Tag: Donald Kraybill

Palm Sunday 2024: Jesus The King (Mark 11:1-11)

Mark 11:1-11

Happy Cloak Sunday!

What, you say, not Palm Sunday?

Well, no. Of the four Gospel writers, only John tells us about the palm branches. We read from Mark, who gets the next closest by telling us that

others spread branches they had cut in the fields (verse 8b)

but he doesn’t specify that they are palms. He tells us more about the cloaks that the disciples put over the colt for Jesus to sit on (verse 7) and the cloaks that people spread on the road (verse 8a).

So I think we can be justified in renaming today Cloak Sunday.

In fact, to get more to the point of what this story is about, it’s helpful to note the heading that the NIV Bible gives it: ‘Jesus comes to Jerusalem as king.’ I don’t normally like the headings of Bible passages to be read out because they’re not part of the text, and they sometimes detract from the theme I am going to take from the reading, but on this occasion it’s spot-on. Jesus comes to Jerusalem as king.

Firstly, let’s look at the signs of kingship:

The colt, the colt, the colt, the colt. Four times in the first seven verses we read, ‘The colt.’ That’s without where a pronoun like ‘it’ substitutes for it. Those first seven verses are all about the colt.

And although Mark doesn’t directly quote it as Matthew does, you know what’s in his mind and you know what will be in the mind of those present – it’s Zechariah 9:9:

Rejoice greatly, Daughter Zion! Shout, Daughter Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

Even the cloaks on the colt’s back might indicate Jesus’ kingship, because the king’s steed could not be ridden by anyone else.[1]

But certainly the fact that Jesus rides into the city whereas all the pilgrims walk in sets him apart. And the ground was often covered for the arrival of a visiting dignitary. We can be in little doubt that Jesus is making an explicit claim to being Jerusalem’s king.

And that’s a change of tactic from Jesus. Up until now, Mark’s Gospel has recorded several incidents where Jesus has forbidden people to reveal who he is. He has wanted to keep his identity secret. (Scholars call it ‘The messianic secret.’)

But at this point, Jesus goes public. He is Israel’s true king, God’s anointed One. This is only going to do one thing, and that is to ratchet up the tension with both the Roman authorities who will not brook a challenge to their power, and the Jewish leadership who have rejected Jesus but will look bad if they reject their true king.

It had to come out at some point, but not earlier, when it would have ruined Jesus’ ministry in Galilee and other places. But all along Jesus has known his destiny and the climax of his mission. It isn’t what most people would consider a climax to their work, but yet again Jesus flips on its head the notions and the values of the world. His kingdom is different. It is different by one hundred and eighty degrees from the kingdoms of this world.

Many years ago, I read a book by an American Mennonite called Donald Kraybill that called the kingdom of God in Jesus’ teaching ‘The Upside-Down Kingdom.’ As the publisher’s blurb puts it:

What does it mean to follow the Christ who traded victory and power for hanging out with the poor and forgiving his enemies? How did a man in first-century Palestine threaten the established order, and what does that mean for us today? Jesus turned expectations upside down. The kingdom of God is still full of surprises. Are you ready?

So we need secondly to consider the type of kingship that Jesus was demonstrating on Cloak Sunday:

The crowds acclaim the coming kingdom of their father David (verse 10a), which is surely a sign of messianic expectation. You can imagine the hopes that this might be the one who will rid them of the hated Romans.

But if they did think that, then they missed the Zechariah hint with Jesus coming ‘lowly and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.’

Lowly. Not war-like. Among the disciples, I wonder what Simon the Zealot felt? Remember that the Zealots were committed to the overthrow, by violence if necessary, of Israel’s enemies. And did this contribute to Judas Iscariot’s disillusionment with Jesus? We don’t know, but I do wonder.

Jesus is clearly coming as king, but his enthronement will happen at of all places the Cross, where the charge against him will be ‘The King of the Jews’ (Mark 15:26). The Cross is enthronement and victory, not defeat.

