Last week I posted my Sunday sermon here as an emergency measure when I couldn’t upload it for a day or two to my other site, where I usually post them. Since a couple of you here appreciated it, I thought that at least for this week I’d again post it here.

To view the Bible
passage in a separate window, click
here.
 

Introduction
You’ve probably heard the famous story about the preacher
giving a children’s address.

“What’s brown, furry and climbs trees?” he asks the
children.

A little girl nervously raises her hand. “Please, I know the
answer should be Jesus but it sounds like a squirrel to me.”

How easy it is to get the wrong end of the stick.

So who is our passage about? Is it about Herod? John the Baptist?
Salome? Herodias?

I’m going to suggest that in the words of the little girl,
‘the answer should be Jesus’. The whole of Mark’s Gospel has Jesus as his
subject. The very first verse of the Gospel says it is the beginning of the
Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Even in this story, where the apparent
focus is upon the scandalous murder of his cousin John, Jesus is the theme.

1. Kingship
There’s a very revealing description of Herod in verse 14.
Coming after the positive response to the ministry of Jesus and the Twelve in
the Galilean villages, Mark says,

‘King Herod heard of it.’

So what? King
Herod, that’s what. This is Herod Antipas, one of the sons of Herod the Great,
who tried to murder the infant Jesus. And he is not a king. He is a local ruler
for Galilee and Perea appointed by the Romans.
He wanted the title ‘king’ and had even modelled his court after the imperial
pattern. But the Emperor Augustus denied him the title, and dismissed him from
office in AD 39, sending him into exile, for the cheek of asking. [William
L Lane, The Gospel According To Mark, p 211.]

Mark, I believe, is not lacking information when he calls
Herod ‘king’. He knows only too well that Herod had pretensions to kingship.
Mark is writing about twenty-five years after Herod’s dismissal from office by
Augustus.

And Mark’s readers know this, too. Mark almost certainly
wrote his Gospel to Christians in Rome
who were suffering persecution under the Emperor Nero. They know Herod was not
granted the title of king, too.

So Mark is using the title ‘king’ for Herod in an ironic, if
not satirical way. Here is a man who had pretensions to kingship. He gathered a
court. He liked power, titles and respect. But he wasn’t a king.

And more to the point, Herod was hearing about the one who
was truly king, Jesus, and who showed a radically different way to be king.
Here is one who gathers no court of snivelling admirers and grovellers for
favours. He has a motley crew of twelve men from dubious backgrounds and with
flaky characters. And he’s going to start a revolution with them.

And here is a king who doesn’t need to plead for the title,
because he knows who he is. He knows he is ‘Lord’ and yet he doesn’t ‘lord it
over others’. He comes not to be served but to serve. He makes a nonsense of
conventional airs and graces when he takes a towel and washes his followers’
feet.

Now where does that leave us? It leaves us in what one
writer called ‘The
Upside-Down Kingdom’. Wherever we are in the world, we are called to
reflect this. Following the model of Jesus our king, it will affect how we
work. Not for the Christian the model of creeping to those above us in the
hierarchy and trampling on those below us.

It affects the way we do church. I wear a dog-collar on
Sundays out of concession to those who would be offended if I didn’t, but to be
honest, I don’t believe in it. Dressing differently makes me look superior, and
I’m not. It’s a worldly way of thinking, whereas under the reign of Jesus you
don’t become important by having a title, qualifications or position. You are
important because you are human and because Christ died for you.

It affects the way we treat anyone. Other people are not
commodities. They are not resources. They are people to be served in the name
of Jesus our king. Understanding the kingship of Jesus leaves us not with a
superiority complex that we are in on secret truth but with a question about
who I can serve in his name.

