Radio Silence

My good friend Paul Grant and I are having a spell of mutual appreciation in the sermon department - the past few Sundays I have been drawing on a series of Paul's on the Woman at the Well, and have refrained from posting as the work is largely his. Normal service to be resumed soon! Thanks for continuing to look in.

God's Questions - "Can These Bones Live?"

The writer Frances Dewar tells of an old house near to where he stays in Durham. Above the front door there’s a painting of a sundial and underneath it are painted the Latin words Dum Vivimus, Vivamus. While we are living, let us live.

I wonder what those words awaken within you.

While we are living, let us live.

For many of us, just hearing those words will be enough to put us in touch with an unnamed yearning that’s a huge part of being human, but that’s rarely if ever vocalised.

We want to know how to live.

No-one really teaches us how to live any more, if they ever did in years gone by.

Once born, we quickly learn the basics of keeping ourselves alive, and if we’re fortunate enough to have good family and friends around us, we can learn a good deal from watching how they live. But that’s not enough to silence the inner voice which tells us that there’s more to know about this business called living.

For all our achievements and accomplishments in life, we know, if we’re honest with ourselves, that we still haven’t got it all together. We’re homesick, not for a place or for a time, but for that integrated, joyful, life-giving person that we long to be.

We catch glimpses of that person now and again, but most of the time we’re so caught up in the business of living and making a living that we forget to live and settle for mere existence. But the yearning doesn’t go away, it just goes underground for a while.

It surfaces in those moments when we know we’ve acted shabbily and wish we'd done better, or when we catch a glimpse of something in another person which doesn’t provoke envy but makes us want to be better people than we are.

It surfaces when we find ourselves wondering where the years have gone, and how we’ll use the time that remains.

It surfaces when we realise that there are depths of creativity or potential within us that we haven’t even begun to tap into.

It never goes away, this yearning. All of us, no matter who we are, yearn to know how to live.

And our text today speaks into that yearning.

Ezekiel’s not a book or a person you’ll be familiar with, I’m guessing. He’s one of the Old Testament prophets, and prophets were a rare breed. Priests were the respectable folk who mediated religion for the masses; by nature, they were conservative.

Prophets had no such inhibitions. They were freelancers; radically allied to God, but never wedded to the religious institution. And they were mavericks to a man – not given to rituals and ceremony but to thundering dreams and visions that carried echoes of eternity. They delivered words from God that no one else dared to say, or even dream of.

Their shuddering prophesies tended to come as warnings when Israel fell into bad ways, or as visions of comfort and hope when all seemed lost.

At the beginning of the 6th century BC, the time that Ezekiel spoke his words, all seemed lost. The Holy City of Jerusalem had been so thoroughly destroyed it was said that a man could drive a plough right across the middle of it and never hit a stone. Thousands of Israelites had been slaughtered, thousands more carted off to Babylon as slaves. Sitting weeping by the rivers; homesick for what they had and for what they’d hoped to become. This was the end, they thought. God had washed his hands so thoroughly of them that there was surely no way back.

Not so.

Against this background of utter hopelessness came Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones: a powerful metaphor of what God would do for his people, Israel. They were dead and buried in Babylon – but he’d pull them together again. He’d rejoin bone to bone, wrap them in flesh and skin, fill them with the breath of life and bring them back to where they belonged. That was his word to them through Ezekiel.

So in historical terms, this prophesy is spoken, first of all, for Israel.

But there’s a part of me, this morning, that wants to speak those same words over the dry bones of the Church of Scotland.

Numerical decline, increasing marginalisation, internal divisions, financial problems, a dearth of spirituality. This is exile, folks. This is Babylon.

I’ll always remember the damning critique I read in a newspaper a while ago which described our situation as one elderly, decrepit congregation collapsing into the arms of another elderly, decrepit congregation until eventually we’re all gone.

Hard words; and these are hard times we’re in. But if it gets us thinking less like priests and more like prophets it might not be a bad thing. If we stop obsessing about running the institution and start listening for what God is saying to us in the midst of this crisis, I think we have good reason to hope. Something new will rise from the bones of the old.

There are some fantastic things going on in many of our churches – many within our own Presbytery. There is growth and innovation, there are people taking risks. But none of that makes the headlines.

