Letting Go, Letting God

Like Bob Geldof, I’m beginning to have a problem liking Mondays.


Monday tends to be the day that most ministers take off – but for me, it’s the day when I try to get my preparation for the following Sunday done. The house is quiet, and I’ve usually got an uninterrupted stretch of time to work in until the kids come home from school.


But recently, things haven’t been going so well on Mondays. I’m ten years into the parish, fifteen into ministry. That’s getting on for 600 sermons, having been round the lectionary cycle five times, when I’ve chosen to follow it. After all that, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that you’ve said it all before. Luckily you lot seem to have short memories!


And recently, when I’ve sat down to study a text I’ve found it harder to focus in on the one or two things that need to be said. My minds full of ideas, but trying to grab a couple of them and pin them down isn’t getting any easier. The comedian Bill Bailey did a tour called Dandelion Mind a few years back, and that’s a pretty good image of a Monday for me, at the moment.


So there I am, for five or six hours on the trot, trying to study and pray and discern and write, and not making a whole lot of progress, and before I know it, there’s the rumble of the school bus and there’s Isla knocking at the study window with a big smile on her face.


And I want to be a good dad for her, and smile back. But too often on Mondays, I don’t feel like smiling. I try to be present for her, but I’m weighed down by the fact that after several hours of reading and thinking, all I’ve got is a paltry 300 words and no real clue where the sermon’s going. And once the after school stuff’s done, and I head out to an evening meeting or a visit, that’s Monday gone and I haven’t even got the hymns picked because I don’t know where I’m going with the sermon yet.


I want to do better and to be better – for everyone. For my family, for you folk in the pews. But too often I end up feeling tense, irritable, resentful, clenched. No good to anyone. Incidentally, that’s something you could pray into for me – pray that I’ll get the help I need from God to make preparation more of a pleasure and less of a pain.


But my saving grace in all of this is that I know you could tell your own stories like this too. Different things would set you off; different scenarios would pull your trigger, but I bet you know what I’m describing. Those times when you’ve tried to get a grip on something and all that’s happened is that it’s ended up getting a grip on you – your mood, your behaviour,  your outlook.


We need a word from Jesus this morning. We need some light to help us live better.


The disciples come to Jesus bearing good news in this morning’s reading. He’s just entered Jerusalem at the start of what we now call Holy Week. The crowds are pressing in to see him; wondering what this miracle-worker from Galilee is going to do next. The Pharisees are rattled because they can’t explain away the things he’s doing, and the people are following him in their droves.


And that’s the point at which some Greeks, who were there for the Passover, approach Philip to see if he can arrange a meeting with Jesus.


Now we know nothing about these Greeks – they may have been  converts to Judaism, but it’s more likely they were just ordinary Gentiles, curious about who this Jesus was and what he’d been doing. Maybe they’d seen him run the animals and the traders out of the Court of the Gentiles and wondered if, for that reason, he’d have some sympathies towards them.


But whatever their thinking, the fact of their approach is met in a strange way. Jesus doesn’t give Philip a yes or a no to a meeting as we might expect. Instead, he launches out on this strange monologue about the fact that his hour has now come. 


So what’s he on about? What is his ‘hour’ and why has it come now?


Well all throughout John’s gospel we’ve heard time and time again that Jesus’ hour hasn’t yet come. When his mother draws him into the wine crisis at the wedding at Cana, he says ‘Why do you involve me, woman? My time has not yet come’. When the authorities unsuccessfully try to grab and silence him on a couple of occasions, John tells us that Jesus manages to escape because his time hadn’t yet come.


But now, standing in Jerusalem on the cusp of his destiny, his hour has finally arrived. Even as the leaders of his own people are plotting against him, we find Gentile Greeks coming to ask for an audience with him – a sign of just how far his influence was spreading. And their approach would have had great significance for Jesus. The Messiah, Abraham’s seed, was to be a blessing to all nations. And here they are – representatives of the nations coming to seek him out.


His hour had come.  But what was the hour going to bring?


Well at first it sounds like honour and success. “The hour has come for the son of Man to be glorified’ he said. And with that we might have expected palm branches, brass bands and  tickertape parades. But we know enough about Messiahship now not to be surprised when Jesus’ idea of glorification turns out to be very different from the world’s idea.


His glory will be found in obedience that leads, ultimately, to death.His glorification looks for all the world like ignominious failure. But it’s not. Because he knows that it’s only as the seed gives itself up in death that it can generate more seed and more life.


It’s only as Jesus gives up his life in death that others can take on his Spirit and continue his work - scattering God’s word and God’s ways across the whole earth.


Jesus knows that this is how things have to be; and yet now that his hour has come, even he is afraid.


John has no record of Jesus’ agony in Gethsemane, but these next few verses take us into the same emotional territory: “Now my heart is troubled – and what shall I say? Shall I say ‘Father, do not let this hour come upon me”? But that is why I came – so that I might go through this hour of suffering. Father, bring glory to your name”


Jesus’ glorification doesn’t come by might or by power. By force of will or force of arms. It comes with quiet self-surrender and hands that are open to accept the will of God for his life, even if that sees those hands nailed to a cross. He lets go of everything that might hold him back so he can let God get on with his work.