2. Knowing Jesus
What were people saying about Jesus? Everybody had an
opinion:

Some were saying, ‘John the baptizer
has been raised from the dead; and for this reason these powers are at work in
him.’ But others said, ‘It is Elijah.’ And others said, ‘It is a prophet, like
one of the prophets of old.’
[verses 14b-15]

What strikes me in these comments is how little they knew
Jesus. If anyone thought that Jesus was John the Baptist back from the dead
they could not have known anything about either of them, ‘since they did not
know that Jesus was a contemporary of John and had been baptized by him’ [Lane,
p212]. If they thought Jesus was Elijah, then it sounds like they knew John’s
preaching but not Jesus’ – you could read that into John’s message but Jesus
clearly said John was the new Elijah. And the suggestion that Jesus is one of
the prophets of old is a similar idea.

The long and the short of it is that they had very little
appreciation of who Jesus was. Jesus’ own followers struggled to identify him,
too. And even when they got it right, with Simon Peter recognising him as the
Christ, it was immediately bungled by the denial that the Christ should suffer.
Remember that earned one of ‘gentle Jesus, meek and mild’s least pastorally
sensitive responses: “Get behind me, Satan”.

And lack of knowledge about Jesus is a contemporary theme.
Many of us are aware how little our friends outside church circles know about
him. Some might have an understanding of his centrality to Christmas, but it is
surprising to realise how few know that Jesus is central to Easter. There are
those who believe that John the Baptist baptised Jesus in the River Thames, and
so on.

For all these reasons and more, our forthcoming Holiday Club
next month presents us with an opportunity to share more of Jesus with young
hearts and minds. The relationships we build and the epilogues we prepare for
the weekly Craft Club are part of the same picture. So too is the wider
involvement of the Christian Church in education, and I shall be taking
assemblies at Little Waltham Primary School once a month from September.

But we also need to examine ourselves. It can be shocking to
recognise how little we know, and our Time
To Talk Of God course has shown that although most of us have been
Christians for many years there are many basic things we know little about –
some key Christian doctrines, some basic Christian disciplines and our general
biblical knowledge, to mention but three.

So when we read biblical stories like today’s and encounter
people who had a defective view of Jesus, and when we meet people in our
society who also know little about him, we need to be very careful about our
own reactions. Yes, we need to be positive in finding ways to help people not
only know more about Jesus but also to know him. But again we have to guard
ourselves against a reaction that comes out of a superiority complex. If those
of us who claim to be his present-day disciples know very little about him and
his ways then there is a clear call to apply ourselves.

In fact it may well mean that we need to reorder things in
our personal life and in our church life. If our current priorities are not
leading to a deeper knowledge of Jesus and practical response in our lives to
that knowledge, then some things need to change. We may need to make hard
decisions about priorities. We may even need to choose between priorities.

What we certainly need to do is put an urgent premium on
developing small groups where we can get to grips with some of these issues. We
can learn more about our faith, ask the difficult questions and cajole one
another into spiritual growth. It’s not simply about learning a collection of
facts that would enable us to be Mastermind
contestants, specialising in Christianity. It’s about the practical application
of our faith – loving God with heart, soul, mind and strength – seeing such
small groups as another way to act out our Christian service in the world.

3. Guilt
How does ‘King’ Herod react? ‘[W]ith an uneasy conscience
disposed to superstition, [he] feared that John had come back to haunt him.’
[Lane, p 213]

But when Herod heard of it, he said,
‘John, whom I beheaded, has been raised.’
[verse 16]

It’s amazing what a meeting of guilt with Jesus will do.
Herod is petrified. And in the rest of the story we get Mark’s account of just
why Herod has a guilty conscience. He has entered into an adulterous and
scandalous marriage to his brother’s wife, which John has rightly condemned. He
has presided over an undoubtedly debauched banquet at which his step-daughter has
pleased a crowd of dirty old men by dancing lasciviously. He has made a rash
vow that his angry wife has manipulated and which ends up with John’s
execution. Is that enough guilt?

