movements for change start small. They start on the edges. The boundaries, because boundaries are the line where on one side people are in and on the other side they are out. Change is about boundary-breaking.

So, there, on the edge of the wilderness, at the Jordan, the boundary between the wild and the tame, the rough and the smooth, the place of wandering and the place of settlement, as Jesus comes up out of the water…
breaking the boundary between wet and dry, water and air…
The heavens torn apart…
The very boundary between us and God is ripped in two.
The Spirit, like a dove, breaks through
and a voice from heaven speaks…
‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’

The truth has been spoken.
The confession has been made.

But what now?

Just as with any other confession we now have a decision to make. What will we do with this truth that has been told?

Will we deny it? Will we decide that it didn’t really happen? Will we pretend that it somehow doesn’t mean what it says? Or perhaps we will think that it isn’t a truth for us, here… now?

Will we try to disprove it?
Deny it?
Undo it? Trying our best to reseal the heavens and restore the boundary because to be honest, that would be better, wouldn’t it?
I mean who wants God wandering around among us?
That’s way too much responsibility.
That demands far too much from us.

Because the telling of that truth means we have to take seriously the fact that God has come to us in Jesus and that God is interested in reconciliation with us to transform the world.

But here’s the difference. Usually when someone who has been excluded or treated unfairly speaks their truth we can decide not to listen, or that their truth isn’t our problem, or that they aren’t even really telling the truth because their experience is so far from ours that we can’t even imagine what it must be like. So we ignore them and hope it will all go away. Or we punish them for exposing something that we all knew but went along with because it benefits us. We can decide not to move the boundary. We can decide to continue to exclude.

But that’s not quite the truth of this event.

God has decided to rip open the boundary. There is nothing we can do about it. We can’t put it back, no matter how hard we might try… and we have tried pretty hard throughout history!

The boundary is forever broken…
God is on the loose.
And that’s the truth…
And if that revelation or realisation doesn’t change everything, then I don’t know what could.