Jesus healing and hiding

Our gospel reading today follows on neatly from last week’s where Jesus drove out a demon from the man who burst into the synagogue.

Today we see him healing and hiding.

By closely following the life of Jesus as we work through Mark’s gospel we aim for one thing: to know the Jesus we are claiming to follow, much more clearly.

We want to beware of remaking Jesus in our own image in case we end up following someone who is not very like the Jesus we encounter in the gospels.

So Jesus is healing again and our reading begins with the word ‘immediately’.

Mark is fond of the word ‘immediately’ – if you read the gospel straight through, you are constantly struck by this word.

There’s a break neck pace to the ministry of Jesus in Mark.

As John Pridmore points out, the word ‘immediately’ is not one closely associated with the pace of change in the Church of England.

‘Church leaders are adverse to the word ‘immediately’. It rarely occurs in reports published by the General Synod. The public ministry of the Son of God took far less time than the Church of England needed to revise its Ordinal.’ (p. 58, The Word is Very Near You’, 2009.)

But Mark loves the word.

So for example, immediately after his baptism Jesus is driven into the wilderness by the Spirit. Immediately they heard Jesus’ call by Lake Galilee, the fishermen get up and follow him.

And today, immediately they had come out of the synagogue, Jesus is off to Simon Peter’s house where Peter’s mother in law lies ill.

Just as the demon possessed man was a sermon illustration in himself, Peter’s mother in law is one too; Jesus has just been teaching and his actions also speak volumes.

Now I’ve been on the internet looking for mother in law jokes (acceptable ones) and I’m fairly sure that most mother in law jokes are told by men, so I’m not going to break that trend, except to say I did find this: (and apologies to all mothers in law here present…)

Question: What’s the punishment for bigamy?

Answer: Two mothers-in-law.

And this from Ken Dodd, who once remarked: "I 

haven't spoken to my mother-in-law for eighteen 

months. I don't like to interrupt her."

And finally, from Les Dawson (it would be Les 

Dawson…) "My mother-in-law has come round to 

our house at Christmas seven years running. This 

year we're having a change. We're going to let her 

in."

However, on the grounds that I get on fine with my mother in

law, and also that I might become one myself  some day, I 

think we’ll leave it there.

Joking aside, to be ill with a fever in pre-paracetamol days 

was no laughing matter and Jesus responds to this urgent

need straight away by healing Peter’s mother in law.

It says ‘He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up 

and the fever left her.’

I think we can note from the way this happens, that touch 

and healing are inextricably linked.

The other day I had a chance to pray for someone in the street who I met and got talking to.

I was listening to her ailments, which were many, and I thought ‘what marks out a Christian from any other sympathetic listener?’

The answer was we can offer something greater than ourselves – we can put a person in touch with the Healing God by praying for them.

I was writing a sermon that week about words and actions going together, so I thought I’d better offer some prayer.

But I felt strangely reluctant (fear of what anyone might think etc.)

The moment came for the lady to move on and I still hadn’t offered any prayer, but as she turned to go, I instinctively put my hand on her shoulder and that’s when I got the impetus to pray for her.

So I think we underestimate the power of touch amongst ourselves, to comfort, to bless and even to heal. Without being inappropriate, touch and healing go hand in hand. It’s something to ponder for ourselves and our church family.

And so news of Jesus’ healing action spreads like wildfire and by evening, the whole town is gathered at Peter’s mother in law’s door. 

We can’t stress enough the urgency of the need for healing here. Although there were doctors in Jesus’ day, they of course had nothing like the ability to make well that we enjoy on our National Health Service.

Again and again Jesus proclaims the Good News of the kingdom by actions as well as words. Demons are expelled, the sick healed, apparently instantly.

Does this mean that today with all our access to health technology we don’t need to bother as Christians with miraculous healing?

I admit I find this a difficult one. Someone has suggested three levels of belief involved in whether God still heals miraculously today.

1: I believe in theory that God can heal.

2: I believe He heals other people.

3: I believe He can heal me. (I think I'm somewhere between 2 and 3!)

Because we have a friendship with God, we will of course naturally talk to Him about any physical suffering (and sensibly take ourselves off to the doctor when need be.)

I don’t think prayer and medical treatment need be separate things.

We can, as a godly habit, lovingly commend each other to God in prayer whenever there’s a need, and follow the scriptural injunction that we should ‘pray for each other and confess your sins to one another that you may be healed.’