And so Mark has given us a detailed account of John’s murder
by the authorities. He will later do the same in greater detail about Jesus
himself. It is not without cause that Mark’s Gospel has been called ‘a passion
narrative with a long introduction’. In our story today we get John the
Baptist’s passion as a precursor to Jesus’ passion. This is what guilt does: it
kills God’s messenger.

John is executed, Jesus will be. It looks like the triumph
of injustice and the failure of God’s kingdom. But, as Brian McLaren puts it in
his latest book,

What if the only way for the kingdom of God to come in its true form – as a
kingdom “not of this world” – is through weakness and vulnerability, sacrifice
and love? What if it can conquer only by first being conquered? What if being
conquered is absolutely necessary to expose the brutal violence and dark
oppression of these principalities and powers, these human ideologies and
counterkingdoms – so that they, having been exposed, can be seen for what they
are and freely rejected, making room for the new and better kingdom? What if
the kingdom of God must in these ways fail in order to succeed?
[Brian McLaren, The Secret Message Of
Jesus, p 69f.]

And only this – what the apostle Paul called ‘the
foolishness of the Cross’ – will deal with the guilt that persecutes and kills
God’s messengers and God’s Son. Our high and holy calling is not to proclaim
pop psychology with a religious veneer or a slice of self-help thinly spread
with God, however much the Gospel does wonders for human self-esteem. Nor is it
our rôle to baptise our favourite political creed whether of left or right and
claim that it will bring in the kingdom, however vital the message of social
justice is. Our duty and purpose is to present a cross-shaped message.

And within that comes a calling to live a cross-shaped life.
Ours too will be the call to say uncomfortable things to the movers and shakers
of our society, and they may no more like it than Herod Antipas and Herodias
did. The signs are there: to take but one recent example, little over a week
ago a Christian discipleship course in Dartmoor Prison was closed
because it offended against ‘diversity policies’. What was wrong with it?
Firstly, it taught the sanctity of marriage and that was deemed to be
homophobic. Secondly, it was not multi-faith but explicitly Christian.

Like John’s disciples we may have bodies to bury – I pray
not literally but institutions, assumptions and ways of doing things may be
buried as constraints tighten and opposition increases. Nevertheless we need to
persevere with the call to serve as our King himself did, to learn more of him
and put it into practice – which will doubtless mean a call to that self-same
service and proclaiming the Cross in word and deed even in the face of
opposition.

Technorati Tags: sermon, Mark 6:14-29, Jesus, John+the+Baptist, discipleship, Mastermind, Brian+McLaren

I’ve been unable to upload my sermon for tomorrow to my usual site, so until I can get things resolved with technical support I am posting it here. The layout has gone a bit funny as I’ve transferred HTML code, but it’s late at night and I don’t have time to fix everything now.

You can read the Bible passage on which the sermon is based here.

Introduction
Isadore Irandir was the goalkeeper for Brazilian football team Rio Petro in the 1970s. He was a devout Christian, and prayed at the beginning of each match. One day his team faced the famous Brazilian side Corinthians, whose star player was Roberto Rivelino. Corinthians kicked off. The
ball was passed to Rivelino. Noticing that Irandir was still on his knees, praying, he shot from the half way line – and scored, just three seconds into the game.
[Adapted from Simon Coupland, Spicing Up Your Speaking, p249 #243.]

I tell you that story today, the day of the World Cup Final, because I realise you haven’t heard enough about football in the last month. The Sun’s childish headline ‘There Is A God’, when Wayne Rooney
was getting back to fitness, now looks even more pathetic.

But this is not a sermon in which I make analogies about an English football side filled with individuals who can’t play together as a team – although that would make a useful analogy for many
churches. It is to say, however, that I have chosen a football metaphor to frame
this sermon.

And it’s this. Usually a football team does better when it plays at ‘home’ than it does when ‘away’. At home, in front of your own supporters, you generally win more matches. And in this passage from Mark’s Gospel Jesus is playing both at home and away. Firstly he is on his home ground for a fixture at his local synagogue. Then he is away, teaching in other villages and commissioning his followers to help him spread the Gospel of the Kingdom.

