Mission in the Bible 6: The Apostolic Call (Mark 3:13-19)

Mark 3:13-19

Hearing a reading about the apostles might provoke a reaction in us that says, ‘What’s this got to do with us? We’re not in the same league as the apostles. We’re just a motley crew of ordinary Christians.’

Except we need to remember just how motley the apostolic crew was, too. How did James and John earn that nickname ‘Sons of thunder’ from Jesus? I envisage them turning up for apostolic meetings, gunning the engines of their Harley Davidsons.

We have the whole spectrum of political views from that day, ranging from Matthew the tax collector who helped fund the occupying Roman empire, to Simon the Zealot who wanted to send the Romans packing by the use of force.

We have a range of professions, from the physical labour exercised by the fishermen to the office accountant. That latter one would be Judas Iscariot, by the way: the Gospels tell us he was in charge of the finances.

Maybe the Twelve aren’t so far removed from us after all: the quiet and the loud, the right wing and the left wing, the manual labourers and the white collar workers. That’s not so very different from our diversity as a congregation, is it?

Sure, we may not be called by Jesus to be apostles, and we shall not exercise our calling in exactly the same way. But there are enough similarities for us to draw on here as we live out our calling to spread the apostolic faith. I’m taking verses 14 and 15 as the focus for our thoughts:

¹⁴He appointed twelve that they might be with him and that he might send them out to preach ¹⁵and to have authority to drive out demons.

There are three elements I’m going to pick out from these verses.

Firstly, ‘that they might be with him’ (verse 14).

In the Christian church, and especially in the Protestant traditions, we are very much into the idea that Christian life and witness involves us being highly active. We fill our churches with programmes, and we expect our ministers to be busy. We have a culture that faith is about doing rather than being.

I believe this is one of the reasons our churches are so often tired, dry, and dying. We can no more make Christian witness an endless cycle of action than we can drive our cars without filling up their tanks (or recharging their batteries). Our version of mission has been to run on empty. Is it any wonder it fails?

Before Jesus sent the apostles out, ‘He appointed twelve that they might be with him’ (my emphasis). We have nothing to share with the world if we are not in a vital relationship with Jesus Christ. How can we commend him if we spend no time with him? How can we expect people to see Jesus in us if we keep our distance from him?

For sure that involves our Sunday practices of worship and Holy Communion. But it also includes mutual sharing in small groups. It includes a personal prayer life each day. We can’t just rely on Sundays. Those of you who are married, would your marriage last if you and your spouse only spoke with each other once a week?

There are plenty of aids to help us in Bible reading and prayer. Traditional daily Bible reading notes still exist. You can get various ones from Scripture Union, or the excellent American daily devotional The Upper Room. Every Day With Jesus, which has been so popular for many years in the UK, is now available as an app for your smartphone or tablet.

Or the 24/7 Prayer movement has produced an app called Lectio 365. It gives you two brief prayer exercises a day. There is a morning one with a Bible reflection tuned to matters of prayer and mission. And there is an evening one where we can reflect with God on how the day has gone.

In the Western church, there is really no excuse when we have so many riches to help us with our devotional lives. It doesn’t reflect well on us that our brothers and sisters in far poorer parts of the world just get on with things and often have more vibrant prayer lives than us. Is that one reason why they tend to have more of an impact with their faith than we do?

If we want our church to have life, we need to begin by going back to spending time with Jesus. There is no substitute.

Secondly, ‘that he might send them out to preach’ (verse 14).

OK, so here’s where we might not all do things like the Twelve did. Jesus doesn’t call every disciple to be a preacher. But he does call every Christian to take his message into the world. We know people don’t like being ‘preached at’ today, but we do have good news to share.

In the ancient world, a herald would come to a town or a village, much like a town crier. There were two messages that he would call ‘Good news.’ One would be that Rome had a new emperor on the throne. The other would be that Rome’s armies had won a great battle.

The New Testament writers took inspiration from this. For them, there was not a new emperor on the throne of Rome but a new king on the throne of the universe, for Jesus had ascended to the Father’s right hand. He was not a coercive king like the Roman emperor, but still one who called people to follow the ways of his kingdom.

Similarly, the New Testament heralds proclaimed that Jesus too had won a great victory in battle – not by bludgeoning the enemy to death but by going to death himself at the Cross.

So our message of good news for today is that Jesus has done all that is necessary against the powers of evil in his death on the Cross, and that he now reigns in heaven, calling everyone to submit to his rule.

Our message is that Jesus has overcome all those things in life that frighten us the most, even death itself, and that he how calls for our allegiance.

If we live according to this message then it will provoke questions. If we are not frightened by what life can do to us, and if we are committed to the ways of Jesus, you bet people will notice and want to know more.