And there, I think, is the word for you and for me for today. Let go and let God.


Listening with 21^st century ears, we might well misunderstand what Jesus is saying in verse 25: He says “Those who love their own life will lose it; those who hate their own life in this world will keep it for life eternal.”


What does he mean? Surely we’re in the business of loving life, not hating it? And if you hate your life why would you want to keep it for all eternity anyway!?


Well what he’s talking about here is the need to hold things lightly, with an open hand. If we’re guarded and possessive about things, life will close down on us and we’ll be lessened as people. If we’re generous and free with what we have and who we are, life will begin to open up for us and we’ll be enlarged.  It’s the kind of upside-down thinking that’s so characteristic of Jesus’ teaching – where the first are last, the lowly lifted high, and those who give  end up receiving back a hundredfold.


When Jesus says to hate your life, he doesn’t mean it literally any more than when he says elsewhere we’re to hate our mothers and fathers. There’s a wee bit of the bible you didn’t know!

 

Luke 14:26 “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple."


It’s hyperbole. He’s not telling us to hate the people we love, or our own lives. He’s saying that our love for God should be deeper than all those other loves. Our love for God should be the thing that defines us; everything else is secondary.


If we have deep roots in God, we don’t need to keep clinging on unhealthily to other things that tell us who we are – appearance, wealth, looks, abilities, status, family. We can enjoy them, but with an open hand, knowing that they are not the last word on our lives. God has the last word, and he calls us his beloved.


The ancients had a word for that kind of thinking. They called it the practice of detachment. A rootedness in God which helped keep everything else in proper perspective. It’s a lesson all of us need to keep re-visiting in life, time and time again.


I’ve told you before about the time when I was living in Glasgow and  thought I had a call to go and minister on Tiree in the Western Isles – everything seemed to be coming together beautifully.


And I remember going to see my prayer mentor, Sister Joan, when all this was fermenting in my mind and I was really excited about it. And after the opening pleasantries, I launched into this big spiel about how this just seemed so right and how it would be exactly what we were needing and how God seemed to be leading us there.


And eventually she broke into my monologue and said “Paul – hold on a wee minute. Am I still here? You haven’t looked at me for about 20 minutes”. And she was quite right. I was away and running with this idea, but I was so engrossed in it I’d treated the real live person I was sitting opposite like a cardboard cut-out.


I was holding Tiree too tightly. Instead of pinning my hopes on God’s timing and God’s provision, I was pinning them all on this idea. This was the solution! This was the answer! It was only when I unclenched my hand, and did some research and prayed some more that I came to realise that actually, it wasn’t the answer.


Sometimes the way forward involves recognising that something’s become too important to us and that we need to let it go before God can get on and use us.


I wonder if there’s something you need to be letting go of this morning? Something you’ve been holding on to so tightly that your knuckles are white and your mind’s getting tired from the strain?


What are the worries you’ve brought here this morning?

Work, family, health. How you feel about yourself?
 

Where do you find yourself angry? Nursing anger towards someone, or at a set of circumstances? How is that affecting you?


Are there things that have become too important to you? How you look? What you own? How others perceive you?


No-one’s saying these things don’t matter, but don’t be like me in the room with Sister Joan. So intent on what I was clutching that I didn’t reckon with the deeper reality of the God who is always holding us. The God who is bigger than any circumstance we happen to find ourselves in.


I finished the bulk of this sermon at half past three on Monday afternoon. There’s probably much more I could and should have said. There always is, when you’re a preacher. But I decided to unclench my hands and my mind, trust God for the rest, and go and greet my daughter off the bus with the kind of welcome that she deserves.  Life’s too short to let worries keep us from being the people we really ought to be.


As I was getting ready for this morning I remembered a lovely song by Tommy Emmanuel called Today Is Mine. It’s a song that speaks into this kind of territory, and we’re going to take a few moments now in silence to listen to it together and reflect on its wisdom. 

 

Prayer


Today is ours, Lord – this day you have blessed us with.

So grant us the serenity
To accept the things we cannot change;
Courage to change the things we can;
And wisdom to know the difference.

Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
Taking, as He did, this sinful world
As it is, not as we would have it;
Trusting that He will make all things right
If we surrender to His Will;
So that we may be reasonably happy in this life
And supremely happy with Him
Forever and ever in the next.

Amen.

Jesus at Capernaum

I wonder how many sermons you’ve heard over the years?

 

I wonder how many of them you actually remember!

 

That’s the kind of thinking that can get a preacher down, until you remember that sermons are a bit like meals – they’re there to nourish in the short term and they only tend to stick in the memory if they’re especially good or especially bad for some reason.

 

Two sermons I once sat through came to mind this week as I read Mark 1:21-28 – one of them bad and the other good.

 

The bad sermon was preached at Rannoch church near Pitlochry. Rhona and I were staying up there years ago before we had kids, and I think it was a visiting minister who was taking the service.