But – does Jesus do better at home or away? And what do the results tell us about discipleship in God’s Kingdom?

1. Home
He’s the local boy made good, the local hero. The lad from Nazareth is garnering quite a reputation. Now he’s returning home. Surely it will be standing room only and accolades for the man who teaches like no-one else and who heals and casts out demons. This should be a home banker.

Not exactly. It seems to start well. They are astounded. The locals say,

‘Where did this man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been given to him? What deeds of power are being done by his hands!’

[verse 2]

But behind those words, ‘Where did this man get all this?’ is not wonder and praise but cynicism. For verse 3 continues,

<!– +fOther ancient authorities read son of the carpenter and of Mary+e –><!– +fOr stumbled+e –>‘Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?’ And they took offence at him.

They know him. He can’t be anyone special. He’s just a carpenter. Carpenters don’t do this sort of thing. He’s just a common worker like the rest of us [cf. William L Lane, The Gospel Of Mark,
p202.].

And in that designation ‘the son of Mary’ is a Jewish derogatory statement. You only described a man as the son of his mother when you were reaching for terms of insult [ibid., p203].

So the people who have known Jesus since boyhood have little more than contempt for him. They cannot see beyond their own narrow horizons to embrace him as a prophet, let alone the Messiah and the Son of God. They dismiss him. Without openness to him even Jesus cannot exercise the power of the Spirit. It’s not a home win, is it? It’s a home defeat. It’s like the opposing team marking the star player out of the game.

Perhaps this is something that faces us as we share in God’s mission today. While there is an incredible ignorance of Jesus and the Gospel in our society, many people who reject Christianity do so thinking they know what they are rejecting. This society sees itself as post-Christian, not pre-Christian. It is our task to set before the world Jesus as he truly is, in all his blazing glory. At the same time we may face the same level of scorn and rejection that Jesus himself faced. But that must not mean we stop witnessing to Jesus in word and deed.

But for us to witness to Jesus in the world means facing some challenging thoughts fin this story for those of us in church life. We are the people who like to think we know Jesus well. Yet maybe
familiarity has bred contempt for us. Maybe we’re so used to the same old sayings, creeds and formulae being trotted out about Jesus that it is altogether too well-known and it loses its power. Maybe the routine and regularity of church life have dulled our vision from vivid Technicolor to sepia or black and white. We think we know him.

Indeed we think we know him so much that we have domesticated him into an obedient pet who will do what we tell him. There’s something altogether the wrong way round there. And as C S Lewis wrote in Narnia Chronicles, ‘Aslan is not a tame lion.’ Jesus is what the musician T-Bone Burnett called ‘The wild truth’.

And we’ve become so accustomed to the ordinariness of church life that any breakout from it must be contained. Is it so surprising, then, if our churches can be drab and dreary – not necessarily in the decor of the buildings but the demeanour of the people? Is it that startling to notice that Jesus is not working many miracles among us, too? Mind you, we’d probably be satisfied with him laying hands on a few sick people and curing them [verse 5].

Could it be that Jesus is amazed at our unbelief, just as he was in Nazareth [verse 6]? What kind of belief is required? We’ll explore that more in the second point, where Jesus has an ‘away fixture’, because there we see something quite different from the ‘match’ at Nazareth. In fact, the suffocating unbelief in the synagogue is the very thing that leads to Jesus’ mission to the villages in the second half of the reading. Unless we heed the warning about unbelief in him it could be that he will move on from us to somewhere that is more receptive than we are.

2. Away
So to the ‘away fixture’. And if Jesus hasn’t scored a victory at home, what chance is there for him away? Is he relegation material?

Far from it. Away from home, away from unbelief, Jesus and his disciples find it easier to score goals and win the game. In contrast to the result at Nazareth that ‘he could do no deed of power
there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them’ [verse 5] the result in the villages of the Twelve’s mission is that ‘They cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them.’ [verse 13]. It isn’t that everything will be smooth, because Jesus says some villages will reject the message and so the Twelve should wipe the dust off their feet
against them [verse 11] as a prophetic sign of dissociation from its moral pollution and warning of judgement to make them ponder.