Don’t believe the hype. We have eleven folk joining us as new members today, we had four more just before Christmas. There are others who are ready to think seriously about what it means to be a Christian and to take the step of joining our church. To borrow a phrase from Mark Twain, the rumours of our demise have been greatly exaggerated!

But that’s not where we going today.

Today, this isn’t about Israel, or about the Church of Scotland.

It’s about you and me.

“Can these bones live?” God asks Ezekiel.

And the truth is, faced with the half-formed thing I call my life, I ask that question of myself all the time. And I’m pretty sure you do too.

Can these bones of mine live?

You know the echo of that question in your own heart. So where do you go to find an answer?

You’ll get plenty of answers from our culture. You want to live? Have an affair. Have another pint. Gok your wardrobe! Get in shape. Buy more stuff. Take a holiday. Do up the house. Then you’ll be living.

Really?

None of those solutions penetrate below the surface of who we are. None of them give us life in our bones, in the marrow of who we are.

It strikes me that there's no shortage of folk wanting to tell us how to find the life we crave, but precious few who are actually living it.

The author Brian McLaren parodies the way the world tries to pursue life and says “It’s ironic, isn’t it? Our bodies grow fatter, we’re all on diets and our souls, meanwhile, go wispy and anorexic for lack of attention”.

“Can these bones live?”

On the evidence of our eyes, we might be tempted to doubt it; but from today’s reading, the answer God gives is a resounding ‘yes’. Yes, they can.

How?

Through God’s Word and God’s Spirit. It’s the combination of word and spirit acting upon us that brings us to life.

“Prophesy to the bones” God says. “Tell them the truth! Tell them to listen to the word of the Lord”.

“Prophesy to the wind” God says. (wind/spirit same word in Hebrew and Greek) “Tell the wind to come from every direction and breathe life into these bodies”.

Word and spirit together bring life - That's what Ezekiel is telling us this morning.

Let me unpack that for you a little bit.

What is this book that’s carried in and deferred to each Sunday in every act of Christian worship? We call it many things – Bible; Scriptures; Word of God.

Is it a rule book? An instruction manual? Required reading for the entrance exam to heaven?

None of the above. The thing this book is most like is a mirror.

And the thing about a mirror is that you don’t read it. It reads you.
It shows up every blemish and wrinkle; every strong line and beautiful curve. It’s utterly uncompromising and honest, and if you can bear to look in it, you quickly discover the truth about yourself for good and for ill. It tells us how things really are.

The Christian way has always been that we find out the truth of who we are by looking into the mirror that is the word of God; not by listening to the voices of our culture which judge and evaluate us. Those voices don’t speak the truth about you and me. God’s word tells us the truth about who we are, and that’s why our first discipline is to learn to engage with it.

But we all know, those of us who’ve tried to read the Bible, that it’s a hard book to read! If you start in Genesis and try to read through you’ll do fine ‘til you get to Leviticus and Numbers at which point you’ll lose the will to live!

There are lots of ways to read the Bible and some are more ambitious than others, but the most important way is to learn to read devotionally. Don’t try to work your way through the whole thing if you’re just starting out. It’s far better to take a few verses and meditate on them prayerfully. Ask God what they’re saying and how they apply to your life today. How will you live in the light of what you’ve just read?

This is where the Spirit comes in. The word of God comes home when the Spirit takes some insight or some phrase you’ve read, or maybe some experience you’ve had, and makes it come alive for you. Makes it speak into your life with a particular significance. You feel enlightened and empowered by what you’ve realised. In your bones you feel a little bit more alive, not just to God, but to the world, to the people around you and to your own life. You feel stronger and ready for what’s coming next.

That kind of reading, along with prayer, is the basic discipline of the Christian life. Putting yourself under the word of God so that his Spirit can show you the truth about yourself and point you towards life. You’re reading not for information, but to help you find that life that you’re yearning for. And if you learn to read that way, you will find it.

