Trinity and Community

He had a smile in his eyes as he said “Paul, I’m finally beginning to understand that my family are not the enemy”.

Few people I know love their families more than my friend and colleague Matt Canlis, so why on earth would he be describing them as the enemy?

Well he was saying it tongue in cheek; but the comment came out of the tension that all clergy with family experience. The tension between the demands of work life and the demands of home life, because in our vocation those two are pushed together more than they are for many people.

You work from home much of the time, and there are aspects of your work that need extended periods of concentration and peace. It takes most of a day to nail a sermon. There are complex problems and strategies to think through. There are pastoral situations needing attention. There’s time you need to spend in reading and prayer so your work doesn’t degenerate into soulless ecclesiastical management.

Now imagine it’s the summer holidays. Everyone’s in a holiday mood -  except you. You’re still working. Working at home, where your four lovely but very noisy children, all under the age of 10, are all wanting a piece of you. Your darling wife keeps gently, or not-so-gently, reminding you about all those wee jobs you’d promised to do when you had the time, and adding a few more to the list every time you pass her in the kitchen.

Is it any wonder that most clergy with family wonder every now and again if it’s too late to sign up for the monastic life?

How on earth are we expected to be about the kind of work we’re called to, when there are days when we can’t seem to get two minutes peace without some kind of interruption?

Too often, it can feel like our families are the enemies of our vocation.

And that’s why Matt’s comment was a breakthrough. “Paul, I’m finally beginning to understand that my family are not the enemy”.

I’ll tell you later what it was that brought about that change. But I begin with that little introduction because today is Trinity Sunday and though the doctrine of the Trinity is an immense mystery, some very important and easily grasped truths follow from it – not least, that if community is at the very heart of God’s being, it’s also at the heart of God’s plans for creation.

As human beings, we were made to live in community.

Remember Adam, brought into a world already teeming with life and beauty and wonder. Lacking nothing and yet still ultimately lonely?

Remember God’s words? “It is not good for the man to be alone.” And lo and behold, there was Eve.

“It is not good for the man to be alone.” Before those words are about marriage or procreation or any of that stuff, they’re about community.

It’s in community that we grow and mature and discover who we are and become – that is how God has ordained things.

And the whole sweep of Scripture can be read as one long endeavour by God to draw us out of ourselves and into communion with himself, and with one another. And I want to look at both of those aspects this morning.

“In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord”  writes Isaiah.

Scholars reckon that would have been about 758 BC, and it’s interesting that Isaiah chooses to place this experience in time. In all likelihood that’s his way of saying “I know this sounds strange, but this really happened. And this is when it happened.”

And how did the Lord appear in this vision? “He was sitting on his throne, high and exalted, and his Robe filled the whole temple. Round him flaming creatures were standing, each of which had six wings. Each creature covered its face with two wings and its body with two and used the other two for flying. They were calling out to each other: Holy, Holy, Holy! The Lord Almighty is Holy! His glory fills the world”

So it’s a vision of God as King that Isaiah’s granted – a King so glorious that even the creatures around the throne have to shield their eyes from his radiance.

And as is the way, when we find ourselves in the presence of someone or something of such staggering, immense glory, we become painfully conscious of our own inadequacy.

“I said, “there’s no hope for me! I am doomed because every word that passes my lips is sinful and I live among a people whose every word is sinful. And yet, with my own eyes, I have seen the King, the Lord Almighty”.

In the presence of God, Isaiah is rightly humbled.

A few months ago a friend of mine from University was invited to go and preach at Crathie Kirk and there’s a tradition that when you’re invited to do that you dine with the Royal Family the night before and stay at Balmoral.

And that got me thinking - how do you make small talk with the Queen over dinner without appearing like a complete tube!? Here’s this woman who’s been the matriarch of the nation for 60 years; who’s image is the most reproduced image in human history; a woman who regularly dines with world leaders and statesmen and has them in awe. What would a wee nyaff like me have to say to someone like her!?

And yet, the testimony of those who have met her and spent time in her company is that she goes out of her way to make her visitors feel at home and at ease in her presence.

In a similar vein, I was told a story a while back by a lady in this congregation who used to work at Balmoral. It was the Gillies’ Ball and she found herself dancing a set dance with Prince Charles and though she reached out her arm to swing her first partner, she didn’t think that was appropriate when it was Charles’s turn, so she respectfully kept her hands down at her side; at which point he promptly grabbed her by the arm and said “Oh no! If you’re swinging him, you can swing me as well!”