Here are the words of one such person[1]:

If you want, I’ll talk to you about God and salvation. I’ll turn up the volume of heartbreak to the maximum, so to speak. The fact is that I am a Christian, which usually rather sets me up for constant ridicule in the Anti-Corruption Foundation, because mostly our people are atheists, and I was once quite a militant atheist myself. But now I am a believer, and that helps me a lot in my activities, because everything becomes much, much easier. There are fewer dilemmas in my life, because there is a book in which, in general, it is more or less clearly written what action to take in every situation. It’s not always easy to follow this book, of course, but I am actually trying. And so, as I said, it’s easier for me, probably, than for many others, to engage in politics. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied.” I’ve always thought that this particular commandment is more or less an instruction to activity. And so, while certainly not really enjoying the place where I am, I have no regrets about coming back, or about what I’m doing. It’s fine, because I did the right thing. On the contrary, I feel a real kind of satisfaction. Because at some difficult moment I did as required by the instructions, and did not betray the commandment.

I wonder if you know who said those words? They have been widely reported in the last week. Because they came in 2021 from Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who was recently murdered in prison.

So – firstly, be with Jesus. Secondly, preach the good news. Thirdly, ‘to have authority to drive out demons’ (verse 15).

Ooh. That’s a bit scary. And maybe we divide here between those who would run a mile from something like this and a few Christians on the other hand who would get unhealthily excited by it. We have also had the subject sensationalised and distorted by Hollywood and by the media generally.

Every now and again we hear of terrible misuses of this, where some church leader believes somebody to be possessed by demons, and physical force is used, leading to serious injury or even to death.

That’s why most churches restrict who can practise this. In Methodism, you now have to apply and be interviewed before you can be recognised as someone who practises in this area. You are not permitted just to go off and do exorcisms independently.

We may not have the particular authority to drive out demons. But all Christians have a mandate from Jesus to oppose evil. For evil is not just about what the devil does, according to the New Testament, it is also about the world and the flesh.

When the Bible talks about ‘The world’ in negative terms, it means the systems of this world in their opposition to God. So it’s when rulers, politics, or culture line up against God’s kingdom as inaugurated by Jesus. So it includes things such as when politicians don’t care about the poor. It’s about when our culture raises up created things as false idols – so think of the ways people are denigrated today for not being in sexual relationships and you will see one thing that our society treats as an idol. These things need to be opposed.

When the Bible talks about ‘The flesh’ as a bad thing it doesn’t simply mean the human body. It means our sinful human nature. It means that natural bias we seem to have towards doing what is wrong. And this too needs to be opposed.

And just talking about these things may make us realise that opposing evil is not just an external thing: it is also something we fight within ourselves. We have our idols. We have our own inner tendencies towards sin. And as I read this week, even when we take up an offering in an act of worship we engaging in an idol-busting exercise. For as someone said,

“It’s not a time when you’re trying to get money out of people’s pockets. It’s a time when you’re trying to get the idols out of their hearts.”

So in conclusion, the apostolic call to mission can be stated quite simply. It is fueled by spending time with Jesus. It is seen in living and proclaiming the Good News of Jesus’ reign. And it is characterised by opposing evil in all its forms, externally and internally.

It’s simple to state, but challenging to practise. So let us rely on the Holy Spirit to live out this call.

[1] Found on a friend’s Facebook feed. Source unknown.

February 25, 2024 0

Defeating Evil, Luke 8:26-39 – Jesus and the Gerasene Demoniac (Ordinary 12, Year C)

Luke 8:26-39

We had hardly passed the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic when Vladimir Putin began his invasion of Ukraine. For our world, it has been one storm, closely followed by another.

You could say that is what Jesus and his disciples face in this story. From the storm on the lake to the storm in an individual’s life, a storm so violent that he has effectively been put in an outdoor solitary confinement by his society.

Yet as Jesus stilled the storm on the lake he now stills the storm in this man’s life. Surely this story, then, is good news for a world facing its own storms.

We might think that a story of someone infested by many demons is far from our experience and beliefs today, but the themes of the story are in fact profoundly relevant to us.

Yes, it is remote in one sense, even for someone like me who does believe in the existence of the demonic, because even I don’t see demons under every bed. I can only think of one or two cases where I am certain I have encountered them. And in my opinion only a few Christians are called to confront them as Jesus does here.

But I still find relevant themes here for our life and mission today. Luke himself certainly didn’t see this as purely confined to the ministry of Jesus. You can see that in the use of one particular expression that occurs elsewhere in his writings. The man addresses Jesus as ‘Son of the Most High God’ (verse 28). Not only was this a title that the Archangel Gabriel used twice when telling Mary about the child she would conceive (Luke 1:32, 35) it is also a title that pops up in Luke’s other book, the Acts of the Apostles, when Paul is faced by a demonised girl (Acts 16:17). Now if that is the case, Luke must have assumed that this kind of ministry was not unique to Jesus, but it continues with his followers.

