About a child

Mark 9: 37a. Whoever welcomes one such child in my name, welcomes me.

This Sunday's passage from Mark takes an important direction from high and mighty (The Mount of Transfiguration) to lowly and domestic (a house, a chair, a child). We'll bear that downward direction in mind as we look at these seven short but devastating verses from Mark 9.

The passage begins 'Having gone forth from there...' and reading back slightly, we can see that 'there' refers to the mount of Transfiguration where Jesus has been spectacularly revealed to Peter, James and John as a dazzling figure of white, the exalted Son of God, or to use the language of the Harry Potter books, 'The Chosen One'. Scholars are not agreed, but this may have been Mount Tabor, 1843 feet of glorious elevated mountain, 17 km west of Lake Galilee. 

'Having gone forth from there...' 

So they're leaving the mountain behind...How many times have we had splendid ideas for our church, a dream that God will move in power, that God will be on that mountain top experience of healing, blessing or new vision. And then we 'go forth from there', and find that life is seemingly still mundane, ordinary, troublesome.

As we saw, the disciples are 'moving on' from the mountain top experience, and continuing with Jesus along the way, they discover that instead of talking about Elijah and Moses and the great coming of God at the end of all things, Jesus is talking about suffering. 'The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him and three days later, he will rise again'. Not only do they not understand what he's talking about, they are afraid to ask.    

If only following Jesus' teaching was as simple as following his footsteps through the Galilean countryside. At least the disciples are good at walking. Picture them trudging the dusty pathways in the heat of the day, Jesus always up ahead, forging onwards, but occasionally turning round to catch what it is they're discussing at the back of the group there. As the sun heats up the dry earth from its zenith in the blue sky, arguments are simmering...

They come to a house. A domestic setting, so different from the mountain top. A house with four walls, a family, arguments. A house where you eat, sleep, live alongside each other. Or feel the loneliness of empty rooms. Jesus is at home both on the mountain and in the house. In a house you can be intimate, sit and eat with friends and be honest about your nearest and dearest, as long as you're ready for them to be honest about you.

Here, in this house, Jesus brings out all the dirty linen. 'What were you arguing about on the way?' It's not that he doesn't know, even though they are silent. They are silent because they are ashamed. Family silences can be oppressive - better to get things out in the open - most of the time anyway.

From the mountain to the house. And now Jesus sits down on a chair. Not exactly sitting at God's right hand in glory, more sitting after a long journey, sitting to summon patience with your fellow travellers, sitting to be smaller. Perhaps the disciples continued standing, while Jesus was content to physically shrink in front of them. Did he sit because at that moment a child ran in from an adjoining room? Perhaps Jesus suddenly wanted to leave behind the adult world of bickering, one-upmanship and cover up. The child running in just then must have been a blessed relief, a breath of fresh air. Or perhaps Jesus was just tired. We all need to sit down once in a while. Even a servant sits at the end of a long day sweeping floors, cleaning cupboards and cooking meals for the whole family.

'Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all. And then he took a little child and put it among them.' 

Jesus is good at visual aids. The disciples (and we) need them. The little child was perhaps 4 foot, 7 years old? Thrust into the middle of a group of adults who were busy trying to pretend they were not arguing over who was the top disciple. At that moment, looking down at the child in their midst, they must have felt pretty stupid. The child (let's call her Miriam) may have felt a touch frightened. Good job then that Miriam found herself in Jesus' arms moments later, the warm reassurance of strength, being special, being noticed, being the centre of Jesus' attention.

The Jesus of the mountain top is in a house, sitting on a chair, cuddling a child. Which parent, uncle, auntie, Godparent or grandparent has not felt this timeless moment of utter communion, this moment when we think we're offering comfort, when in fact the child comforts us, and the world feels right, this cuddle in a comfy chair, this one-on-one conversation with divine wisdom.