The apostle James says as much in the only letter that bears his name:

“Do not deceive yourselves by just listening to his word; instead, put it into practice. Whoever listens to the word but does not put it into practice is like a man who looks in a mirror and sees himself as he is. He takes a good look at himself and then goes away and at once forgets what he looks like. But those who look closely into the perfect law that sets people free, who keep on paying attention to it and do not simply listen and then forget it, but put it into practice — they will be blessed by God in what they do.”

They will be blessed, says James. They’ll discover how to live.

In a few days time getting church magazines, and there’ll be a colourful leaflet in it like this called E100.

Remember I was saying how hard it can be to get into the Bible, well the geniuses at Scripture Union have made it easy for us because what they’ve done is boil the whole thing down to 100 essential passages that will give you the whole flow of the story from Genesis to Revelation.

Each passage will take about 10 minutes to read and there are 50 from OT and 50 from New. The idea is that you commit to prayerfully reading through them over a time period of your choosing, help you develop the kind of practice I’ve been talking about today.

If you’re a member – you’ll be getting one with your magazine, but there will be some at the door as you leave: if you’re here today as a visitor, please feel free to take one on your way out. It might just help you find more of the life that you’re looking for.

Amen and thanks be to God.

God's Questions - "Can You See Anything?"

For this Sunday, with the kids present for Thinking Day, I tried to take a more dialogical approach to the sermon. We talked our way through the text together, thinking about it as we went along, before I drew things together at the end.

Hard to work this up into something bloggable, so I’d suggest you read the passage for yourself (Mark 8:22-26) and then engage with the questions as I put them to the congregation.

22 They came to Bethsaida, where some people brought a blind man to Jesus and begged him to touch him.

WHO’S ‘THEY’? – (Jesus and his disciples)

WHERE’S BETHSAIDA? – (North eastern corner of Galilee)

“Some people brought a blind man to Jesus”

DO YOU THINK HE CAME WILLINGLY?

(Hard to say. Stigma associated with disability in ancient world, couldn’t work, so possibly very keen.

Then again he might well have been asking “What will this mean? What if it doesn’t work?)

“and they begged him to touch him”.

WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE AND SOUND LIKE WHEN SOMEONE BEGS FOR SOMETHING?

The kids in the congregation know all about begging for things! The Greek is parakaleo which means ‘along or beside’ and ‘call out’. They would have been imploring Jesus to do something.

WHAT WERE THEY BEGGING JESUS TO DO? Touch him.

WHY? They knew there was healing in his touch.

It could be they were genuine friends with the man, but it’s equally possible they’d just collared the first blind guy they found in the marketplace and brought him to Jesus to see what he’d do. Curiosity value.

WHAT’S THE NEXT THING JESUS DOES?

23 Jesus took the blind man by the hand

SO JESUS TOUCHES HIM! DOES HE GET HEALED STRAIGHT AWAY?

No. And there’s something important for us in this.

For Jesus, it wasn’t all about the healing. It was about the person who needed to be healed.

His power didn’t just spill over like magic on anyone who happened to be close to him.

Plenty of people touched Jesus over his lifetime. They cradled him as a baby, they gave him piggy backs as a child. They shook his hand and embraced him as a man; they punched him in the face and held his arms and legs down as they nailed him to a cross. None of them, to the best of our knowledge, were magically healed.

It didn’t work that way. His power to heal was never impersonal. It always flowed in the context of a relationship of faith. When people came to him, genuinely seeking help and open to God, that’s when things would happen.

Perhaps that’s why he made the next move “and led him out of the village”.

If Jesus were just looking to impress people, to make a name for himself, he’d have stayed there. But he went to the other extreme – tried to get him away from the hungry, inquisitive eyes of the villagers. He didn’t want to turn this poor man into a circus sideshow. This happens a lot in Mark – it’s called the Messianic Secret. It seems at times that Jesus was wanting to keep his identity quiet from the masses.

23 After spitting on the man's eyes,

That’s a strange thing to do– only mentioned three times in gospels.
Sounds weird to us, but it you cut finger in all likelihood the first thing you’d do is stick it in your mouth.

In the ancient world people believed there were healing properties in spittle. Jesus could clearly heal without this, so maybe he was doing it for the blind man’s sake to fulfil his expectations of what a ‘healer’ would do?

23 Jesus placed his hands on him and asked him, “Can you see anything?” 24 The man looked up and said, “Yes, I can see people, but they look like trees walking about.”