Firstly, the story reminds us we are in a spiritual battle.

Where did Jesus fight his initial great spiritual battle? In the wilderness, and the Holy Spirit led him there (Luke 4:1). Note the contrast with the afflicted man in this story:

Many times it had seized him, and though he was chained hand and foot and kept under guard, he had broken his chains and had been driven by the demon into solitary places. (Verse 29b)

The man has not been led by the Spirit but driven by the demon – to where? Solitary places. The Greek word translated ‘solitary places’ is the same one used for the desert where Jesus faced his three temptations.

What are the differences? Jesus is led by the Spirit, the man is driven by the demon. Jesus resists temptation, but the man does not or cannot resist the forces of evil.

We know only too well our own battles with evil and temptation, especially when we are in solitary places, isolated from the support and encouragement of others. How ashamed we feel when we realise yet again that we have not conquered sin and temptation like Jesus did in his earthly life.

But the key to winning the battle is Jesus. When we have failed and need forgiveness again, we remember that he has won the battle against evil not just on his own but on our behalf. Ultimately, he conquered it at the Cross. When we have faith in him and are united with him, then we are clothed in his victory, not our failure. The Father looks at the repentant sinner, united with Christ, and sees the victory over sin of his Son. This is Good News!

And not only that, Jesus gives us hope for our future battles. For just as he was led by the Spirit, so since Pentecost he promises the Spirit to us, too. We can be led by the Spirit as well. When we are faced with temptation, then we can call on the Holy Spirit to strengthen us in resistance and holiness. That’s why Paul writes these encouraging words on temptation in 1 Corinthians 10:

No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it. (1 Corinthians 10:13)

Secondly, this is a story about power.

I’m sure you will remember from other biblical stories that in ancient times there was something powerful about a person’s name. You will recall stories where people are given particular names with certain meanings, because these indicate the kind of person or life they are going to lead under God.

But the ancients also believed that if you knew someone’s name, you had power over them. So the demons try this on early in the story, even though there seems to be a note of fear in what they get the man to say:

‘What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, don’t torture me!’ (Verse 28b)

They know who Jesus is. And they know what he can do to them.

Jesus, though, shows no fear. He asks the name and takes control.

Jesus asked him, ‘What is your name?’
‘Legion,’ he replied, because many demons had gone into him. And they begged Jesus repeatedly not to order them to go into the Abyss. (Verses 30-31)

Jesus has authority as Son of the Most High God, and he knows all about the demons controlling this man. Who is in charge here? Jesus.

Again, this is good news for us. Jesus knows the names of those who oppress us. He has power over the forces of darkness that make our lives miserable. He is coming for them.

Sometimes, that means quite a wait. We don’t know how long this man had been afflicted by demons. Sometimes it is quicker. In other cases they will be dealt with at the Last Judgement.

I believe that Jesus is coming for Vladimir Putin. There will be a dreadful price for him to pay if he does not repent. So too will there be for the monsters in power in Beijing, who persecute Christians, Uyghur Muslims, and others. I think this is part of what we call ‘Good news for the poor.’

One of my favourite Psalms for appreciating this is Psalm 73, where Asaph the Psalmist begins by talking about how the wicked have everything their own way and the righteous suffer (verses 1-16). But then he enters the sanctuary of God (verse 17), the place of worship, where God is acknowledged as King , and he sees things differently:

Surely you place them on slippery ground;
    you cast them down to ruin.
How suddenly are they destroyed,
    completely swept away by terrors!
They are like a dream when one awakes;
    when you arise, Lord,
    you will despise them as fantasies. (Psalm 73:18-20)

God places the wicked on slippery ground. Don’t just look for instant obliteration: watch the unfolding of history, and pray. The power of God will prevail one day, and especially at the Last Judgement.

Thirdly and finally, this story is about restoration.

Contrast the man at the beginning of the story and at the end. At the beginning he has not worn clothes for a long time (verse 27) but after the demons are expelled he is ‘dressed’ (verse 35). I wonder where the clothes came from. Did Jesus send the disciples to get some?

At the beginning of the story he is shouting in a loud voice (verse 28) but afterwards he is ‘in his right mind’ (verse 35).

At the beginning of the story he has been living in tombs, not a house for a long time (verse 27) but at the end Jesus sends him back to his community, and he returns as a witness to Jesus (verses 38-39).

He is restored in so many ways. The physical and material restoration of clothing. The restoration of his mind. The restoration of relationships with his fellow villagers. And key to all this is that after Jesus’ powerful intervention the man is ‘sitting at Jesus’ feet’ (verse 35). This is the power of the Gospel.