It’s very easy for us to react with disillusionment, too. Some of the biggest conflicts and acts of sabotage in a local church are undertaken by people whose anxieties about the future have escalated. I was reading about this on Friday in an email from the organisation Bridge Builders, who train church leaders in how to transform conflict. Their Director of Training, Liz Griffiths, wrote this:

Triggers for that anxiety are plentiful – uncertainty about the future of many churches; declining numbers and aging congregations; rapid social change and concern as to how to respond to these with integrity and faithfulness; and the wider issues that impact far beyond the church – rising inequality, climate and environmental issues, and the aftermath of a global pandemic. It’s not surprising that anxiety is high, and reactive behaviour is so prevalent.

Now there may be all sorts of reasons in our family background and the history of our churches that lead to these anxieties, but in the long term what we need to do is bring them to Christ and submit them to his very different form of kingship. His way of overcoming evil is not by the crash-bang-wallop methods that some would advocate. It is by peace, lowliness, and ultimately, suffering.

I guess that Judas Iscariot bottled up all his frustrations and then his weakness for money became the flaw through which his dissatisfaction came to fatal expression with his betrayal of Jesus and his own subsequent suicide.

What about Simon the Zealot? He is still part of the eleven apostles come the Resurrection. Could it be that he submitted his own prior commitment to violent resistance to the ways of Jesus and followed the lowly, peaceable king? It looks to me like he did.

Will we bring our anxieties, our frustrations, our dissatisfaction with the state of the church and the world to Jesus, the king of peace and humility? Only his way brings healing.

And all that means that thirdly, we are talking about our responses to Jesus’ kingship.

How are we going to respond to the Jesus who rode humbly into Jerusalem as King? I have just posed it as a choice between Judas Iscariot’s pent-up frustrations and Simon the Zealot’s ability to put aside his prior commitments and go the way of Jesus. But there is another way of framing the binary choice we have, and it’s more directly in the passage. As with some earlier comments in this sermon, I owe what I am about to say to the Anglican New Testament scholar Ian Paul[2].

Mark refers to the two villages of Bethphage and Bethany at the Mount of Olives (verse 1), whereas Matthew only mentions Bethany. We know from John’s Gospel that Bethany was a safe place for Jesus, because that is where his friends Lazarus, Martha, and Mary lived. One Christian author, Frank Viola, even entitled a book of his about their relationship at Bethany ‘God’s Favourite Place On Earth.’

But Bethphage was different. The name of the village means ‘House of unripe figs’, and that seems rather significant given that one of the first things Jesus does in ‘Holy Week’ is to curse a fig tree that is not producing fruit. A fig tree sometimes symbolised Israel, and Jesus’ action was a prophetic sign of his assessment of the state of God’s people.

Symbolically, then, Bethany and Bethphage show us two contrasting responses to the kingship of Jesus. Either we draw close to him, learn from him, and follow him as Lazarus, Martha, and Mary did, or we make no serious response to him and end up unfruitful and even cursed.

This is a time, then, to take Jesus seriously.

And this week, I read a short devotional article entitled ‘Taking Jesus Seriously.’ The author, a retired American Baptist pastor named Mike Glenn, began by talking about how we don’t take Jesus seriously. We like to explain away some of his teaching. Some of us even think he was rather extreme in saying that he had to die on the Cross for our sins. Can’t we just say sorry and be done with it?

But this is a season which shows how much it does matter, just how serious the rupture between God and human beings caused by sin is.

Glenn ends the article by talking about the focussed seriousness for Jesus that we need, and which is the only proper response to him at this time:

It takes a focused effort to begin to our lives more seriously and when we begin to think about our lives and purpose, we begin to seek Jesus again. He’s the only one who knows how to make life matter. As Peter confessed, “Only You, Lord, have the words of life.”

Only by focusing on Christ are we able to take our attention away from the sin that tempts us and still seeks to destroy us. We don’t overcome temptation by fighting it. We overcome temptation by ignoring it, by no longer desiring it.

Believe it or not, it’s in watching Jesus die that we learn to live. It’s only when we begin take Jesus seriously that we can take ourselves seriously.

Easter tells us how seriously Jesus takes us. Now, the question we have to answer is how seriously we’ll take Jesus.

[1] Ian Paul, Jesus enters Jerusalem on ‘Palm Sunday’ in Mark 11

[2] Op. cit.

0

Sermon: Turning The World Upside Down

Luke 14:1-14

One of my daughter’s hobbies is gymnastics. Sometimes I think she would prefer to cartwheel somewhere rather than walk.