 

I was fresh out of divinity school; an experience which furnished me with a set of academic tools to help me dissect the Bible, but didn’t – in all honesty - do my soul much good. And the sermon that day in Rannoch wasn’t so much a sermon as a dissection.

 

Here we wield the scalpel of reason; here we use the swab of superstition to mop up this frankly unbelievable part of the story. Here we pull the thing apart so we can see how it all works, and look – here’s the little bit that’s left over. Aren’t I a clever boy?

 

It reminded me of a story by Herman Melville where a ship’s surgeon, Dr Cuticle, has to operate on a sailor with appendicitis. He’s delighted at having something more challenging to deal with than usual, so he corrals several of the other hands to help him. And as he cuts through the tissue to reach the diseased organ, he points out all the interesting anatomical details to his helpers, who’ve never seen the inside of someone’s abdomen before. He’s absorbed in his work, and evidently very good at it, but his attendants are, to a man, not impressed but appalled. The poor patient, by the time he’s been sewn up, has already died on the table. In his enthusiasm to instruct and maybe even show off a little, Dr Cuticle hadn’t actually noticed that his patient had expired, and the sailors were too polite to point it out.

 

That sermon in Rannoch died on the table too. But we were all far too polite to say so.

 

The other sermon I remembered, the good one, was at a conference held in Birmingham in 1989. The keynote speaker was a man called Floyd McClung, and although it’s more than 25 years on, I still remember that talk like it was yesterday – his humour, his insight, his stories. The son of a pastor in America, he spent his twenties working with young people who were dropping out and heading off on the hippy trail through the middle east and asia, looking for drugs, free love and enlightenment. And after that he relocated to Amsterdam with his young family to start a ministry on the edge of the red-light district, where something like 16,000 women are involved in the sex trade.

 

The vision was to start a work which would see these women treated as people, and not just objects. Over time the family became known and trusted in the community. Floyd remembered one occasion when some of his sponsors were visiting and as he gave them a tour of the area he became more and more embarrassed because everywhere he went, these working girls would smile and greet him by name and he wasn’t sure what the visitors would make of it!

 

And the message that day in Birmingham was simple. No tearing the text apart, no erudite biblical criticism. He took a few verses from the book of Ezekiel and applied them. He showed us how Ezekiel went and sat with the exiles of Israel in Babylon, hearing their stories, sharing their pain.

 

Where are the Christians today who will go to where the need is and simply sit with people, he asked. Who’ll take the time and earn the right to be heard, through costly love?

 

It’s a message that still stays with me 25 years later.

 

And those examples came to me this week because of what Mark says about Jesus’ teaching in the gospel passage we’re looking at this morning.

 

Jesus, Mark tells us, taught with authority, not like the teachers of the Law. And when they heard his teaching, the people were amazed.

 

So what does he mean by that? How was Jesus’ teaching different?

 

Well, I wish we knew!  Because Mark doesn’t tell us what he said that was so amazing! And that’s typical of Mark – he records much less of Jesus’ teaching than the other three gospel writers. And maybe that’s deliberate. Maybe, for Mark, it was more to do with how he said things than what he actually said.

 

Synagogue services wouldn’t have been so different from what we do here in church, in terms of content. Readings, prayers, singing songs of worship. But when it came to the preaching and teaching part, the established method was for a scholar to rehearse what Moses had said, or what an eminent Rabbi had said and offer different interpretations. It was all about what had been said in the past.

 

But today, we find Jesus speaking to the folk in Capernaum with a quiet, compelling authority that was all his own. He undoubtedly used the scriptures, but from them he spoke out of his own understanding, his own experience. He didn’t lecture to inform them, or perform to entertain them. He preached, to turn the hearts of women and men back to God.

 

His authority came from who he was – the incarnate, divine Son of God, yes, but also a worshipping, serving, learning human being. A person who grew in his faith in the same way we do – through prayer, through study, through experience and the struggle to integrate all of that into a purposeful God-directed life.

 

He spoke with the authority of one who was genuinely living a life centred on God; and when people live that kind of life, it can’t help but spill over into action. Action that’s going to stir things up, and create ripples.

 

Today’s not the day to get into the whys and wherefores of evil spirits, but imagine the tension that disturbed man’s screaming must have caused in an atmosphere as quiet and attentive as this one. And notice what the spirit shouts at Jesus – ‘“What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Are you here to destroy us? I know who you are—you are God's holy messenger!”

 

Who’s the ‘us’? What do you want with ‘us’?

 

If you know the story of Legion, you’ll know that there are other places in the gospels where people are said to be possessed by several evil spirits. But here, apparently, there’s only one. So who’s this ‘us’?

 

Is the spirit speaking on behalf of all the other evil spirits whom Jesus will deal with in his earthly ministry? Well, that’s possible, but I think it’s broader than that. And less comfortable.

 

Think about who else could say those words “What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Are you here to destroy us?”. Anyone, any power, protecting their corner against God’s seeming interference could equally well use those words.

 

What about the religious leaders, who were already getting angry at the commotion that John, and now Jesus, had been causing?

 

What about the Romans, who found governing Israel about as easy as juggling flaming steak knives in a barrel of gunpowder.