And therefore this is what we are called to proclaim and to show. We proclaim restoration of relationship with God through Jesus Christ. We show it in material provision – and the clothes here inevitably made me think of the Knaphill clothes bank.

Yes, we who benefit from the victory of Jesus and his power in the battle against evil now need to share this with others. Like the man, we are to ‘Return home and tell how much God has done for [us]’ (verse 39). Alongside it, Jesus calls us to demonstrate all the ways in which his restoring love works: in feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, offering healing love to the disturbed, and reconciliation of relationships.

The only question is, when are we going to start?

June 19, 2022 0

Following Your Calling (Mark 7:24-37) Ordinary 23 Year B

Mark 7:24-37

There is a meme on the Internet with these words: ‘You shouldn’t believe everything you read on the Internet.’

It then claims that the quotation is from Abraham Lincoln – think about it!

One area where we should be very careful not to believe everything we read on the Internet is when all and sundry offer commentary on difficult Bible passages. And boy do we have a difficult passage this week. What does Jesus think he’s doing, speaking to the Syro-Phoenician woman like that?

²⁷‘First let the children eat all they want,’ he told her, ‘for it is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.’

Well, the stupid and arrogant brigade are only too quick to tell you. They say that Jesus was a racist and that even he had to learn how to treat people of other races well from the woman.

Of course, what they’re really saying is, you should all be as enlightened as us!

When you get a difficult passage like this and when you come across Jesus saying strange and apparently disturbing things, the first thing you need to do is study the text very carefully. Jumping to conclusions just based on how it reads in English without checking with specialist biblical scholars is dangerous. So is reading it as if it’s a contemporary incident in our culture.

For one thing, racism as we know it didn’t exist in Jesus’ society. There were forms of prejudice, yes, but not in the way that we shamefully discriminate against another race or a person of different skin colour. Therefore, to assume that Jesus was being racist is a fundamental mistake.

In any case, this comes in a series of chapters in Mark where Jesus is criss-crossing Lake Galilee between Jewish and Gentile populations. He has healed a Gentile like the Gerasene demoniac. In the previous episode which we considered last week, he has brought down the barrier of the Jewish food laws. To make Jesus a racist against the Gentiles beggars belief.

For another, we need to look at translation issues. If we think Jesus is referring to the woman as some kind of feral dog, we are wrong. The word is not that for a wild dog but for a pet dog, a lap dog, a house dog. This story (in its form here in Mark and also in Matthew) is the only time that word is used. Everywhere else the word for dog is a street dog – but not here.[1]

What does this mean? Jesus is painting a rather more endearing picture of a family where the children give scraps to the beloved family dog. It’s rather more affectionate than that painted by those who jump in screaming, ‘Racism!’

Now granted, it’s still provocative in a way because it’s not what you expect Jesus to say in response to a request for healing, but that’s because what Jesus is doing here is speaking in the form of a riddle. It’s designed to elicit a response from the woman, and that’s exactly what he gets:

²⁸‘Lord,’ she replied, ‘even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.’

And by the way – did you notice how she said ‘the dogs under the table’? She had definitely understood Jesus to mean family pets, not wild dogs.

Jesus is saying something like this. My first calling is to take the kingdom of God to Israel, the People of God. I’m not concentrating on the Gentile mission, which comes after that.

Nevertheless, given the woman’s faith, he heals her daughter by expelling the demon. Even Jesus with his focussed calling on bringing the message of the kingdom to Israel recognises that faith exists outside Israel’s boundaries and on occasions like this he can flex his calling to bring the love of God to this woman and her family.

And having got to that point, I think we can now make a couple of applications from the story to our own lives.

Firstly, are you living out your calling?

Jesus was clear: his priority was to go to ‘the lost sheep of Israel.’ That was his focus. The good news of God’s kingdom had to come first to those whom God had made into his people over many centuries. They were the priority in his calling. For he was the Son of God, which means not only that he was divine, but also that he was the True Israel. He was fulfilling the destiny of Israel. So he had to come to them first.

This determined what he did and where he went. He knew this was his Father’s will for him.

Every Christian has a calling. It isn’t always to a ‘religious job’, such as being a minister. It can be to a certain profession or industry. It can be a calling in family life. It can be something we’re called to do in the church or the community. It can be about the use of a particular gift or talent.

If you don’t know what yours is, then pray about it. In the meantime, dedicate the gifts and resources you know you have to the service of God, and consider the maxim offered by the spiritual writer Frederick Buechner when he said that vocation was ‘where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.’

Once you do have a sense of calling, then the example of Jesus means that it becomes a significant factor in determining what you do and what you leave aside. It helps you when people ask if you will take on a responsibility, because you can consider whether their request matches your calling. If it does, then fine. If not, then the answer is probably ‘no.’