But nevertheless there is a radical difference. So what has produced the difference? Perhaps most importantly for us, how is faith being exercised here in contrast to the unbelief prevalent in the Nazareth synagogue?

Well, we don’t know anything directly about those who responded to the teaching of Jesus and the message of the Twelve. We can probably assume by contrast to the pious people at Nazareth that they did not display the short-sighted unbelief that hampered them. Instead of being restricted by past experience and assumptions they were open to what God wanted to do through Jesus and his messengers.

But what we do know a little more about is the way in which Jesus sent his twelve followers out to share in his mission. They, too, demonstrate active faith.

Their faith becomes immediately apparent by responding to the terms Jesus sets for them as they go out. They have to depend entirely on local hospitality – no bread, no beggar’s bag and not even the most worthless copper coin in their belts. Nor could they take a second tunic that would have been needed to guard against the night chill if they had had to sleep outside in the open air. [ibid., p207f.]

This was a definite act of faith that they would find hospitality – although it has to be said that giving hospitality was characteristic of the culture.  Nevertheless their message risked a negative approach and so they could have been flung out of a village. So on balance this is an act of trust. It is going out on a limb, on the basis that Jesus has spoken, and trusting God to meet needs.

It may be that living-on-the-edge kind of faith that we are being called to. It may be the lack of it in our churches that makes us dull rather than exciting places. Jesus may or may not lay similar requirements upon us to those he laid upon the Twelve, but he certainly will call us in some ways to take risky action based on his word to us. I’m not saying we sit and think of something extreme and then do it – that would be like the temptation in the wilderness for Jesus to throw himself down from the top of the Temple. But I am saying that Jesus wants to challenge us to do things outside our comfort zone and when we trust him enough to do them he will do wonderful things as a result.

Simple and daring faith is combined with courageous witness. They know that the message of Jesus is not of the ‘I’m OK, you’re OK’ variety. They know that his message from the beginning has been one that says, the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is near, so repent and believe the good news [Mark 1:15]. So it is not surprising that their message is to ‘[proclaim] that all should repent’ [verse 12]. Living faith in Jesus knows there will be areas where his message comes into conflict with everyday life as we know it. To meet Jesus is to know the need to change. It is no good thinking we can just tweak the Gospel to suit the moral fashions of the day.

To proclaim the Gospel is to know what the Catholic author G K Chesterton knew when once he wrote a letter to The Times, which said:

Dear Sir,

What is wrong with the world?

I am.

Yours faithfully,

G K Chesterton.

Finally, active faith and courageous witness are combined with compassionate use of spiritual power:

They cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured
them.
[verse 13]

Simple, authoritative prayer to cast out evil. Anointing with oil – which was thought to be medicine in the ancient world – but this is no quackery, the sick people are cured, so we may presume prayer is
involved, too.

For us comes the simple challenge to meet human needs and alleviate pain in the name of Jesus Christ – not only by the efforts of relief agencies, but also personally and taking all action on a foundation of prayer.

Now I am not denying that we pray for people – and we shall do so in the intercessions in a moment or two – but perhaps we are being called to be more daring. To say to people, I will pray for you. To offer to pray for them in their presence, if they would like it.

And I am not condemning, either, when we give money to relief organisations. But might not a vibrant church also ask what small projects it could begin in the locality to serve the needy?

Conclusion
In 1981 I went with a few other Christians from my home circuit to the north of Norway for a nine-day mission. There we were joined by some other Methodists from Strasbourg. It was under a programme of the European Methodist Youth Council (apparently, I was still a youth in 1981). The theory behind the programme was that it was best to get your first taste of mission away from home soil, where you might find it more difficult to speak about your faith.