 

And what about us? Isn’t there a part of every one of us which wants to stay back, keep our distance, walk away because we fear where actually following the Galilean might take us? Isn’t what we’re hearing the perennial cry of the human ego when faced with the cost of discipleship? “What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Are you here to destroy us?”

 

The answer, you’ll be glad to know is ‘no’. Jesus says as much in John 3:17: “For God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.” He’s come to mend, not to destroy, though he never promises that the process will be easy, either for him or for us.

 

“Come out of him” Jesus orders, and with cries and convulsions, the spirit departs from him.  And the people once again are amazed. The authority in Jesus’ words has been backed up with authority in his actions. And word about him spreads like wildfire throughout the region Galilee. Which might seem like a good thing…..

 

…..but amazement and fame were never what it was about. If it were Jesus could quite happily have gone along with the devil and chucked himself off the highest pinnacle of the temple to wow the crowds.

 

No. He wasn’t there to amaze or entertain. He was there to turn the hearts of women and men back to God. His teaching, his actions, his authority, were all focused on that one aim. Everything else was secondary.

 

So where does that leave us today? What does a text like this have to say to you and me?

 

Well we live in an age that’s grown hugely sceptical and mistrustful of authority, and not without cause:

 

Scandals over MP’s expenses; Clerical Child Abuse; Operation Yewtree; Hillsborough; Phone Hacking; MP’s pay rises; scandals involving the Royal Family; Illegal Wars and Sexed-Up Dossiers; Bankers Bonuses. Harold Shipman; Cyril Smith……… Leon Brittain……. Question Mark.

 

Any wonder we’ve become sceptical about authority?

 

And any wonder the church, which quite likes its place as part of the establishment, is coming under consistent attack too? We’re living in the last years of the church’s privileged position in society and some of us think that might not be a bad thing because instead of assuming respect we may actually have to go out there and earn it.

 

In my last year at university I had to labour through a tome called A Handbook of Pastoral Care. It was dull as ditchwater. But I’m perennially grateful for one wee story it contained. It was of a young minister who was a year into his first charge and couldn’t understand why folk weren’t doing his bidding as he’d expected them to, because  - after all - he was the minister.

 

An older colleague took him aside and said ‘Son, you have exactly as much authority in your church as your people vest in you. It doesn’t come with the role. You have to earn it.”

 

And what’s true of the minister in the church, is just as true of the church in the world. The days when we could rely on the status of the church, or assume that when we said ‘The Bible says’ people would automatically listen, are long gone.

 

Any respect we’ll generate in our communities has to be earned, just as Jesus earned it that Sabbath day in Capernaum. Parading around in the increasingly shabby robes of Christendom isn’t going to cut it anymore.

 

We’ll earn the respect, and maybe the attention of the people, when each and every one of us, like Jesus, is able to speak from personal experience about what we know of God, and let our faith spill over into purposeful action in the world.

That’s the kind of authority that can still get a hearing in 21^st Century Britain. The authority that comes from personal experience and that leads to purposeful action.

 

And before you start thinking that the only people with something worth sharing are the experts, the together people – whoever they are! – let me end with two stories that suggest otherwise.

 

The first is from Peter Nielson, an eminent thinker and speaker in the Church of Scotland.

 

Peter tells a story about taking a trip to Skye with his wife, and having breakfast with some other tourists in their B and B. They got talking about their jobs and when Peter confessed that he was a minister (and confessed is probably the right word), one of the others – a Swiss scientist – gave him a hard time, How could an intelligent person possibly believe in all that mumbo jumbo these days?

 

Before he could give a reply, Peter’s wife, who was in the throes of depression, spoke up and said “All I know is that if God wasn’t real, I couldn’t make it through the day”. End of argument.

 

Later on that evening, an American couple who’d been part of the conversation came up to Peter and said how impressed they’d been by what they’d heard at breakfast time “But it wasn’t anything you said” they added.”It was what your wife said. We’ve never heard anyone speak so honestly about their faith”.

 

We’re sent not to persuade with powerful arguments or impress with purple prose. We’re sent as witnesses to share, honestly and simply, something of what it means for us to be followers of Christ. How we encounter him in our lives.

 

The second story comes from the author Francis Spufford who writes about sitting nursing a cappuccino in a café one morning, after a tortured night of arguing with his wife. They’d parted for work with things still unresolved and he found himself in that dark, dank place of guilt, anger and uncertainty that all of us visit from time to time. His reality had shrunk to the cave of his own misery.

 

And then the person making the coffee put on a CD, and it was Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto – the middle movement – the Adagio. And although he knew the piece very well, it struck him that morning in an entirely fresh way.

 

“If you don’t know it” he writes  “it’s a very patient piece of music. It goes round and round, in its way, essentially playing the same tune again and again, but there is a messageless tenderness in its deep waves. It’s not music that denies anything. If offers strong, absolutely calm rejoicing, but it does not pretend there is no sorrow. On the contrary. It sounds as if it comes from a world where sorrow is perfectly ordinary, but still there is more to be said. The world has this tenderness and beauty in it, as truly as it contains your unhappiness, and you’re deceiving yourself if you don’t allow for the possibility of this.