Actually, I suspect that many of us need to say ‘no’ a lot more in order to be able to fulfil our callings. We get more hooked into a human weakness of wanting to please people and remain popular with them than we do following the call of God on our lives.

A few years ago, a very popular book for businesspeople and leaders in society was a title called ‘Essentialism’ by Greg McKeown. Basically, it’s a book that teaches you to say ‘no’ to everything outside your calling. McKeown says that if you have doubts about whether something is consistent with your calling, then you should say ‘no’ to it. I wonder whether many of us in the church should listen to him.

Secondly, though, are you flexible about your calling?

I say that, because I think that’s what Jesus showed in this story. Yes, his calling was to the people of Israel, but here he was in a place where there was less likelihood of him being able to do that. Tyre was a Gentile town.

So although he’s trying to stay low profile and undercover, when the woman discovers his presence and brings her heart-rending request he certainly has the opportunity to meet her need with his divine compassion without adversely affecting his calling.

Therefore, although following our calling is usually pretty decisive, we need to listen to God for those occasions when we need to be flexible rather than rigid.

Jesus homed in on that here as he told his riddle and the woman showed evident faith in her response. When he sees that faith, he acts.

In other words, he knows that God is at work here. The Spirit of God has surely been working in the woman’s life, preparing her for what will lead to Jesus’ life-saving intervention.

That, then, gives us an idea about when to be flexible about our calling. It’s not simply that we have some down time and a gap in our diary so we can fit in one of the people who is regularly badgering us. Instead, it’s about discerning the work of the Spirit who is doing kingdom things and making kingdom opportunities available.

One good way of discerning whether we’re being called to flex our calling is by consulting trusted friends. If you start to get enquiries and requests from people for your time and what they want are things that go beyond your regular calling as you understand it, then it can be wise to take the details of those approaches to your spouse, or to some wise friends. Let them help you discern an answer to these questions: does this request constitute a reasonable flexing of your calling or will it distract you from your calling?

In conclusion, then, when we dig into this story and get beyond the superficial ways of treating it, what we discover here is that the example of Jesus is very practical for us living out our calling, whether he’s called us to serve him in the church or in the world.

He wants us to follow our calling with a passion, but also to listen carefully for those occasional diversions from the route when something else is required of us.

As we do this, the kingdom of God will advance.

And that’s what we want. Isn’t it?

[1] On this and the general thrust of this sermon, see Ian Paul, Did the Syrophoenician woman in Mark 7 teach Jesus not to be racist?

September 5, 2021 0

A Day In The Life: The Kingdom Ministry Of Jesus (Mark 1:29-39)

This week, we look at what a typical day in the life of Jesus’ early ministry looked like, and how it pointed to the kingdom of God which he heralded. What does that mean for us?

Here’s the video, and the script of the talk follows as usual.

Mark 1:29-39

Although the Beatles had their wildly successful career while I was a child, I can’t say I listened to their music until I was a teenager and their songs came on the radio as oldies. At the time, I could warm to their melodic songs like Yesterday and Penny Lane, but I found some of their more experimental songs strange and even disturbing.

One example of the disturbing category for me was ‘A Day In The Life’. Not only was it filled with druggy lyrics and accompanying psychedelic arrangements, it ended with a strange section where the instruments of the orchestra kept accelerating in tempo until there was one final, aggressive piano chord, which eventually died away.

Some critics say that song was their crowning achievement. It just left me feeling troubled.

‘A day in the life.’ In our reading today, Mark edits together some typical accounts of Jesus’ early ministry to provide us with a sense of what a day in the life of Jesus during those first weeks and months of his mission in Galilee were like.

But it’s not just any old ‘day in the life of Jesus’. It’s very focussed. All the themes reflected here give pointers towards the coming kingdom of God which Jesus was heralding in his ministry. He said the kingdom had come near, and so in this typical day’s ministry we see glimpses of what is coming.

Firstly, healing:

²⁹ As soon as they left the synagogue, they went with James and John to the home of Simon and Andrew. ³⁰ Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they immediately told Jesus about her. ³¹ So he went to her, took her hand and helped her up. The fever left her and she began to wait on them.

Let’s leave aside any jokes about the greatest miracle here being that Simon Peter wanted his mother-in-law healed, let’s see this for what it is: a sign of the coming kingdom. As Jesus heals people, he shows that the coming kingdom is one where sickness will not ravage people, but that our resurrected bodily lives will be characterised by well-being in every sense.

How do we read this as the COVID-19 pandemic continues, and in a week when the number of deaths in the UK has gone past 110,000?

We remember that God’s kingdom is both ‘now’ and ‘not yet’. So we see signs of the kingdom when people are healed, but not all are healed. Death, the last enemy, has not been completely vanquished yet. But it will be when Christ appears again.