The other evening, she asked me to time how long she could hold a handstand with her feet against a bedroom wall. I had to ask her to stop, because I could see her face going beetroot red with the blood. She was disgusted, as it turned out she had not achieved the time she wanted to make.

Our Gospel reading today is about Jesus turning things upside down. Just as the early Christian preachers were accused, according to the Book of Acts, of ‘turning the world upside down’, so had Jesus done precisely that before them. They were only following in their Master’s footsteps.

There are two major areas of life that Jesus turns upside down in these verses. The first is religion itself.

Think about the story of Jesus meeting the man suffering from dropsy on the Sabbath (verses 1-6). The Pharisees are watching him. Healing is banned on the Sabbath, but Jesus asks an awkward question:

“Is it lawful to cure people on the Sabbath, or not?” (Verse 3)

In the face of their embarrassed silence, Jesus heals the man, sends him away, and then asks another embarrassing question that exposes the hypocrisy of the religious rules they were operating:

“If one of you has a child or an ox that has fallen into a well, will you not immediately pull it out on the Sabbath day?” (Verse 5)

Again, embarrassed silence (verse 6).

Now, it’s easy for us to be smug and talk about those wicked Pharisees. But … there are a couple of elements here that should make us nervous.

One is that what Jesus shows up with his light here is the darkness of hypocrisy. You know as well as I do that one of the charges non-Christians level at Christians is that we are hypocrites. I know we can retort with comments such as, “Yes, the church is full of hypocrites – but there is always room for one more,” but perhaps sometimes we need to look at our hypocrisies, or at very least our inconsistencies. What are the areas where our lives contradict what we claim to be the truth of God? For a lot of us, there are rather too many.

Sometimes, this is blatant in the way that we do not lives up to the stringent standards that Jesus laid down for the life of discipleship. We do not love the poor. We are glad to have a Food Bank at our church, but we do nothing to support it, not even an occasional tin in the basket.

But our inconsistencies can show up in the most surprising forms. We proclaim that God is love, but we don’t actually believe he loves us.

The late Brennan Manning, one of whose books we have been studying in the Discovery Group, once said that he was convinced that on Judgement Day, God would only ask us one question, and it was this: “Did you believe that I loved you?”

“Do you believe that the God of Jesus loves you beyond worthiness and unworthiness, beyond fidelity and infidelity—that he loves you in the morning sun and in the evening rain—that he loves you when your intellect denies it, your emotions refuse it, your whole being rejects it. Do you believe that God loves without condition or reservation and loves you this moment as you are and not as you should be?”

Some of us actually don’t believe that God loves us. And because deep down some of us don’t truly believe God loves us – and loves us like this – we manufacture a substitute religion. It comes out in the other thing that Jesus is criticising here: we construct a religion of rules. If we can’t believe God loves and live in response to that, then we will come up with something else that makes it look like we truly believe: outward conformity to rules. It’s as if we are saying that keeping the rules makes us acceptable to God, or keeping the rules shows that we are on the inside of the boundary between those who are God’s people and those who aren’t.

That is what the Pharisees were doing – and they ended up with labyrinthine rules that led to the prohibition on healing on a Sabbath day.

But it’s also what we do. We do it when a sincere churchgoer says to the preacher after the service, “If we only returned to the Ten Commandments, all would be well.” (Not that I am knocking the Ten Commandments!) We see it when we turn those in the religious hierarchy into people who police the laws of our institution, rather than preachers of the Gospel. Anglicans can turn Archdeacons into their police officers, and Methodists can do it with their Superintendents. When we are more concerned with maintaining the institution, we have fallen out of love with God.

Turning religion into a set of rules can actually happen for the best of reasons. We are so used to seeing the Pharisees as the villains of the New Testament piece that we forget they started out as good guys. Before the birth of Christ, they had begun as a group that wanted to return the people of God to the purity of the faith, and away from spiritual compromise. It was a noble goal. But somewhere along the way, they took a wrong turn or two and ended up with a caricature of pure faith. Could it also be possible of us that we are people who began with worthy goals as Christians, but took our eyes off Jesus Christ and the grace of God and ended up with a distortion of the real thing, one that – unlike Jesus – rarely brought any kind of healing to people? If that is a description of our faith, then do we not need to start dwelling again on the radical nature of God’s love for us and for the world?