 

An encounter with the divine reality beneath the surface of things, right there in the ordinariness of his local café. It doesn’t have to be big and flashy to be meaningful. You don’t have to have all the answers to all the questions. You just have to be walking closely enough with God to have something to share from your own experience. And be living out what you believe in with consistency and integrity. Because faith without deeds is dead, says the apostle James. As dead as Dr Cuticle’s appendectomy patient. As dead as that sermon I heard in Rannoch church.

 

There’s a lot of rubbish on facebook – some of it posted by myself – but every now and again you do come across a wee nugget of gold that’s worth holding on to and I came across one this week. Someone had posted these words :

 

“The mark of an effective church isn’t how many people come, but how many people live differently as a result of having been there”.

 

So here’s a question to end with, and to take with you back into the week ahead.

 

“If someone asked you why you believe and what difference it makes to your life, how would you answer them?”

 

Folk may not have much time for the institution of the church any more; but by the grace of God, our words and our actions can still carry authority, if we walk closely with him.

 

 

 

 

The Calling of the First Disciples

Nobody’s quite sure how or when they came for John, but we know why. He’d been telling the truth about King Herod and his affair with his brother’s wife, a truth no-one else had had the guts to talk about in public. And as we all know, when you’re clearly in the wrong, it hurts to be confronted with the truth.

 

But luckily for Herod, if you’re one of those who holds power, you can get to hurt right back. And so the men in black came for John; and my guess is they came at night, just as a few years later they would come for Jesus in Gethsemane at night. Fewer people, less fuss. Best all round.

 

“Well, that’s that” people said the next day, as the latest batch of pilgrims trudged back home, unbaptised and disappointed. Surest way to kill a snake is to cut its head off. No John, no movement. It was nice while it lasted.

 

But then, says Mark, came Jesus, fresh from his 40 days in the desert. Lean in body, full of the spirit. And undaunted by John’s imprisonment. A lesser man might have paused for thought, following in John’s footsteps, but Jesus didn’t think twice. He knew what he had to do, and he knew that it wasn’t just prison that he was destined for.

 

And so he went to Galilee to preach the Good News. Galilee – home of those awkward, stubborn northerners who had little time for the sophisticated, moneyed elite of the south. Always the first to be trampled on when bigger nations turned their greedy eyes towards Israel. Always on edge, with Gentiles living around them and among them. Always practical and down to earth in the way they approached their lives. They were fishermen, farmers and tradesmen – proud and canny. Nobody’s fools.

 

And it’s among these folk, not the movers and shakers of Jerusalem, that Jesus begins his ministry, fulfilling the words of Isaiah, written seven centuries before his birth: “he will honour Galilee of the Gentiles, by the way of the sea, along the Jordan—

²    The people walking in darkness

    have seen a great light;

    on those living in the land of the shadow of death

    a light has dawned.”

 

The light of God comes to them in person, though at first you’d have had to look closely to see it. And it’s to these hard-bitten people he brings God’s Good News:

 

“The right time has come, and the Kingdom of God is near! Turn away from your sins and believe the Good News!”

 

And with these words, Jesus is telling them two things – he’s telling them what’s happening among them and he’s telling them what they need to do about it.

 

It’s the right time – he says. The Greek word kairos means an opportune time, a time that’s ripe with possibilities. The time when all the things that have been spoken about before are going to come to fruition. God is doing a new thing among them, and they need to get ready for it!

 

And they need to repent- which literally means to change their thinking. They need to turn away from everything that’s false and worthless in their lives and turn back to God so they can be free to embrace everything that he has in store for them.

 

And it’s hard for us, at a distance of 20 centuries to hear those words and feel the impact they’d have had in that culture, but Jesus’ day was a time in which God’s people had largely acquiesced into hopelessness or apathy.

 

It had been 300 long, silent years since the last prophet, Malachai, had spoken. There had been centuries of invasions and guerrilla wars against their oppressors. Everything they held holy had been trampled on. And now, this latest catastrophe – being annexed by the monstrous power of Rome and ruled by a puppet King whose only genuine concern was for his own self-advancement.

 

God seemed to have given up on them. There was no hope of anything new. All the doors seemed to be closed.

 

And then Jesus comes with this word. God is acting NOW. This is the time, this is the place. You need to get in on this. You need to get ready.

 

It seemed like Israel had reached a dead end, but Jesus is reminding them that with God, all things are possible. Rowan Williams puts it this way: “To believe in a God who is Almighty means there’s nowhere God is absent, powerless or irrelevant; no situation in the universe in the face of which God is at a loss. An open door exists in the heart of every situation because of who God is”.

 

An open door.

 

Remember the heavens opening at Jesus’ baptism?

 

Remember the veil of the temple being torn in two after his crucifixion?

 

Remember the stone that was rolled away on that first Easter morning?

 

Open doors.

 

God is here, God is now, God is opening doors. Get ready for it!

This is the Good News Jesus is bringing to the people; and more than bringing – showing, in everything that he says and does.