So Jesus is proclaiming the Kingdom of God with actions, and these actions get him rather famous rather quickly.

And this is where Jesus is so very different from the celebrity and broadcasting culture that we all have constantly around us.

By ‘broadcasting culture’ I mean the tendency in the media to continually broadcast what is happening to people who are in the public eye.

By contrast Jesus seems to shun attention.

In a few short verses we have him forbidding the demons to speak, and getting up before dawn to find a deserted place to pray.

It’s not like Jesus to sit around after breakfast basking in the glory of the evening before when all those people clamoured at the door and got healed.

We must resist the overriding desire for numbers all the time.

Of course we want to see people turning up to events we plan, but do you know what? This is how numbers work: When people are hungry they’ll always seek out what nourishes them.

If people are not coming we need to ask ourselves a question: are we offering the true bread or an imitation?

John Pridmore (again) calls this passage a game of hide and seek.

Jesus hides himself. Peter seeks him out: it literally says ‘Simon and his companions hunted him down.’

Jesus is not interested in being in the limelight for its own sake: he wants to know what the Father wants, so he goes alone in prayer.

As soon as he is found he says ‘Let us go on to the neighbouring towns so that I may proclaim the message there also, for that is why I came.’

His statement ‘for that is why I came’ is a theological statement meaning ‘that is why I came into the world’, i.e. you could say mission is the reason for the Incarnation…

So Jesus works to the Father’s agenda, no one else’s, not even the agenda of need, because there’ll always be plenty of need on which to spend ourselves.

So as we go forward in our mission to grow our church and reach out to others, what have we learnt from Jesus, and what do we need to do about it this week?

This is what we see: Jesus is on an urgent mission. He acts swiftly. He heals and delivers. He seeks out solitude. He works to the Father’s agenda.

May God give us grace today and into the future to take these things to heart and to follow Him accordingly. 

Amen.

sermon spoiler...

Epiphany 4

Mark 1:21-28 –Jesus exorcises a demon in the middle of teaching in the synangogue

If Jesus came here today to this pulpit, what would we make of him?

Firstly he might mount the pulpit steps – after all this is where we get our teaching from, and he was teaching at the start of today’s gospel: ‘They went to Capernaum and when the Sabbath came he entered the synagogue and taught.’

Oaky, we have our teaching on a different day – Sunday, the first day of the week (Resurrection Day) instead of the Jewish Sabbath, but we do have teaching from the pulpit so we know all about what that looks and sounds like…(but how many sermons from the last three months can you remember?)

So he might well mount the pulpit steps and begin teaching…

What would he say?

Would he stick to traditional themes? Would we be tempted to nod off?

Jesus was quite keen on questions, so I wonder if he might turn the exercise back on us and instead of preaching at us he might ask us about our own faith in God.

Some questions he might ask… ‘Tell me, who do people say that I am?’ (Mark 8: 27)

‘What do you want me to do for you?’ (Mark 10: 51)

If Jesus stood here in the pulpit asking: ‘what do you want me to do for you?’ I wonder how you’d answer.

Because invariably Jesus’ ministry was a ministry of words AND actions.

The Christian church down the ages has had an uneasy time trying to match these two aspects of Christian witness – words and actions.

Too many words and people can think we’ve nothing better to do than to sit around in synods and conferences debating matters which are of no actual importance to the average person in the street.

Too much action without words and the church might be mistaken for a benign human agency trying to do good in the world but without any real distinctively Christ like voice.

So we do need both actions and words in our Christian witness.

So Jesus might be standing in this pulpit teaching…

His teaching might be uncomfortable.

We learn in John 6 that many who heard Jesus’ teaching about feeding the world with his own flesh had found it just all too much to take: ‘This teaching is too hard…who can listen to it’?

Jesus knows people are grumbling about this and asks his disciples ‘do you want to give up?’

You can imagine a PR specialist at his point trying to advise Jesus about how best to minimize the damage done and maximize his chance of success and his numbers of followers:

‘Lord, you just need to tone down the whole ‘flesh and blood consuming’ thing – people are getting uneasy about it. Best not to mention the stuff about death and sacrifice, and then we should be able to get a few more people signed up…’

But Jesus is not interested in quantity – only quality.

And to his poignant question: ‘Do you too want to give up?’ Simon Peter answers "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.’