The second are of life that Jesus turns upside down is power. He notices how the guests at the meal lust for the places of honour. But he tells them instead to seek the place of least privilege, and when putting on dinner parties themselves not to invite the movers and shakers of this world but the least and the last, for that is the way of eternal blessing (verses 7-14).

This is the same Jesus who would refuse the request of James and John to sit at his right and his left in glory. He knew the human tendency to seek power, or – if we are unable to gain it for ourselves – to associate with those who are powerful, and so at least be influential.

Unaccountably, despite Jesus’ clear example, this is a lesson the church has struggled to learn over two thousand years. For some bizarre reason, we think the testimony of a celebrity who has become a Christian is more valuable than that of nobodies like us. We think that the church should have clear links with power, whether that is Anglicans clinging on to the idea of being the Established Church, or Methodists not wanting to move our central offices out of London, where we suppose we can talk with national politicians.

And if you think it doesn’t infect ordinary local Methodism, think again. When I arrived in one previous circuit, I inherited a building refurbishment programme. Six months in, we had a grand reopening and managed to get the President of the Conference to preach and dedicate the bright and shiny new premises, with the local mayor performing the official ‘opening’. My biggest headache in the organisation of the day was in satisfying a circuit steward that we had the right dignitaries on the platform. When all that was juggled and agreed, there was no space on the dais for the local MP. He had to sit in the congregation. Thankfully, he wasn’t bothered – unlike the circuit steward!

We need to see, along with Jesus, that the world’s ideas of who should be preferred by virtue of status and power are wrong. They need to be reversed. Let’s think about the examples I’ve just given. The evangelistic initiative that features the testimony of a famous person is actually less effective as a method than ordinary, everyday Christians telling the stories of their faith to friends. The linking of the church with powerful political forces is more likely to end up with spiritual compromise as we try to stay on the right side of these people in order to gain a hearing, whereas the work of the church at street level in standing up for the poor and the forgotten is more credible. And if we have a big event locally, then if we choose to invite the great and the good in order to garner headlines and attract people who otherwise might not come, we will probably largely attract people who come for the wrong reasons – reasons that are inimical to the Gospel, reasons that harden their hearts to Jesus’ message of God’s upside down kingdom, as one author put it.

So the question is, how upside down are we when it comes to power and status? Do we have our own little hierarchies, where we elevate people in a worldly way? Is there any sense here in which we see certain people as more important than others? I certainly hope you don’t see me as your minister as more important. Maybe we even say that some people matter more than us, because we think so little of ourselves, despite the fact that we are loved so much by God.

Or do we set an example here of reversing the world’s values? Do we raise up the lowly and bring down the mighty? Do we bless the poor and not worry too much about what the rich think? Do we favour servanthood over power-grabbing? Are we impressed with humility and disdainful of attempts by people to elevate themselves to positions of prominence?

And do we translate these words and attitudes into action? We know the early church did what it could, even though politically it was a powerless organisation. Slaves became bishops. One early bishop was called Onesimus – the same name as the converted slave Paul sent back to his master, Philemon. It could be the same person. Are we as willing to go against social convention when the Gospel demands it as those first Christians were?

In my teens, we used to sing a modern hymn, ‘O Lord, all the world belongs to you,’ by Patrick Appleford, the man who wrote ‘Living Lord’.

The fourth verse of five pertains to this second point about Jesus upending power and status:

The world wants the wealth to live in state,
but You show a new way to be great:
like a servant You came,
and if we do the same,
we’ll be turning the world upside down.

However, the first verse – which is repeated as the fifth and final verse, too – sums up all we have been talking about:

O Lord, all the world belongs to You
and You are always making all things new.
What is wrong, You forgive,
and the new life You give
is what’s turning the world upside down.

May we be turned upside down by the love of God in Jesus. And may we go out, cartwheeling and hand-standing, to do the same in the world.

0

Sermon: The Revolutionary CV Of Lady Wisdom

Proverbs 8:1-36

For the most part, classical music is a realm of closed-off mystery to me. I cannot understand it or appreciate it. A Local Preacher in my first circuit tried to educate me with the beauties of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, and while I did indeed think it was beautiful and even bought a CD of it, Wolfgang Amadeus didn’t open the doors of heaven for me.