It’s a mark of grace when someone who could easily overawe us, reaches out and chooses to engage in a way that brings us comfort.

And that’s what God does for Isaiah. There he is, the prophet, trembling in awe before the Lord. Knowing the unbridgeable gap that’s between them. And God reaches out to him. “Then one of the creatures flew down to me, carrying a burning coal that he had taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. He touched my lips with the burning coal and said “This has touched your lips, and now your guilt is gone, and your sins are forgiven”.

God takes the initiative; deals with the awkwardness; and draws Isaiah into communion with himself. Why? Because more than anything, he wants to be in communion with us.

And if we needed proof of that, we need only consider the lengths that God was prepared to go to to draw us back to himself. How far would he go? All the way to the cross.

All the way to the incarnate Son of God standing before a baying crowd, a bloody ruin - dressed in mockery as a King. Ready to submit to death, so he could become the burning coal held to the lips of the whole world, to take away our guilt and forgive our sins.

That is how far the God of Isaiah’s vision is prepared to go, to draw you and me into fellowship with him.

Community is at the heart of God’s being; and that means it’s also at the heart of his plans for creation. We were made for him.

But we were also made for one another. It is not good for the man to be alone.

Community is integral to life.

The community of the family is one which none of us choose, but which has a huge influence on how we develop. It’s no accident that farming families tend to produce farmers, musical families, musicians, sporty families sporty kids, delinquent families, delinquent kids. We learn what we grow up with.

There are other communities we find ourselves in by default rather than choice – the community of school, college, or university; the community of the workplace.

We have choice over where we live, but we don’t choose our neighbours. They’re a community we belong to but can’t legislate for. And it’s the same with church we attend.

Perhaps the only truly free community is the circle of folk we choose to keep as friends. That circle is as tight or as expansive as we choose to make it.

But here’s the thing. All of these communities bring blessings, but all of them bring their own stresses too.

Families protect and provide and love, but they also squabble and hurt one another and fall out.

Our time in education broadens our mind and abilities, but it can also expose us to cruelty and peer pressure.

Our friends and colleagues can become trusted companions, but they can also be a disappointment to us, or even become enemies.

Our neighbours can be a blessing or they can be a thorn in the side, and that’s true whether we’re talking about the place where we live, or the place where we worship.

There is no perfect community. Anywhere! And yet God never allows us to go solo. In a hundred different ways, God urges us to stay in community and keep working at it. The communities of marriage, and family, and neighbourhood and church.

Why? Why?

Because community is the only place where we unlearn the tyranny of the self.

Left to my own devices, I can do as I like, unchecked. In community I have to learn to accommodate and be accountable to others. I have to learn that my way is not the only way; that there are other voices that have to be heard.

Left to my own devices I can avoid people who disagree with me or annoy me. In community, I open myself to the possibility that they might have something to say that’s worth hearing.

Left to my own devices, I’m oblivious to my own rough edges. In community, not only do I become aware of them, some of them might even get knocked off, helping me become a more rounded and generous person.

Community is our best chance for unlearning the tyranny of the self. That’s why, since the very beginnings of the church, the followers of Jesus have met in community. We cannot do this alone. Like it or not, we need one another. It can get ugly and it can get messy. But community, not solitude, is the environment in which we grow up into Christ.

Look at the men Jesus chose for disciples. Four big, argumentative, ‘my way or the highway ‘fishermen. Two disgruntled revolutionaries who were just itching to slit some Roman throats. A former tax collector that most folk wouldn’t have touched with a barge pole. It’s not exactly a recipe for harmony! And if you read the New Testament letters, you’ll discover that all the early churches were exactly the same!

But those very communities were the fertile soil in which people grew into mature disciples of Jesus Christ; and they grew not by evading the other but by engaging with them.

Even the early monastics who took themselves off to the desert to live in caves, knew that they needed one another. Very few lived an entirely solitary life. Most struck a balance between seclusion and companionship by living in dispersed communities. They recognised that we need each other.


“Paul” my friend said . “I’m finally beginning to understand that my family are not the enemy”.

I wish Matt could tell you the story himself, but to put you in the picture, he and his wife Julie are quite different characters. She’s got this can-do attitude which doesn’t always worry about the detail, while Matt’s more cautious and likes to have it all figured out. His favourite T-shirt sums up their relationship really well. It’s a picture of a cactus trying to hug a red balloon and the caption just says “Impossible Love”.