That’s the kind of follower Jesus is looking for.

So to return to Jesus in our pulpit…..after a possibly uncomfortable time listening to his difficult teaching about sacrifice, we might suddenly have an intrusion into the church…

I don’t know how synagogues were designed but it does seem somewhat strange that a random mad man can rush into the middle of the gathering and start shouting above the sermon.

I think this is why we have Wardens in the Anglican Church.

If someone rushes in and starts screaming before I’ve finished this sermon I give you full permission to remove them as quickly as possible.

But this is precisely where we go wrong.

The demon possessed man was about to be the best sermon illustration anyone could ever hope for.

Let’s not be so busy repeating the words of our faith every Sunday in church, that we miss the action of God in us.

Verse 24 reveals that the demon possessed man understood, in a way that perhaps we are slow to, that an encounter with Jesus is a life changing event.

‘What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth?’ he shouts.

This could be the fear of the demon talking – demons always knew their end was up when they came across Jesus.

Think of the legion of demons that begged to be sent into the pigs (the ‘Gadarene swine’) – they begged for this fate over the fate of being sent to hell.

So ‘What do you want with us?’ in today’s gospel could be the demons talking.

But it could equally apply to us.

‘What do you want with us, Jesus?’

What do you want with us in this small village in the Oxford Diocese at the start of 2012?

Yes, Jesus does want something with us.

He wants us to respond to his words, to give our lives in love and action – ‘Send us out as living sacrifices, to live and work to your praise and glory…’

So we don’t really know what Jesus would do were he to stand in this pulpit and teach and act, but we do know that he wouldn’t mind being interrupted by a pressing need or by someone who was desperate for freedom from bondage to evil.

Jesus’ ministry is a perfect weaving in of action and words, a perfect lived out demonstration of the breaking in of the kingdom of God.

He can deliver us from evil still today, whatever that means in our lives, and he can still break in.

He can deliver us from mere words to a life changing encounter with him.

A little illustration to end…

The life of an Anglican Minister is also a strange mixture of words and action.

I really enjoy the action – pastoral visiting, bible studies, leading worship, assemblies, baptisms, even funerals (especially funerals.)

But I also enjoy the words – writing essays for ongoing Curates’ training, writing sermons, writing prayers.

I was in the middle of this sermon, pumping out the words, when I felt an inner voice telling me to go for a walk in a certain part of the village (call it the Holy Spirit, call it the need for fresh air…)

I wanted to deliver something to someone there so, abandoning the words of my sermon, I walked, called round and had a very good visit, with some good community ramifications.

On my way back home I saw a lady struggling along the pavement with heavy shopping bags.

I recognized her from a funeral I had taken once.

She told me she hadn’t been very well so I plucked up courage and sent an arrow prayer up – ‘Lord I don’t want my ministry to be words only, but also action…’ (thinking: ‘are you really going to offer to pray for her in the street?’)

Then I asked if I could pray for her, there and then – and she was very keen.

So I had the privilege of discovering that during the writing of a sermon, God can lead you right to where he wants you to be acting.

The walk, the visit and the prayer on the street were all part of God’s gracious leading.

It seemed the perfect illustration for this sermon about Jesus and his seamless life of words and action.

May God give us all, here in this church and across this area, the grace to live our lives like Christ did – in proclaiming the freedom and power of God today in words and in actions.

Amen.

Mission or Maintenance?

Thinking and planning this week about how best to use our brand new Parish Room has given plenty of food for thought about the relationship between maintenance and mission. The Anglican 'Five marks of Mission' are pretty comprehensive, taking in safeguarding the integrity of creation and striving to alter unjust structures of society as well as loving service, teaching and nurturing people in the faith AND evangelistic outreach....all quite a mouthful when talking casually about mission with church members so I'm a bit lazy and tend to use the word for ordinary conversation purposes to refer to the way our church is playing its part in this time and  in this place, in showing/telling the Good News of Jesus Christ to those outside the church. 

I am aware from talking with other clergy, that maintenance of Sunday worship in often ancient and cavernous buildings, takes such a lot of time and energy, there doesn't seem to be much left for new mission initiatives. On a recent church growth conference, we were asked to do a brief audit of what in our church's life amounted to presence, to persuasion or to proclamation? A large amount of what we did was really presence (we're just here, and that's blessing in itself but.....) Not so much was persuasion (talking through the real implications of the Christian faith with interested parties) and hardly any proclamation (to anyone who wasn't already in the club anyway.) Are we so busy maintaining that we're not growing?