Well certainly in this story from Mark’s Gospel there is greater fruitfulness for Jesus’ message ‘away’ rather than at home, but it is not due to a lack of courage on his part. It is all down to a model of true, living faith.

We have two choices. We can be the unbelieving people of short-sighted vision in the synagogue at Nazareth. If so, we shall reject Jesus and his presence will be gone from us.

Or we can show the daring faith of the Twelve out on mission in the villages. Daring faith, courageous witness and the compassionate use of spiritual power.

Does that sound like a model for mission?

Technorati Tags: sermon, Mark+6:1-13, Jesus, mission

I’ve been unable to upload my sermon for tomorrow to my usual site, so until I can get things resolved with technical support I am posting it here. The layout has gone a bit funny as I’ve transferred HTML code, but it’s late at night and I don’t have time to fix everything now.

You can read the Bible passage on which the sermon is based here.

Introduction
Isadore Irandir was the goalkeeper for Brazilian football team Rio Petro in the 1970s. He was a devout Christian, and prayed at the beginning of each match. One day his team faced the famous Brazilian side Corinthians, whose star player was Roberto Rivelino. Corinthians kicked off. The
ball was passed to Rivelino. Noticing that Irandir was still on his knees, praying, he shot from the half way line – and scored, just three seconds into the game.
[Adapted from Simon Coupland, Spicing Up Your Speaking, p249 #243.]

I tell you that story today, the day of the World Cup Final, because I realise you haven’t heard enough about football in the last month. The Sun’s childish headline ‘There Is A God’, when Wayne Rooney
was getting back to fitness, now looks even more pathetic.

But this is not a sermon in which I make analogies about an English football side filled with individuals who can’t play together as a team – although that would make a useful analogy for many
churches. It is to say, however, that I have chosen a football metaphor to frame
this sermon.

And it’s this. Usually a football team does better when it plays at ‘home’ than it does when ‘away’. At home, in front of your own supporters, you generally win more matches. And in this passage from Mark’s Gospel Jesus is playing both at home and away. Firstly he is on his home ground for a fixture at his local synagogue. Then he is away, teaching in other villages and commissioning his followers to help him spread the Gospel of the Kingdom.

But – does Jesus do better at home or away? And what do the results tell us about discipleship in God’s Kingdom?

1. Home
He’s the local boy made good, the local hero. The lad from Nazareth is garnering quite a reputation. Now he’s returning home. Surely it will be standing room only and accolades for the man who teaches like no-one else and who heals and casts out demons. This should be a home banker.

Not exactly. It seems to start well. They are astounded. The locals say,

‘Where did this man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been given to him? What deeds of power are being done by his hands!’

[verse 2]

But behind those words, ‘Where did this man get all this?’ is not wonder and praise but cynicism. For verse 3 continues,

<!– +fOther ancient authorities read son of the carpenter and of Mary+e –><!– +fOr stumbled+e –>‘Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?’ And they took offence at him.

They know him. He can’t be anyone special. He’s just a carpenter. Carpenters don’t do this sort of thing. He’s just a common worker like the rest of us [cf. William L Lane, The Gospel Of Mark,
p202.].

And in that designation ‘the son of Mary’ is a Jewish derogatory statement. You only described a man as the son of his mother when you were reaching for terms of insult [ibid., p203].

So the people who have known Jesus since boyhood have little more than contempt for him. They cannot see beyond their own narrow horizons to embrace him as a prophet, let alone the Messiah and the Son of God. They dismiss him. Without openness to him even Jesus cannot exercise the power of the Spirit. It’s not a home win, is it? It’s a home defeat. It’s like the opposing team marking the star player out of the game.

Perhaps this is something that faces us as we share in God’s mission today. While there is an incredible ignorance of Jesus and the Gospel in our society, many people who reject Christianity do so thinking they know what they are rejecting. This society sees itself as post-Christian, not pre-Christian. It is our task to set before the world Jesus as he truly is, in all his blazing glory. At the same time we may face the same level of scorn and rejection that Jesus himself faced. But that must not mean we stop witnessing to Jesus in word and deed.