In the meantime, we pray for the sick to be healed, and we support them when they do not receive that healing in this life. We keep praying, we keep doing those things which make for health, but we leave the outcomes to God as his kingdom pierces this broken world.

Secondly, banishing evil:

³² That evening after sunset the people brought to Jesus all who were ill and demon-possessed. ³³ The whole town gathered at the door, ³⁴ and Jesus healed many who had various diseases. He also drove out many demons, but he would not let the demons speak because they knew who he was.

Casting out demons is only something that very few Christians will probably undertake, and we should not underestimate it by mistakenly attributing all such incidents to mental illness or epilepsy.

But we are all involved in the battle against evil. We set ourselves against evil in society as we stand for justice. We seek to be a positive witness for goodness and truth in our daily relationships.

And of course we battle the evil that we find deep within ourselves, those things that we wouldn’t want other people to know about.

And yet sometimes the greatest help in our own inner battles is precisely when we do find a trustworthy friend with whom to share our struggles, and who can hold us to account.

We face all types of evil from social injustice to nasty neighbours to our own shame with the help of the Holy Spirit. For the Spirit is with us, among us, and within us to help us in the ministry of Christ. ‘More Holy Spirit!’ is a good prayer when we face evil.

Thirdly, intimacy with God:

³⁵ Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed. ³⁶ Simon and his companions went to look for him, ³⁷ and when they found him, they exclaimed: ‘Everyone is looking for you!’

Many preachers rightly say that Jesus’ priority of prayer is vital in his being equipped to show the signs of the coming kingdom, and they would of course be right. How does anyone – even Jesus – do the will of God without fuelling it in prayer?

But it is also a sign of the coming kingdom to pray, because when the kingdom of God comes in all its fulness there will be a closeness to God, who will no longer be distanced from us by sin or anything else. It’s worth therefore investing now in the practice of drawing near to him.

And no, not all prayer times are ecstatic, but that’s OK. Not all meals are memorable, but they all feed us. So in anticipation of the coming kingdom, prayer is a sign of the intimacy with God that is promised.

Fourthly and finally, there’s a theme that runs through all the three we’ve discussed so far. And that theme is service.

When Simon Peter’s mother-in-law is healed, her response is to serve (verse 31). When Jesus casts out demons, he commands them to be silent ‘because they knew who he was’ (verse 34) and had they blabbed who he was, people would not have understood that Jesus saw himself as the Messiah in terms of Isaiah’s Servant of the Lord, rather than a military leader. And true prayer is an act of service, because prayer reminds us that we are ranked below God, and owe him service.

Serving is a sign of the kingdom because it characterises the relationships of God’s kingdom. The kingdom of God is not a place where we seek to grab all we can for ourselves, it is somewhere that we say, ‘What can I give to others?’

Perhaps you know the old story wherein it was imagined that in both Heaven and Hell the occupants were given very long chopsticks with which to eat a meal. In Hell, people starved, because they only thought to try and feed themselves and the length of the chopsticks precluded that. In Heaven, however, everybody flourished, because people sat opposite each other and fed one another with their long chopsticks.

When we follow the pattern of Jesus by serving him and serving people, we are imbibing the culture of God’s kingdom. It’s an important way that we prepare for the life of the age to come – alongside our ministry to the sick, our opposition to evil in the power of the Spirit, and our fellowship with God.

May we more truly point to the coming kingdom through our lives.

February 7, 2021 0

The Superior Authority Of Jesus (Mark 1:21-28)

A shorter act of worship and a shorter talk too, this week. It’s just the way it worked out. This was the material I could find. (Usable material with copyright permission that didn’t cost a bomb was in short supply for this passage.) And as for the talk, well, I’d said what I wanted to say and didn’t feel any need to prolong it.

So here’s the video, and the script for the talk is below as usual.

Mark 1:21-28

You may know the famous story of the preacher who asked some children, ‘What’s furry, either red or grey in colour, and collects nuts?’

A little girl nervously answered, ‘I know the answer should be Jesus but it sounds like a squirrel to me.’

Unlike that occasion, the answer to the biblical story we’ve just read very definitely is Jesus. For Jesus and his authority are the focus of Mark’s account here.

And Jesus demonstrates his unique authority in two ways in this narrative.

The first is the authority of his teaching:

²² The people were amazed at his teaching, because he taught them as one who had authority, not as the teachers of the law.

What was the difference between Jesus and the teachers of the law? Well, the teachers of the law were learned men, but when they taught all their exposition of the Scriptures would be based on quoting ‘previous authorities and commentators’.

To a large extent, the modern preacher does the same. Without you knowing it, I just quoted a scholar named Ian Paul. I could also look at my shelves of Bible commentaries and turning to Mark’s Gospel, I could cite William Lane, Robert Guelich, Craig Evans, or James Edwards. Whether I quote them or not, I will have engaged with their writing while working out what to preach.