They had a similar problem in Acts chapter 6 only here, rapid expansion meant that Greek believers felt their widows were being neglected in the church's daily distribution of food - a central part of the early church's ministry in a pre-welfare state society. The church's response is interesting: 'And the twelve called together the whole community of disciples and said 'It is not right that we should neglect the word of God to wait at tables.'' They duly appointed more disciples to do the waiting on tables whilst the original evangelists continued the proclamation of the gospel. Their central driving force was evangelisation; whatever else was needed they dealt with almost as an aside.

Is there a danger of becoming so caught up in maintenance of 'normal service' inside the church that we neglect the much larger numbers of people there are outside?

Or is it that all our activities are in a sense mission...? Baptisms, weddings and funerals are all obvious opportunities for the Good News. Choosing chair colour (now there's vexed issue); buying a nappy changing mat and checking health and safety for a new space may seem like very temporal issues but if they are undertaken to a constant background tune of outreach for the sake of those Christ came to save, ministry might become more holistic and life giving.

So it's back to the drawing board...what coffee cups shall we use when, with mounting excitement, we finally open up the new Parish Room for our much awaited community coffee drop in session?!

Annie - Amazing.

'I have been fascinated with the notion of change and impermanence since I was a young girl' - Annie Lennox, as quoted in the excellent The House of Annie Lennox exhibition at the V&A which I saw today. It was memorable for all the reasons the artist herself is enduring and attractive - creative, honest, a sense that having a platform of fame gives you the chance to use it for good - in recent years she has focussed attention on the plight of HIV positive women and children in sub Saharan Africa through her SING campaign. 
The exhibition takes up one room in the V&A in the centre of which a small (one roomed) house features a desk strewn with artefacts of her creative life - bits if paper on which are scrawled priceless first drafts of songs, all impeccably notated in a way you would expect from a classically trained musician (she left the Royal Academy of music a just weeks before her final exams.) Around the walls of the outer room are projected the moving images of a suburban town, such as you would see from the windows of a car or train. She perhaps shows her age (57 and beautiful still) by commenting that on such a journey her creativity is fostered as she becomes introspective and lets her mind wander across the changing landscape. All I noticed on my train journey up was the plethora of people missing the landscape whilst being plugged into their iPhones, iPods and Kindles. Whilst my creativity was being nurtured looking at her wonderful costumes, photogenic portraits and music videos displayed large on a screen, I had some random thoughts about faith too. They were firstly negative: with such talented and humanitarian ambassadors for change in the world, why do we need the church? (whilst partly sympathetic to faith generally, Lennox doesn't claim to be a Christian.) And if a highly creative person stumbled into a typical Anglican church service, what would they make of it? 
But then I thought about God being above all our limitations...if He wants to use someone like Lennox to bring about good in the world, who am I to quibble if she doesn't tick the Christian box? And then her song 'Oh God' is so like one of the Psalms...

'Oh God,

Where are you now?
And what you gonna do
About the mess I've made
If there was ever a soul to save
It must be me
It must be me'

For me she reflects a God who is ultimately Creator. I hope I also have the grace and vision to reflect Him in the way I see His world, in my day to day ministry and especially every time I lead worship.

For a little bathe in gorgeousness...follow the link below...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjUk2YV0t4I

Baptism Qualms

Infant baptisms - I love 'em!! The usually gorgeous small child; the gleaming godparents, the sense of family, the swelled congregation...but if I'm honest I do have a few qualms...