 

And I believe those are words we all need to hear today. We need to remember them. Because life has a way of closing in on us at times, and what saves us is knowing that God always gives us a open door in the heart of every situation.

 

And that should inform our prayer in those times. When we find ourselves feuding with our own bodies because we’re getting older, or we’re falling ill. When we get the letter that tells us what we were most afraid of – that the results weren’t good, or the application failed, or that we’re surplus to requirements. When the sparkle in a relationship seems to be dying, or life has lost its lustre, or a besetting sin seems to dominate us, or a situation seems beyond remedy. Lord, where’s the door?

 

We’re not looking for a magic wand. We just need to know that there’s hope. That these things we’re living through won’t swallow us whole.

We need to find the door. Because when we follow you through it, you lead us into new life, both now and in the life to come.

 

I think of a man I spoke to many years ago whose actions nearly cost him his marriage. He came to me in despair because he’d put everything he loved in jeopardy. But there was a door. For him it looked like confession and repentance. For her, it looked like forgiveness and a willingness to trust again. They were both willing to go through. They saved their marriage. It looks stronger than ever now.

 

I think of a minister friend who tore his Achilles tendon a few years back in the middle of one of those awful winters. Six weeks in a stookie that looked like a spaceman’s boot. Suddenly his world shrank to the limits of his incapacity. But God helped him find the door that led to life in that situation. Enforced rest; time to read; insight into what it must be like for those with a permanent disability; the chance to develop humility and deepen relationships by having to rely more on others. A whole corridor of doors!

 

I think of another man, towards the end of his life. As hemmed in by infirmity as it’s possible to be. Weak, limited, powerless. All the doors are closed on him. Only they’re not, he’s discovered. Lately he’s discovered a door that leads to the presence of a divine father who’s wise, generous and kind beyond his imagining. He’s encountering God in new ways, even as he prepares himself for the end. Which is, of course, just a beginning.

 

 

There’s a door. There’s always a door. Because “The right time has come, and the Kingdom of God is near!”

 

If you don’t need a door this morning – thank God that you’re in a good place. But if you do, take heart and be encouraged. Because the good news for today is that THIS is the time and THIS is the place where God is at work.

 

We find Jesus this morning not in the rarified, incense-filled cloisters of the temple, but among the stray ends of frayed rope, the gutted fish and the laughter and curses of real men on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. He meets us right in the thick of it. In our real lives. It’s there that he brings us this news.

 

And he speaks that same news into the reality of our lives this morning – all the complexity, all the busyness, all that weighs us down, and he says ‘Take heart. This is the time, and this is the place where God is at work”.

 

But we too have our part to play. He tells us we have to repent and believe that Good News. And it’s hard for us to hear that old hackneyed phrase in the way it was meant; but what Jesus is saying here isn’t just ‘say sorry for your sins’. It’s certainly that, but it’s far far more. Change your thinking, he’s saying. Stop living an effectively godless life, where the Almighty’s nothing more than a nodding acquaintance you say hello to on a Sunday morning. That’s fooling no-one  – least of all him.

 

You’ll never really know God until you realise that this is an all or nothing thing – he asks you to love him with heart, soul, strength, and mind. And it’s only when we do, when we make that choice to put him first, that we begin to discover the sheer wonder and delight of knowing him and experiencing him partnering with us in life.

 

The church, over the years, has been faithful in proclaiming what we’re saved from – from sin and death, and the eternal consequences of both. We’ve been less good at talking about what we’re saved for, though that deserves equal mention and maybe even more in the particular era we’re living in.

 

In short, we’re saved so that we might become genuinely, fully human; and if you want to know what that looks like, the Christian response is very simple ‘take a look at Jesus’.

 

Look at how he was with people – his honesty, with friend and enemy alike; his compassion for those in need; his resolve to take people as he found them; his gentleness, his courage; his enduring love. 

 

And look at how he was with God – that ongoing communion with the Father; the wisdom and power that flowed from it; his determination to see God’s will be done, regardless of the personal cost to himself.

 

This is what we were made for – love for God, love for neighbour.

And when we enter the way of faith through the small door at the foot of the cross, it isn’t just that our sins are dealt with as though that were the end of the story. What opens up to us is a whole new life with God at its centre. That’s what it means to be a Christian. That turning from and turning to that I’ve been speaking about a lot in recent sermons.

 

I learned that as a teenager, when I decided to follow Christ, and I’m still learning it now, thirty years later.

 

And I remember a song by the Waterboys from all those years ago that summed up exactly what I was feeling and thinking as I took my first few faltering steps into an adult committed faith. And I still can’t hear it without getting a lump in my throat.  It’s called This Is The Sea, have it played as you leave the church this morning.

 

These things you keep
You'd better throw them away
You wanna turn your back
On your soulless days
Once you were tethered
And now you are free
Once you were tethered
Well now you are free
That was the river
This is the sea!

Now you say you've got trouble
You say you've got pain
You say've got nothing left to believe in
Nothing to hold on to
Nothing to trust, Nothing but chains
You've been scouring your conscience
Raking through your memories
Scouring your conscience
Raking through your memories
But that was the river
This is the sea!
Now I can see you wavering
As you try to decide
You've got a war in your head
And it's tearing you up inside
You're trying to make sense
Of something that you just don't see
Trying to make sense now
And you know you once held the key
But that was the river
And this is the sea!