But for us to witness to Jesus in the world means facing some challenging thoughts fin this story for those of us in church life. We are the people who like to think we know Jesus well. Yet maybe
familiarity has bred contempt for us. Maybe we’re so used to the same old sayings, creeds and formulae being trotted out about Jesus that it is altogether too well-known and it loses its power. Maybe the routine and regularity of church life have dulled our vision from vivid Technicolor to sepia or black and white. We think we know him.

Indeed we think we know him so much that we have domesticated him into an obedient pet who will do what we tell him. There’s something altogether the wrong way round there. And as C S Lewis wrote in Narnia Chronicles, ‘Aslan is not a tame lion.’ Jesus is what the musician T-Bone Burnett called ‘The wild truth’.

And we’ve become so accustomed to the ordinariness of church life that any breakout from it must be contained. Is it so surprising, then, if our churches can be drab and dreary – not necessarily in the decor of the buildings but the demeanour of the people? Is it that startling to notice that Jesus is not working many miracles among us, too? Mind you, we’d probably be satisfied with him laying hands on a few sick people and curing them [verse 5].

Could it be that Jesus is amazed at our unbelief, just as he was in Nazareth [verse 6]? What kind of belief is required? We’ll explore that more in the second point, where Jesus has an ‘away fixture’, because there we see something quite different from the ‘match’ at Nazareth. In fact, the suffocating unbelief in the synagogue is the very thing that leads to Jesus’ mission to the villages in the second half of the reading. Unless we heed the warning about unbelief in him it could be that he will move on from us to somewhere that is more receptive than we are.

2. Away
So to the ‘away fixture’. And if Jesus hasn’t scored a victory at home, what chance is there for him away? Is he relegation material?

Far from it. Away from home, away from unbelief, Jesus and his disciples find it easier to score goals and win the game. In contrast to the result at Nazareth that ‘he could do no deed of power
there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them’ [verse 5] the result in the villages of the Twelve’s mission is that ‘They cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them.’ [verse 13]. It isn’t that everything will be smooth, because Jesus says some villages will reject the message and so the Twelve should wipe the dust off their feet
against them [verse 11] as a prophetic sign of dissociation from its moral pollution and warning of judgement to make them ponder.

But nevertheless there is a radical difference. So what has produced the difference? Perhaps most importantly for us, how is faith being exercised here in contrast to the unbelief prevalent in the Nazareth synagogue?

Well, we don’t know anything directly about those who responded to the teaching of Jesus and the message of the Twelve. We can probably assume by contrast to the pious people at Nazareth that they did not display the short-sighted unbelief that hampered them. Instead of being restricted by past experience and assumptions they were open to what God wanted to do through Jesus and his messengers.

But what we do know a little more about is the way in which Jesus sent his twelve followers out to share in his mission. They, too, demonstrate active faith.

Their faith becomes immediately apparent by responding to the terms Jesus sets for them as they go out. They have to depend entirely on local hospitality – no bread, no beggar’s bag and not even the most worthless copper coin in their belts. Nor could they take a second tunic that would have been needed to guard against the night chill if they had had to sleep outside in the open air. [ibid., p207f.]

This was a definite act of faith that they would find hospitality – although it has to be said that giving hospitality was characteristic of the culture.  Nevertheless their message risked a negative approach and so they could have been flung out of a village. So on balance this is an act of trust. It is going out on a limb, on the basis that Jesus has spoken, and trusting God to meet needs.

It may be that living-on-the-edge kind of faith that we are being called to. It may be the lack of it in our churches that makes us dull rather than exciting places. Jesus may or may not lay similar requirements upon us to those he laid upon the Twelve, but he certainly will call us in some ways to take risky action based on his word to us. I’m not saying we sit and think of something extreme and then do it – that would be like the temptation in the wilderness for Jesus to throw himself down from the top of the Temple. But I am saying that Jesus wants to challenge us to do things outside our comfort zone and when we trust him enough to do them he will do wonderful things as a result.