A few years back they were going to France on holiday and at the last minute Julie decided it would be a great idea to take their bikes and she ordered a towbar bike carrier which Matt eventually got fitted the day before they were due to leave. The only problem was that once the bikes were on you couldn’t open the boot anymore, which, with four kids, wasn't ideal.

So they headed off to France. All the way down from Aberdeenshire to the south coast of England, across the channel, and then half-way across France 'til they reached the Atlantic. They were there for two weeks. And they didn’t ride the bikes once. Then on their way back to catch the ferry home, Julie suggested that they really ought to use the bikes before they went back to the UK. Against Matt's better judgment, they got the bikes off, went for a ride, and by the time they got to the harbour they’d missed the sailing they were booked on.

And as Matt stood at the quayside watching the ferry disappear into the distance, a little part of him wished he could have been like one of the pioneer monks who crossed that same channel some 15 centuries earlier. Men who were following the call to go and preach the gospel, happily unencumbered by wife, children and under-used bicycles.

But as he watched the kids play, he knew that that wasn’t the answer. The answer was to see this little community God had blessed him with for the gift that it was.  The gift of a people who, through all the ups and downs and complications and interruptions, were helping him become more of the man God wanted him to be. A community who in their own wonderful, maddening way, were helping rescue him from the tyranny of the self.

It’s in community that we come to maturity.

So may God – Father, Son and Spirit – keep drawing us into communion with himself, and with one another, for the sake of his Kingdom, and the good of our souls.

Amen

God's Questions - "Who is My Mother? Who Are My Brothers?"

Then Jesus' mother and brothers arrived. They stood outside the house and sent in a message, asking for him. A crowd was sitting round Jesus, and they said to him, “Look, your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside, and they want you.”

Jesus answered, “Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?”

That little exchange should be enough for you to realise that what’s coming is not the usual chirpy Mother’s Day sermon.

After a brief sojourn with the woman at the well, and a sneak preview of the Easter story, we’re back onto the theme of God’s questions this morning. And the question in today’s reading has loomed large in my imagination for many years, though until now I’ve never preached on it.

I’ve been saving it up for a sermon series I’m planning called “Ten Things I Wish Jesus Hadn’t Said!”

“Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?”

I wish Jesus hadn’t said that. It really doesn’t fit with my picture of him, and I’m guessing you probably feel the same. It sounds uncharacteristically dismissive, petty even.

There’s something about those words that’s deeply unsettling. And that’s a gift to a preacher because it means there are layers to the story, and layers to you and me that need to be peeled back if we’re really to understand what’s being said here.

So let’s work our way through the story, just as we find it in Mark’s gospel.

20 Then Jesus went home. Again such a large crowd gathered that Jesus and his disciples had no time to eat.

So two questions to begin with. Where are they and what’s been happening?

Well, this is early in Mark’s gospel, but already the word about Jesus is beginning to spread.

Wherever he goes in Galilee, there are crowds – a mass of unmet needs – and with that fame there comes scrutiny. The Pharisees begin to snoop around the place, watching what he does, asking questions, trying to trip him up or find holes in the things he’s saying. Anything to prove he is unorthodox so they can try and set the people against him.

In the verses just before today’s reading, Jesus has had to take refuge in a boat on the Sea of Galilee to avoid being crushed by the sheer number of folk trying to hear him and touch him for healing.

And so he withdraws for a time with the disciples to a quiet hillside, probably in the Golan Heights to the east of Galilee, and it’s there that he chooses the twelve to be he disciples, his most trusted followers.

And after that, Mark tells us, Jesus went home.

I have never noticed that phrase before. Did you ever think of Jesus having a home? We know that later in life he said that birds have nests and foxes have holes, but he had nowhere to lay his head. But that was later.

At this stage of his life, had he found a little place to stay somewhere in Capernaum – the same village Peter and Andrew came from? A base to work from in Galilee? It’s not beyond the realms of possibility.

How do you feel when you arrive home after a working day and close the door behind you? Would Jesus have felt the same way? Was he happy to be home; content to lose himself in fixing some food; ready to turn in for a while?

He didn’t get the chance. The downside of having a place you call home is that people can always find you, and when the word spread that he was back home, the crowds descended again, so much so that Mark tells us the disciples and Jesus couldn’t even eat. How busy do you have to be so that you can’t even eat? But such was the response to the things he was saying and doing that proclaimed the arrival of the Kingdom of God.

Now – verse 21:

When his family heard about it, they set out to take charge of him, because people were saying, “He's gone mad!”