NOTICE ANYTHING STRANGE ABOUT THAT? How would he know what trees looked like? This suggests had probably had sight at some point. Maybe it was a cataract-type problem?

25 Jesus again placed his hands on the man's eyes. This time the man looked intently, his eyesight returned, and he saw everything clearly. 26 Jesus then sent him home with the order, “Don't go back into the village.”

Told to avoid village presumably for the same reasons Jesus led him out of the village to perform the healing…….

That’s our story for this morning, as we find it in Mark – and in fact, Mark is the only gospel writer who includes this particular story. None of the others record it, though they would almost certainly have known about it.

So why did Mark keep it in?

Well at this point in his telling of Jesus’ story, this is exactly the story Mark needs. In the chapters leading up to chapter 8, he’s spent a lot of time showing how blind the Pharisees were to who Jesus was, and even how blind the disciples were to who he was. No-one seems to understand.

But in the verses just after the ones we read this morning, Peter finally gets it. He begins to see. “Who do people say that I am?” Jesus asks him, and Peter replies “you are the Messiah, the son of the Living God”.

Finally, after weeks and months and years in his company, Peter is beginning to understand just who this man is.

Like Peter; like the man healed of his blindness, the light dawns on us slowly. We move from not seeing, to seeing poorly, to clear-sightedness as we journey with Jesus: but it all takes time. Time, and presence: and anyone who tells you otherwise is pulling your leg.

There’s good news and bad news for us in today’s reading – and that’s the double-edged nature of this thing we call the gospel.

The bad news is that to a greater or lesser degree, we’re all partially blind.

Not pleasant to hear that, is it? But even a moment’s reflection confirms that it’s true.

We’re blind to our own faults most of the time. We can spot a speck of dust in someone else’s eye at twenty paces, but we rarely notice the plank that’s hanging out of our own.

Burns knew what he was on about when he wrote: O would some power the giftie gie us to see ourselves as others see us.

We’re partially blind to our faults; but we fail to see to our true nature as well. The Bible tells us some amazing things about who we are – that we’re made in the image of God; that we’re chosen and precious in his sight; that we’re made just a little lower than the angels; that he loved us enough to send his son to the cross for our sake. Things that give each one of us a monumental worth. But we’re blind to it, most of the time, and end up scrabbling around for worth among the scraps that the world has to offer.

We’re partially blind to one another, of course. If we struggle to recognise God’s image in ourselves, how much harder is it to see God in anyone else? We ‘see people moving around’, but they ‘look rather like trees’ sometimes. Objects rather than persons. We find it almost incomprehensible that behind every human face their lives a human consciousness every bit as unique and valuable as our own. Every bit as easily hurt and wounded as we are. And from this blindness comes most of the ills human beings do to one another.

And we’re partially blind to God too. Seeing and yet unseeing, Believing, and at the very same time, filled with unbelief. But enough of the bad news.

There is a healing to be found. Some old friends have brought us to this man, Jesus. Abraham has grabbed one arm, Jacob the other. Moses raises his staff and parts the crowds. Joshua pushes us on, while David makes a few jottings for a Psalm he’ll write about it later. Isaiah promises that it will all turn out for the best.

They stop, mid-flow, and a man’s hand, a carpenter’s hand, grasps ours and leads us away from the hubbub and the noise, beyond the limits of the village. We keep going ‘til even the last of the stragglers falls behind, too embarrassed to keep up the chase, and at last we are alone.

We’ve spoken little, but enough for him to know that this is what we want. We want to be able to see. To see our faults and not be broken by the sight of them. To see our true nature, and aspire to become it. To see our neighbour, and recognise God’s image within them. To see God for ourselves and be able to return his loving gaze.

We know these things take time. Some miracles are slow burners, and this one will take a lifetime and more to run its course. But we want to see – to see things how they really are.

He spits and presses two wet fingers against our clenched eyes, blood pulsing through them as he holds the pressure on and murmurs a prayer.

And then it’s over.

"Can you see anything?" He asks, peeling away his hands. “Yes Lord”, we reply. “Enough to know that we want to see more”.

Amen and thanks be to God for his word.