Simple and daring faith is combined with courageous witness. They know that the message of Jesus is not of the ‘I’m OK, you’re OK’ variety. They know that his message from the beginning has been one that says, the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is near, so repent and believe the good news [Mark 1:15]. So it is not surprising that their message is to ‘[proclaim] that all should repent’ [verse 12]. Living faith in Jesus knows there will be areas where his message comes into conflict with everyday life as we know it. To meet Jesus is to know the need to change. It is no good thinking we can just tweak the Gospel to suit the moral fashions of the day.

To proclaim the Gospel is to know what the Catholic author G K Chesterton knew when once he wrote a letter to The Times, which said:

Dear Sir,

What is wrong with the world?

I am.

Yours faithfully,

G K Chesterton.

Finally, active faith and courageous witness are combined with compassionate use of spiritual power:

They cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured
them.
[verse 13]

Simple, authoritative prayer to cast out evil. Anointing with oil – which was thought to be medicine in the ancient world – but this is no quackery, the sick people are cured, so we may presume prayer is
involved, too.

For us comes the simple challenge to meet human needs and alleviate pain in the name of Jesus Christ – not only by the efforts of relief agencies, but also personally and taking all action on a foundation of prayer.

Now I am not denying that we pray for people – and we shall do so in the intercessions in a moment or two – but perhaps we are being called to be more daring. To say to people, I will pray for you. To offer to pray for them in their presence, if they would like it.

And I am not condemning, either, when we give money to relief organisations. But might not a vibrant church also ask what small projects it could begin in the locality to serve the needy?

Conclusion
In 1981 I went with a few other Christians from my home circuit to the north of Norway for a nine-day mission. There we were joined by some other Methodists from Strasbourg. It was under a programme of the European Methodist Youth Council (apparently, I was still a youth in 1981). The theory behind the programme was that it was best to get your first taste of mission away from home soil, where you might find it more difficult to speak about your faith.

Well certainly in this story from Mark’s Gospel there is greater fruitfulness for Jesus’ message ‘away’ rather than at home, but it is not due to a lack of courage on his part. It is all down to a model of true, living faith.

We have two choices. We can be the unbelieving people of short-sighted vision in the synagogue at Nazareth. If so, we shall reject Jesus and his presence will be gone from us.

Or we can show the daring faith of the Twelve out on mission in the villages. Daring faith, courageous witness and the compassionate use of spiritual power.

Does that sound like a model for mission?

Technorati Tags: sermon, Mark+6:1-13, Jesus, mission

Jesus makes an appearance ‘in person’ on this church site. His ‘message’ ends with, ‘And remember, I’ll always love you’, which either sounds like Barney The Dinosaur or Whitney Houston massacring a tender Dolly Parton song.

According to Purgatorio (thanks for the link) the site claims,

‘This site was created and inspired by God through the Power of the Holy Spirit.’

I can’t help thinking of the wicked story Murray Watts once told in an edition of Ship Of Fools back in the early 1980s when it was a mere printed magazine. He told of people who would say to him, ‘The Lord has given me a poem’ and then present it to him. But most who claimed the Lord had given them something had written pretty terrible stuff. So Watts was wont to tear the poem to pieces and say, ‘The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord’.

But in this site’s case what is all the more curious is that the site site also has the statement,

‘All Rights Reserved Copyright Crossrevconnect.com’

God doesn’t seem to get the copyright, then, despite it being supposedly his inspiration. I mean, they could at least put his royalties in the offering plate.

Technorati Tags: Crossrevconnect.com, Barney+The+Dinosaur, Whitney+Houston, Dolly+Parton, Purgatorio, Murray+Watts, Ship+Of+Fools

Real provocative wisdom here.

Technorati Tags: preaching, Kim+Fabricius