Jesus doesn’t need to do any of that. He has come from the Father. He is the Son of God. He doesn’t need to derive anything. He speaks with personal, divine authority. If he came to preach, he wouldn’t need to say, ‘Ian Paul thinks this.’ If he wrote an article, there would be no footnotes.

You get a flavour of this in Matthew’s Gospel, where Jesus often says, ‘You have heard it said … but I say to you …’

If you encounter the voice of God through a preacher today, it will be because the preacher has worked on faithfully and accurately relaying to you the teaching of Jesus (which may involve consulting learned sources). And there will also be the explicitly spiritual dimension. The preparation will be soaked in prayer. The Holy Spirit will sovereignly choose to light up the words of the preacher in your hearts and minds, such that you hear the voice of God, rather than the preacher.

Please pray for your preachers. We only have this secondary authority. Pray for our faithful study of the Scriptures. Pray that we will be in tune with the Holy Spirit.

And for all of us, preachers or otherwise, what we need is an authentic encounter with the voice and teaching of Jesus through the work of the Holy Spirit. The Scriptures have been preserved for us as the primary and supreme way to hear his authentic voice today.

Therefore it’s not just a case of praying for Sunday’s preacher. It’s about exercising the privilege we all have to read the Scriptures under the illumination of the Spirit and encounter Jesus, to whom they point.

The second way Jesus demonstrates his unique authority in today’s passage is in the authority of his power over evil:

²³ Just then a man in their synagogue who was possessed by an impure spirit cried out, ²⁴ ‘What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are – the Holy One of God!’
²⁵ ‘Be quiet!’ said Jesus sternly. ‘Come out of him!’ ²⁶ The impure spirit shook the man violently and came out of him with a shriek.

This is a battle for power. The unclean spirit uses words that were commonly used as a rebuke: ‘What do you want with us?’ The spirit also names Jesus as ‘Jesus of Nazareth … the Holy One of God’, a reflection of the ancient belief that knowing someone’s name gave you power over them.

But it doesn’t work with Jesus. He doesn’t use spells or incantations. He doesn’t even need to pray. He acts on his own superior authority! ‘Be quiet! Come out of him!’ And that’s that. All done and dusted.

Jesus doesn’t just have words, he has deeds. And those deeds validate the content of his teaching that we thought about last week, where he proclaims that the kingdom of God is near and it’s time to repent.

It’s something that confronts us all. Very few people are demonised, but all of us face the conflict with evil and the temptation to go the wrong way.

And so this combination of authoritative teaching and authoritative deeds face us with a choice. What will we do with Jesus?

At the end of the passage we don’t hear what choice the members of the synagogue make about Jesus. We only hear about their amazement (verse 27). Who will follow Jesus and who will oppose him? We know that very soon there will be a split. Teachers of the law whose authority as we have seen is displaced by Jesus will largely oppose him. Many ordinary people will follow him.

But what about us? It’s not enough just to admire his teaching and call him a good man or even a prophet. Choosing to do nothing about him is effectively to choose against him, because we are saying we don’t want him to change us.

Why, some people even try to neutralise the influence of Jesus by saying that they worship him on Sundays in church. But that same worship is also meant to convey the word and works of God in Christ to us. We still need to choose.

Perhaps some of us listening today are also amazed by Jesus and his authority. But let’s be more than amazed. Let’s respond to him by following him.

January 31, 2021 0

Sermon: A Missional Confrontation With Evil

Luke 8:26-39

Israel, Sea of Galilee (Lake of Tiberias) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was tempted to start this week’s sermon the way I began my sermon last Sunday. I figured you wouldn’t notice, as I was at Knaphill and this is Walton. The only people who would notice were those who read this on my blog.

I was going to talk about a woman called Nancy Duarte, who is a world authority on how speakers might craft the best visual presentations. She talks about the need to find something in your message that will resonate with your hearers, so that there is empathy between speaker and audience (or congregation).

But for a lot of contemporary Christians, there are difficulties finding that resonance or empathy with today’s Gospel reading. Some get worried by the references to demons. Others are troubled by what happens to the pigs. A few will know there are issues around the reference to ‘the country of the Gerasenes’ (verses 26, 37) and whether it extended to the border of the Sea of Galilee.

Nevertheless, I want to ask you to stay with me as we explore this story. Whatever problems some of you might have with the account, I believe Jesus has much to teach us here about the way we share in his mission in the world today.

In fact, let’s take up that theme at the outset: this passage is first and foremost about mission.

Then they arrived at the country of the Gerasenes, which is opposite Galilee. (Verse 26)

Then? What has just happened? Jesus and his disciples have just crossed the Sea of Galilee to the ‘other’ side, the Gentile side. They have survived a terrible storm, which threatened their lives, but which didn’t bother Jesus, who commanded it to stop. This is a deliberate journey. It is an utterly intentional act that he leads the disciples away from the safety and familiarity of the Jewish side of Galilee to the Gentile side. Jesus is leading his disciples out of their comfort zone.