Now I hear there's a train
It's coming on down the line
It's yours if you hurry
You've got still enough time
And you don't need no ticket
And you don't pay no fee
No you don't need no ticket
You don't pay no fee
Because that was the river
And this is the sea!

 

Leaving behind the security of the river, so you can explore the vast expanses of the sea.

Finding an open door, when you thought that all the doors were closed on you.

 

Whatever the image, the Good News is the same. God is at work, here and now, and he has more in store for us than we could ever imagine.

 

“This is the right time. This is the right place. Change your thinking and believe the Good News!”

Jesus' Baptism

Life is full of Kodak moments. I don’t know if you can still talk about Kodak moments in the era of digital photography, but you know what I mean.

 

Times when families are together and good things are happening Birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, holidays. Things you’ll look back on with fondness in the years to come if you ever knuckle down and actually order the prints. Most of us have a drawer somewhere that’s overflowing with those kinds of photos. Some of us, at the more organised end of the spectrum, might even take the time to arrange them into an album.

 

Lots of Kodak moments in life. But this morning we’re thinking about a different kind of moment. Those which come to define our lives. In an average lifetime you could probably number them on the fingers of both hands. Your wedding day, if you’re married. The birth of your children. The death of a close relative. The day you made a particular decision which proved, with hindsight, to be life-changing. The day you got that particular piece of news.

 

Some of those moments come with pictures we can look back on, but most don’t. Most are just pasted in the album of our memories. Moments of deep signficance in our journey through life – some bringing gratitude and joy, others sorrow and pain.

 

Defining moments.

 

Baptism, in the life of the early church, was just such a moment in a person’s life.

 

Church writers from the first couple of centuries tell us that preparation for baptism normally took about two years of catchesis – or teaching. During that time the initiates could attend church, but they were screened off from the rest of the congregation. They would fast, along with the rest of the church, for forty days during Lent, and then have several days of intense fasting and prayer before their baptism, which usually took place at Eastertime in a solemn night-time ceremony.

 

It involved removing your clothing, being immersed in water, confessing your faith and being anointed with oil. You renounced your old way of life, and put on the new, along with the clean robes that awaited you once the ceremony was over. You then went joyfully to join the congregation in your first Eucharistic meal on Easter Morning.

 

After that kind of intense preparation, and in such a hostile cultural climate, is it any wonder that Baptism was such watershed in a person’s life? It was defining.

 

And although today’s gospel reading comes from even earlier days, it’s clear that John’s baptism, the precursor to Christian baptism, was seen in a similar light.

 

Why did folk flock into the desert to see John, I found myself wondering? Why did so many go down to see this maverick preacher and submit themselves to the public humiliation of the baptism he was performing?

 

No hiding you see – broad daylight. Confession of sins, though we’re not told how loudly and to whom. This wasn’t for the faint hearted.

 

Why did they go? What did they find in what John was doing that they didn’t find in the established rituals of the temple?

 

I’ve thought about that a lot this week, and I think that the most likely answer is change. The promise of change always gets our attention. Think about the books that will be flying off the shelves over the next couple of weeks as we enter a new year. Experts telling us how to lose weight or quit smoking or finally take a hold of our lives or practice mindfulness.

 

There’s nothing new under the sun. The promise of change has always piqued our interest. And the people of Israel were ripe for it.

 

They’d had the system of animal sacrifices for generations, and they’d followed the letter of the law. But the letter hadn’t touched their hearts. It hadn’t set them free from their doubts, or their guilt, or their tendency to sin. For many it had just become a routine – a necessary  bit of sin-management. Like washing the dishes after a meal.

 

The writer of the letter to the Hebrews puts it this way:

“the same sacrifices repeated endlessly year after year, cannot make perfect those who draw near to worship. ²If it could, would they not have stopped being offered? For the worshippers would have been cleansed once for all, and would no longer have felt guilty for their sins.

 

But they did feel guilty – a thousand years of animal sacrifice for forgiveness of sins had shown them that they needed more than animal sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins! They needed a change of heart that they couldn’t muster themselves. And that’s what John was offering.  A once-for all cleansing and a new life that would follow. A before and an after. A defining moment - out there in the desert, where so many of Israel’s defining moments had come.

 

And they came to see him in their droves.

 

Some out of curiosity – John was the first prophet for something like 300 years. Folk believed that God had stopped speaking until John came among them, dressing, eating and preaching like one of the prophets of old – like Elijah. He was something to see.

 

Some came out of jealousy – the religious leaders marched down to the Jordan to make their presence felt and bring the collective weight of their disapproval to bear. But they were sent home with a flea in their ear. Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath, you brood of vipers? he roared at them.

 

But most came to go down into the waters, and even as John lowered them under, he cried ‘this is only the beginning. Another one is coming, one more powerful than I am. I’m not even worthy to be his servant and untie his shoes. I’m baptising you in water – he’ll baptise you in the Holy Spirit.”