How did they hear about it? Maybe someone tweeted. “Things going mad here. Can’t even eat. LOL”. More likely, the story passed from person to person as news travelled the 25 miles between Capernaum and Nazareth, and as you know, stories often get embellished in the telling. So over the space of a couple of days, and several re-tellings, “Jesus is mad busy” became simply “Jesus is mad”. And that’s the point at which the family decided to intervene.

And we miss the force of the word Mark uses here in some translations. The GNB says they came to “take charge of him” but the Greek word is better rendered as “restrain him”, and in other places the same word is actually used of arresting people. They weren’t going there to muck about. They were going there to take control, by force if necessary.

Now let’s stay with that for a moment.

It doesn’t take too much imagination to put yourself in Mary’s shoes, or those of Jesus’ siblings. You can imagine what they were thinking. “He can’t keep doing this. He’s going to kill himself if he doesn’t slow down. He needs looking after. All of this attention is turning his head”.

On that level we can all sympathise with what they were trying to do.

But nobody’s motives are ever 100% pure. Scratch the surface and I wonder if there were other issues at stake here. More selfish ones. “He’s going to land us all in it. If he doesn’t shut up we’ll all get put out of the synagogue. It’s fine for him to be stirring things up like this, but does he realise what this is doing to our reputation and our lives?”.

And if you scratch even deeper under the surface, not just of this story, but of the whole of the four gospels, you have to ask yourself – what kind of relationship did Jesus have with his family anyway?

Why were none of his brothers among his disciples? Why do we know so little about the rest of his family? Why does Joseph disappear off the map altogether? Why do we hear so much about Mary at the beginning of the story, and also at the end, but hear virtually nothing about her in the middle? Why do we read about Jesus spending time at the homes of many different people but hear nothing about visits home to his mother? Jesus’ family are conspicuous by their absence in the story, at least as the gospel writers choose to tell it.

When you dig deeper, you come across passages like John 7:1-9, where Jesus has a sharp disagreement with his brothers about the direction of his mission, and John, almost as an afterthought, casually mentions that ‘even they’ didn’t believe in him.

It’s only after the resurrection that Jesus’ mother and one or two of his brothers begin to come into the story as members of the emerging church.

When we hear the words “Jesus’ family”, we immediately jump to conclusions about a concerned group of relatives coming to save him for his own good. But who exactly were these people coming to restrain Jesus? What was the nature of their relationship with him?

Mark leaves that question hanging in the air with a little technique good storytellers often use – he gives you the start of one story, breaks off to bring in another related story, and then winds things up by finishing off the first one.

So at this point Mark introduces a conflict with the Pharisees about the origins of Jesus’ power, and the connection he wants to make is that neither Jesus’ family, nor the Pharisees have really understood him.

It’s bad enough that Jesus’ family think he’s mad. These high heid yin’s up from Jerusalem are saying that he’s possessed. They can’t deny the miracles that have happened because too many people have seen them – so the best they can do is try and discredit him.

“He’s using demons to cast out demons” they say. “Aye right” says Jesus, or words to that effect. “Satan’s evil but he’s not stupid. Why would he go about destroying his own kingdom, negating his own work? If you had eyes in your head you’d see that this is a sign that one stronger than Satan is here, and that God’s Kingdom is breaking in. You’re on very dangerous ground when you become so twisted within yourself that you can’t tell God’s work from the devil’s any more”.

The speech bubbles are still hanging in the air when someone pushes his way through the crowd and says in one of those stage whispers that’s loud enough for everybody to hear – “Master, your mother and brothers are outside, wanting to see you”.

And I wonder what Jesus thought at that point.
You see, a good Jewish boy would have held his hands up and said “Sorry folks, I really have to go. My mother’s outside. My family are looking for me”.

We would struggle to understand the social pressure upon Jesus to react in that way, but we know enough about middle eastern culture to realise that there are still parts of the world today where a son is expected to show unquestioning deference to the presence of his family, and most especially the woman who bore him.

By all the standards of the day, Jesus should have gone. But therein lies the whole point of this story. Jesus did not come to preserve the standards of his day or his culture; he came to reform them in the light of God’s priorities.

33 Jesus answered, “Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?” He looked at the people sitting round him and said, “Look! Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does what God wants him to do is my brother, my sister, my mother.”

As with so much that Jesus has to say, there is judgment and blessing mixed together into those words.