Nor did a girlfriend who loved classical music. When I tried to show an interest and started to like some baroque music, she scorned that style because it wasn’t as demanding as her beloved Sibelius. I tried him too, but beyond Finlandia it all washed over me.

Yet there are other areas of life which I enjoy but which remain a strange land to others. Cricket, for example. To me it is the sport of heaven, especially in the glory of its full five-day Test Match version. Innovations like Twenty Twenty are to me a dumbing down into crash bang wallop territory that lose the subtlety of the game in its fullest expression.

What is the difference? When it comes to classical music, I have never truly learned an instrument or had a mentor. But with cricket, I had a mentor and I used to play. As a child, I watched my father play every time his club team had a home fixture in the summer. I picked up the bug from him. When I started to play, he would take me over the park and place a ten pence piece on the ground to show the exact place where I as a bowler should pitch the ball. When I was slightly older, he took me with him to winter nets practice with his club. Only as an adult did he tell me that the batsmen couldn’t read my Chinaman. If only I’d known that as a teenager, I would have developed as a spinner, not a seamer.

And yes, I realise that the last couple of sentences are gobbledygook to some of you.

What about wisdom, though? What if wisdom is – as I said in the all-age service a fortnight ago – the ability to live well for God? Is that not something we all desire? Yet do we not struggle with it? Is the competence to live for God’s glory a mystery to some of us? Could we not do with a mentor to help us play?

Step forward Lady Wisdom herself. In Proverbs chapter eight she presents her CV for guiding people in the way of wisdom[1]. Is she someone you would take on? Let’s compare the way things are with what she can offer. Of course, this being an ancient document her CV won’t tally exactly with how we write them today, but we do see how she presents herself as qualified for the position.

Firstly, Lady Wisdom offers her skills to everyone. Imagine the dilemma like this. Could it be that the average person is short on wisdom, lacking in the ways to live a life that pleases God? Could it be that many a typical Christian earnestly longs to please God but struggles to do so? And might it also be that the same typical Christian thinks, “I can’t be wise, because I don’t have the theological education or the special gifts that others do”? If so, we face a situation where those who would love to be wise in the biblical sense feel unable to meet their good and godly aspirations.

I wonder whether that is how you feel at times. Do you long to please Christ, yet regard yourself as some kind of second-class Christian?

If you do, Lady Wisdom has something on her CV for you. She is everywhere, and therefore available to everyone. She calls out at the meeting of the paths and at the entrance to the city (verses 2-3). She calls out to ‘all humanity’ (verse 4), including the ‘simple’ and the ‘foolish’ (verse 5). Lady Wisdom’s special attributes are not for the élite but for all. Why? Because they are not about cleverness, talent or charisma. Lady Wisdom empowers all and sundry to live for God’s pleasure. She doesn’t require you to gain alphabet soup after your name, she only requires a heart of obedience and a willingness to depend on God’s Spirit.

Secondly, consider some of the reasons we as Christians feel uncomfortable with the values and priorities of our society. An emphasis on wealth and possessions. An undue attachment to celebrity. Lies, deception and spin. Do we not get frustrated and disheartened by the shallow and tawdry things that capture the imagination of our world?

Lady Wisdom says, I bring qualities of true value. If you want something truly precious, she says, I have it, and I can give it to you. Her words are ‘trustworthy’ (verse 6), ‘true’ (verse 7), ‘just’ (verse 8), ‘right’ (verse 9) and more valuable than silver, gold or rubies (verses 10-11).

She says we can have a choice between a culture that is tone deaf to goodness[2] and one that rejoices in her pure and beautiful teaching. Which do we want?

Thirdly, Lady Wisdom invites us to think about the civil and social order and imagine what it could be like. Christians are not immune to the popular perception of politicians as only being in their profession for the amount of gravy they find on the train. We are used to viewing them as having their fingers in the trough and their ducks in the moat.

And of course in the wider public culture we have the corruption of journalism. We await Lord Leveson’s report into the role of the press and the police in the phone-hacking scandals.

However much we also know that in truth there are many decent politicians, journalists and police officers, it’s hard to evade the conclusion that smell of rotting vegetables in our public life.