 

And so John made way for the coming of the Lord.

 

And when HE came, he came, first of all, to submit to John’s baptism. And that puzzled the gospel writers as they reflected on it and set down their stories. Why would the Son of God, the sinless one, need a baptism of repentance?

 

There are two answers, it seems.

The first is to remember that repentance isn’t just a turning away from sin, it’s also a turning towards God – a setting of our minds on the new way he’s leading us in. Jesus had no sin to repent of, but here, he’s certainly setting his mind on following the way God had prepared for him. Like all of us who say we have faith, he had to set his own will aside so he could discover and live out God’s will for his life. There’s a turning from, but also a turning to.

 

But secondly, theologians have always held that Jesus’ submitting to John’s baptism was a powerful statement that he wanted to identify with us and stand alongside us in our sins. He wasn’t ashamed to be seen among those who’d failed and knew it. They were the very ones he’d come to save. It’s the sick, not the righteous who need a doctor, he went on to say.

 

And this baptism, this submersion with and for God’s beloved but fallen people, was the first step on the long journey that took him to his greater baptism, in the waters of death itself. When the concrete boots of our sin and selfishness dragged him all the way to the murky depths on that first Good Friday.

 

That’s why he came; that’s why, today, we find him making his way down to the Jordan along with all the others.

 

My good friend Paul Grant preached a wonderful sermon on this passage last year, and as I was preparing for today I couldn’t get it out of my head. So rather than try and paraphrase it, I asked Paul if I could just read a section of it, because he paints the picture far better than I ever could.

 

 

 

He had seen God in a beggars twisted limbs and in the folk who gave him nothing. God was there in the hopping sparrows pecking seed in the farmer’s fallow field. God passed when the fingers of the wind stirred the surface of the lake, or made the cedars sway.  He had heard God creak in the burden of labourers, waiting for a day’s work to come. He had heard the divine echo after the steps of a widow, who for a few pennies would service the garrison.

 

He had seen and heard God walk the face of the earth in sign and symbol. And now God led him here; to the river of new beginnings. To John and the Jordan; alongside the line of stragglers; the hopers the half believers the shivering women and men dripping wet; dipping their lives into a muddy river to churn up a repentance that might bless them with new beginnings.

 

Alongside them, Jesus stood, and watched each one disappear under the muddy waters and rise up again out of its churning to ask John for new direction.

 

And John would answer – do you have two coats, brother? Then give one away. Are you a guard on the border? Then don’t fleece the travellers. Be content with your pay.

 

They left the river dripping, half suspecting that their newfound repentance might end before even they were dry. Because when you’re a tax collector you’ve got kickbacks to pay or you lose the contract. And a widow with no income can’t feed her children on a good name.

 

Leaving the Jordan they wondered how long they could keep the resolution they had made before John and before God.

 

Standing in line - one of them - Jesus immersed himself in the dirty water. One with them.

 

And his held breath was a prayer for whores and tax collectors. For fat landlords and the landless. For bent judges and bankers with bonuses.  The guilty, too afraid to stop drinking. For the sad, who long forgot where they had left joy in their lives. For the battered and the bruised and the disillusioned., for the doubting and unbelieving and unrepentant. For the innocent and the deluded. All of them held in the prayer breath that Jesus took in, as John lowered him under the muddy waters of the Jordan.

 

Under the muddy water, Jesus held the whole world in a deep breath. Held even the lives that were not yet born. And he asked God this – what if I carry their sin in my soul?

 

What if I repent for the hurters and share the pain of those they’ve broken? What if I atone for the greedy and fill myself with the poverty of those who hunger? What if my baptism draws the lost world to me, that there you may find it again?

 

Jesus rose from the water and immediately an answer came. The heavens parted as though cut by a subtle knife, and from the hidden beyond came all the colour of God’s mercy. The music of forgiveness. The beat of justice, the laughter of peace. The riches of grace. The tenderness of welcome.

 

And like a flurry of snow, or a feather landing, the full gentleness of God’s clout swooped down on him, with the power to begin a perfect repentance on behalf of the line of stragglers, the doubters and half-believers, the shivering women and men dripping with the water of the Jordan. A perfect repentance for those not born yet. The power to complete this lands on Jesus as gently as a dove.

 

And in that moment Jesus hears it said – this is my Son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased. Heard it said before he had done anything. Before he had healed or taught, before he had blessed or welcomed. Before he had told a single story of the kingdom, or gone the long lonely road to the cross. Before he rose from the waters of death in his resurrection. Before all of this, Jesus hears his name spoken as Beloved. As delighted in.

 

And all those who have entered in to baptism in his name find the same love, find the same delight of God spoken over them. For we are baptised into him, and into his death. And if we have shared in his death, we will surely also share in his life.

 

 

 

Sprinkled, dipped, infant or adult – these are the wrangles the church gets into over baptism, but they’re all secondary.

 

Today as we tell the story of the Lord’s baptism the only thing that matters is that we remember that we too are baptised.

 

Let it define you as God’s beloved, forgiven child. And let it define not only what you turn from, but what you turn to in all the years that lie ahead.