Mainly the liturgy..... 'Do you reject the devil and all rebellion against God?'...... 'May Almighty God deliver you from the powers of darkness.' I hope I'm not getting too wishy washy (excuse water-based pun) but I find this bit difficult to explain to the poor unsuspecting parents beforehand. I'm sure you can't do it adequately without wading into deep theological waters (pun again) - those stirred up in fact by Augustine's doctrine of original sin, and the necessity of washing it away by baptism (with the attendant awkward corollary of the dubious final destination of the unbaptised.) How much is baptism an active sacrament (effecting slavation) and how much is it a sign of something you hope will come later? The theology of baptism is so dense - the idea of the Exodus deliverance through water; Jesus' own baptism; death and resurrection; the new life of the Holy Spirit (being born again); covenant theology etc. etc. As an Anglican priest I'm overwhelmed at the thought of how to communicate all this in the two 'baptism visits', and probably fail miserably. It feels in the service as though we've chewed off an enormous piece of theological meat and are having trouble chewing through it. There is nothing light and contemporary about the words. You can sense the parents of small children losing the plot half way through the 'Prayer over the water' (goes on for three paragraphs). In the final analysis, should I be more concerned that the family felt loved and welcomed, and will have an ongoing relationship with the church, than that they grasp the finer points of baptismal theology? If there were a parental test afterwards ('How far do you understand your child to have experienced a symbolic death and resurrection after his/her recent baptism experience?') I'm not sure how well we'd score! It's probably time for some soul searching and more Curates' training (cue Hard Skill Day coming up....) In my mutli-denominational Christian past I experienced two baptisms (naughty) and I enjoyed the second one more, but then I don't really remember the first.....


Returning to the present question though, I do love them babies.......and say thanks to God every time I'm asked to do a baptism, trusting that He will continue the good work by His Spirit and help me find a way through the tangled forest called 'baptism liturgy'.

Twelfth Night

It's got to be my favourite Shakespeare play - mistaken identity, gender confusion, shipwreck, love, mirth, madness, and ultimately, melancholy ('With a hey ho, the wind and the rain...') All you ever want from a real human life. The traditional merry-making on Twelfth Night collides richly with the Christian tradition of Epiphany - the evening of 5 Jan being the 12th night after Christmas Day and the eve of the Feast of the Epiphany (6 Jan) when Christians ponder the significance of the visit of 'Magi from the East' to the Christ child. The didn't need Satnav - being astrologers they knew how to plot a course by the stars. After the dead end that was King Herod, the king they eventually found became the unlikely recipient of their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. The Magi are not the domesticated crown-wearing 'kings' of Christmas cards, but strange Gentiles, outside of the traditionally Jewish people of God. They are mysterious, mystical even; their gifts to the newborn are costly, rare and, frankly, odd (imagine presenting your new godchild at her baptism with the gift of a shroud - that's the kind of thing myrrh, a burial ointment, suggests.) The '3 wise men' are a good reminder of the strangeness of faith, the endlessly wide embrace of the gospel and the sheer otherness of the divine. 
We're taking down the decorations tonight; I used to be glad to clear away the mess, now it just makes me sad, it feels so much like an ending. Or is it a beginning? In the visit of the Magi, a snapshot of the whole life, death and resurrection of the Messiah King, the one without beginning or end, is presented for us to feast on in wonder. Happy Twelfth Night.

Christ and the media

The new Sherlock Holmes film was enjoyable, in a kind of top-hatted swashbuckling way, and it made me think how much media such as film and TV influence us. Messages inside film can be powerful and a popular film may even be culturally influential, so to people who are sensitive about the spiritual temperature of society, it does matter what kind of things we are watching. Downton Abbey (much as I love it, especially that kiss in the snow) is really just escapism with a lot of nice frocks thrown in. Reading an Arthur Conan Doyle short story does a lot more for me than seeing 117 highly choreographed shots of Victorian men beating the living daylights out of each other. On the other hand, the recent BBC adaptation of Great Expectations was brilliant and thoughtful - being steeped in the Christian faith, Dickens' writing shows a deep understanding of the human condition which he lays bare inside a fantastic story, infused with the biblical motif of the Prodigal Son. So why aren't we praying for and encouraging more writers who are Christians to use their creative talents in the world of the media? We pray for teachers and vicars, nurses and maybe policemen, but when were you last in church when a Christian screenwriter or advertiser was mentioned? One such is Rhidian Brook, whose TV drama Mr Harvey Lights a Candle (2005) was one of the best written, most thought-provoking and surprising successes that year. The gospel was hidden right in there inside the brilliant script about a has-been RE teacher (Timothy Spall) who takes a group of ungrateful teenagers to Salisbury Cathedral for the day. Brook has since released an uplifting and positive film - Africa United (2010) - about a group of African children who walk 3000 miles to see the World Cup. Rev Richard Coles, Anglican priest, musician and journalist, writing about the influence of Christianity in pop music in last week's Big Issue is another example of someone who's 'in there' making a difference. To fulfil the Christian vocation to be 'salt and light' in the world, we could do with a lot more like them.