That is where Lady Wisdom offers her gifts again. Verses 12 to 16 centre on the place of wisdom in public life. Wisdom brings prudence, knowledge and discretion to the public square (verse 12) and evicts evil, pride, arrogance and perverse speech (verse 13). Instead, she says,

Counsel and sound judgment are mine;
I have insight, I have power.
By me kings reign
and rulers issue decrees that are just;
by me princes govern,
and nobles – all who rule on earth. (Verses 14-16)

It’s a common thread from the ancient world, applied here in terms of Israel’s God:

In the ancient Near East, kings ruled, judged, waged war, protected the weak, and gave laws by means of the authority and gifts of the gods. They mediated divine blessings to the people and ensured peace and prosperity.[3]

I’m not simply saying we should always vote for Christian politicians, but I am saying this: Lady Wisdom invites us to dream of a different social and political order from the one we have.

Fourthly, and related to this, do we not also dream of a society where righteousness and justice are rewarded? Goodness is sometimes rewarded in our culture, but we also witness the way the unrighteous gather power for their own benefit and use it against others. If the allegations about the late Jimmy Savile are true – and the Met Police seem to be talking as if there is clear evidence – then we have a case of someone who garnered fame and fortune and then used his power base and his connections with those in authority to carry out and cover up great wickedness.

It is Lady Wisdom who says that a society which rewards goodness is possible. When wisdom is exalted, truth, righteousness and justice receive their reward. It is not celebrities and entertainers who flourish; rather, it is the wise, who walk in the ways of God, are recognised. Verses 17 to 21 describe a place where wisdom receives riches and honour. Surely we long for a world like that.

Fifthly, let me suggest that we long for a world that needs more than science as an explanation. Science cannot tell us whether anything has a purpose. It can only analyse cause and effect. The trouble is, we have people so committed to science as the answer to everything that they speak about a world that is only explained by cause and effect. They rule out any sense of purpose. The logical end product of this is the claim of Richard Dawkins that the universe displays what he calls ‘pitiless indifference’. It is a cold, purposeless, pointless place.

I am not denigrating science. I am saying it cannot explain everything. It is one important discipline among many. And although the ancients did not conceive of science in the way we do, in our passage Lady Wisdom alerts us to the fact that there is purpose in the universe. We see this from the extended description of Wisdom as having been present before all things in verses 22 to 31 (‘given birth’ in the NIV may be misleading). Not only that, wisdom was involved in creation itself. It is a rich passage that I cannot examine in detail this morning. But if the wisdom of God was present before all things and involved in creation, then we have a guarantee that God baked purpose into the universe.

So – is this what you want? Do you reject a world where only the élite are candidates for wisdom and long instead for a world where wisdom is open to all who wish to live well for God? Do you despair of a culture that values vacuous celebrity and long instead for one where wisdom is prized? Are you sick of the corruption of the powerful and pray for a society where wisdom rules with justice? Are you fed up with a world where the influential use power for themselves and earnestly desire instead a place where goodness is rewarded? And do you say ‘no’ to those who insist on describing life as meaningless, mocking those who disagree as stupid, because you know deep down there is purpose ingrained into life?

And if this is what you want, then what to do? The concluding five verses of this chapter urge us to get familiar with wisdom, the wisdom of God. Ultimately in New Testament terms that means Jesus Christ. What we need to do is embrace the teaching of Jesus with the help of the Holy Spirit. It is Jesus, God’s true wisdom, who turns the values of our world around. His is what one author called ‘The Upside-Down Kingdom.’ He reverses the priorities of this world. He is ‘making all things new.’

To follow God’s wisdom in Jesus will likely never win a majority at the ballot box. It will not be widely popular, except in versions so diluted they lose their power. We are likely to be a minority, operating at the margins of society rather than in the corridors of power.

How, then, can this change the world? It’s a curious thing, but often the most powerful social movements are those who which are minorities operating on the margins. Jesus certainly works this way.

Does anybody want to start a revolution?

[1] Raymond van Leeuwen describes verses 6-21 as ‘Wisdom’s self-presentation. Self-praise seems strange to Westerners today, for whom it seems immodest and naïve. But the function of such speech is like a modern résumé, in which people present their qualifications for such a position.’ (New Interpreter’s Bible Volume V, p90.)

[2] op. cit., p91.

[3] op. cit., p92.

1

Create a website or blog at WordPress.com

Up ↑