The judgment falls on those who, like his family, stand outside; who claim kinship with Jesus but will not sit and keep company with him. Who claim to know the best course of action without having sought his counsel. Who press home their own agenda while completely disregarding his agenda. Who expect him to fall into line and follow them, when it is we who should be following him.

Should anyone, be it his mother or his brothers or his sisters, fail to see that the only appropriate way to engage with God incarnate is to sit with him, listen to him, and set aside our own agenda in the pursuit of God’s way, then he will have words with them. Hard words.

Words like “Who is my mother?” to his mother. Or ‘get thee behind me Satan” to his disciple Peter.

If we dare assume we can tell him what to do while standing apart from him, it matters not one jot whether we’re his mother, or his brother or his sister, or a regular churchgoer, or a minister or an elder.

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you.’

I wish Jesus hadn’t said those words. They scare me. I would like a nice, kind, uncontroversial Jesus who does my bidding. Friends with everybody. Kisses things better when they go wrong. Able to be co-opted to whatever agenda I want to peddle to the world today.

But he does not allow that to happen. He doesn’t even allow his own mother to get away with that. And maybe she of all people should have known better than to try.

All across the world today, sermons are being preached about how Jesus was the great upholder of family values: motherhood and apple pie are being served up with a smile from many a pulpit. On another Sunday, I may well choose do the same because despite my cynicism, there is a core of truth to be mined there.

But today we’ve engaged with a deeper, sterner truth. What Jesus is saying here is that if blood is thicker than water, then Spirit is thicker than blood. Our spiritual connection to Jesus and to one another should be even more important to us than the bloodlines of our families, much as we love them.

If you’re not shocked by that, then you haven’t really understood it properly.

It was shocking then and it’s shocking now, but it’s there in black and white, time and time again in what Jesus has to say. Perhaps the measure of our shock is a measure of how far we still have to go on the road of discipleship…

“Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?” He looked at the people sitting round him and said, “Look! Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does what God wants him to do is my brother, my sister, my mother.”

Jesus didn’t come to preserve the standards of the day. He came to reform them. He came to tell us that in God’s economy there was something even more important than the ethnic and family ties that his own people, and people down the centuries, hold so dear.

For the young Christian communities who heard those words of Jesus read out as copies of Mark’s gospel began to circulate, there was a deep blessing to be found in them. Many of them would have been disowned by their families for their faith in Jesus; most would have been expelled from the synagogues and shunned by those who had once been their friends.

This new Jesus community was their family. A place where they were loved and valued for who they were. Where bonds of fellowship and accountability grew up that transcended the transiency of bloodlines and family connections and social status.

And before we start thinking that must have been a peculiarly New Testament phenomenon, it’s worth recognising the parallels with the kinds of churches meeting today under extreme Communist or Islamic regimes. Small, mobile, hugely committed, and with a radical focus on relationships and discipleship.

A deep and abiding sense of belonging to each other and being responsible for each other.

In the comfortable West, we generally find all of that in our families. Is that why we so rarely find it, or look for it, in the church? Are our congregations simply too big to thought of as families, many of them? Do we focus to much on ritual and ceremony and buildings at the expense of relationships? Is this why the churches that are growing in the west tend to be the ones with a wide variety of small group activities, where people feel they belong?

At times I despair of how far we are from that New Testament model of family and fellowship. And yet, by the grace of God, we get the occasional flash of it in our life together; when people show unexpected kindnesses; when grace pours oil upon troubled waters; when folk show themselves ready to offer up a sacred cow for the good of all, when people connect and new relationships begin to form; when hospitality is offered without thought of reciprocation.

It’s in moments like those that we sense something of the potential Jesus saw as he looked around that room at people who had very little in common except the shared desire to follow him.

These people, he said, these people are my mother and my brothers and my sisters.

So today, on mothers’ day – love your mother if you have her with you; let her know how much you appreciate who she is and what she’s done for you. If she’s gone, remember with gratitude what you can and say a prayer of thanks for her.

But remember, as Jesus said in another text I wish he hadn’t said, that if you love only those who love you, you’re no different from anyone else.

You want to be different? Try this. Can you be a mother in God’s church? Spreading your wings wider than your own kith and kin to embrace others who need love? Can you be a father in God’s church? Taking responsibility? Taking the time to lead others to understanding and maturity? Can you be a brother or a sister in God’s church? A companion, a friend, a co-worker, a listener to those in this community who need you?

These people, said Jesus, these people, who do the will of God are my mother and my brothers and my sisters. Why?

Because blood is thicker than water. But Spirit is thicker than blood.