Here, at last, is the heart of discipleship. From the mountain, to the house, to the chair, to the child. If we cannot sit with Jesus and know his tender love for us, how can we ever enter the kingdom of God? As we welcome the child in his name, we will find we're welcoming Jesus himself. And as we welcome Jesus, we will find we're welcoming the one who sent him - even God. 

'Are children welcome in all your services?' was a question asked recently of us as a church....In this question, as we ponder the downward direction from a mountain, to a house, to a chair, to a child; we surely (like the first disciples) have a great deal to learn.

G(r)owing nowhere fast

There's a conversation going on at the moment within the Church of England, about growth (or in other words, how to halt decline), which is proceeding along depressingly predictable lines, as reported recently in the Church Times: 

http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2015/17-april/news/uk/church-growth-bishop-broadbent-rounds-on-the-critics-of-reform-and-renewal

This week it was the turn of the evangelical group, Fulcrum, to address the criticism of Reform and Renewal, the Archbishop's vision for the renaissance of the C of E. It was the contention of the Rt Revd. Pete Broadbent, Bishop of Willesden, that now that the Church of England is finally looking hard at some really important things, asking awkward questions like 'what actually leads to growth? (or, if you like, how do we get out of the mess we're in?) those more used to managing decline suddenly don't like what they see, and are resorting to accusations that the Church is adopting un- thought through secular management techniques, seeking safety in numbers, and ignoring the fact that sometimes priests do struggle on bravely in the toughest ministry circumstances, whilst numbers drop inexorably away, sometimes to zero.

The narrative of this increasingly polarised debate goes like this: liberals are hopelessly happy to preside over decline, stressing prayerfulness and holiness above numbers, and relying on presence as an evangelistic strategy, while evangelicals unquestioningly adopt secular management techniques, flog their programmes, pinch other people's churchgoers and rely on a certain sort of leadership mystique for numerical growth (thought they're always quick to add, as an afterthought, that growth is about quality, not just quantity).

Bishop Broadbent declared himself to be 'allergic to Rev.', the gritty, award winning BBC series about an inner city priest who struggles on despite having, to all intents and purposes a 'failing' church, with no money, smug authoritarian overseers, and a handful of oddballs for worshippers.

Being allergic to Rev. is also a predictable part of the narrative. Rev. has a decided 'liberal catholic' flavour, and evangelicals got short shrift in series 1, episode 2: Jesus is Awesome, with the satirising of 'smoothie bar' Christianity. Okay, maybe a bit unfair, but excruciatingly funny precisely because there was more than a grain of truth in it.

If you're primarily geared up to growth and how to achieve it, watching the Rev. Adam Smallbone lurch from one crisis to another in a church which is teetering on the edge of closure (which is in fact what sadly happens at the end of series 3), will of course leave you feeling queasy. But from a dramatic, and even a theological point of view, anyone who's 'allergic to Rev', for me, is dangerously close to saying they're allergic to the underdog, therefore allergic to the Beatitudes, even allergic to the possibility of resurrection...?

It's a cloudy picture, this debate about decline/growth/leadership etc... In the mix is another unseemly argument around the word discipleship, a word I admit is beloved of evangelicals, but also a rather hard to ignore idea in the New Testament. I'm keen on the word and do not share other people's scruples about it. Anyone brought up on David Watson's 1981 seminal book of that name is likely to read a critique (see link below) of the concept as an attack on the very foundation of a serious lifelong commitment to following Jesus, which is how I interpret discipleship.

http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2015/30-january/comment/columnists/dissing-the-d-word

So there you are - I love Rev. and I don't want to 'diss' discipleship. And I'm desperately hoping that instead of arguing about growth, we Christ followers could just get together and 'seek first his kingdom and his righteousness', then 'all these things' (numbers; or at least, the people God is calling, which are not always the same thing) would maybe be added to us as well....

Is it too much to hope for? Or in our little camps, promoting our own brand and dissing the others, are we just going to be going (growing) nowhere fast...?