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.