And that is something we need him to do with us if we are to be on mission with him. How often do we want to stay in our familiar surroundings? How often do we describe outreach as ‘getting more people to join us’? We would rather it were all done on our territory, on our premises. But Jesus will not let us get away with that. If we just want to get people to join us, we are doing little more than recruiting people to our religious club. We have lost the vision of calling people to make their allegiance to the kingdom of God.

Yes, that will put us in uncomfortable circumstances. I was dwelling on that a few weeks ago when I went to the barber’s. As I waited my turn with one of the two guys in there, a student was having his hair cut by one of them. I heard him speaking disparagingly about a posh but attractive woman he had met at a social gathering. Without a trace of shame, the young man said, “It wasn’t as though I wanted a relationship with her, I only wanted to go to bed with her.” You can add your own stories, and some of you encounter these vastly different values every day. Yes, we can feel nervous when we come across them, because we are aware that our convictions will be laughed at, but it’s no good retreating from the challenge.

Make no mistake, there are forces that will want to prevent us from making our journey to the Gentile shore. The storm that rose threatened to derail Jesus and his disciples would probably have been seen by first century Jews as a demonic manifestation. The sea was a symbol of fear and for a storm to rise up there was more than a meteorological phenomenon. This was opposition to Jesus’ journey.

We face opposition, too. Yes, there are secular groups that want to obliterate all reference to God from the public discourse, not least the National Secular Society, an organisation that refuses to divulge how many members it has, but probably has no more than seven thousand.

But we have opposition within ourselves. We prefer our comforts. We want to avoid the difficult road. But you know what? We’ve tried that, and look around! It’s not working.

Friends, if there were one priority I could set for every church today, it would be to give mission the priority Jesus did, and to stop us running all our lives and our spare time around church activities. Things need to be cut. Certain high priorities at present need to be put far lower down our lists. We need to be in ‘Gentile territory’ with the love of God.

The second thing to notice – and you’ll say I’m just stating the blindingly obvious here – is that Jesus’ mission is about confrontation with evil. But before you ask why on earth the circuit is paying me a stipend to say such things, please notice that the confrontation with evil is more complex than it first appears.

Let’s begin with the problematic issue of the demons. It’s easy to assume, because we feel so superior as modern educated people, that the ‘primitive’ authors of the biblical books were mistakenly attributing what we would call mental illness to demonic activity. However, why do we make that assumption? Is it because we have already decided we are embarrassed by what is often called the ‘supernatural’? Or maybe we do so, because we know of Christians who have been irresponsible in their easy labelling of anything disturbing as being ‘of the devil’, sometimes causing pastoral damage by doing so. This has certainly happened.

But ultimately do we not as Christians have to deal with the fact that Jesus recognised the existence of the demonic? Were we then to say that Jesus only did so because he was a child of his time, then have we not come close to denying that he is Lord? It is one thing to say that Jesus limited himself in his incarnation, but it is quite another to say that he was wrong.

So I conclude that there is a spiritual dimension to evil that needs to be faced – and faced not with fear but with faith. I think it fair to say that the demonic is real but rare. In twenty years of ministry, I can only point with certainty to one case – although there may have been others. Indeed, the late John Wimber, whose famed healing ministry included a deliverance element, said he could count on the fingers of his hands the number of times he had encountered a demon.

However, I said that the confrontation with evil was more complex than first appears. The effect of Jesus’ ministry is not only the expulsion of the demons from the afflicted man. That is one of at least four effects Jesus has in this story. A second is that he has an effect upon the local economy when he allows the demons to enter the herd of pigs. Whatever we make of that action, the local farmers will not have been pleased. Even if we say that to a Jew the pigs were unclean (which isn’t an easy justification, because Jesus declared all foods clean), we are still left with an economic effect of Jesus’ battle with evil.

It isn’t the only time something like this happens in the New Testament. In Acts 16, Paul casts a demon out of a slave girl, and the girl’s owner is enraged that he has lost his income stream. In Ephesus, the craftsmen who make idols for people to worship become angry with Paul and his entourage who promote the worship of a different deity, one who prohibits images. Gospel preaching and deliverance ministry not only have a positive effect on those who are blessed, but a negative effect on those whose economic self-interest is dependent upon sin and exploitation.

As well as the exorcism and the social effect, there is a third effect of the confrontation with evil, and it is a positive one: the man’s relationship with society is healed. No longer does he have to be ostracised as a graveyard-inhabiting madman in chains, the only people he sees being those engaged to guard him (verse 29). Now, instead of being naked he is clothed, and instead of being afflicted he is in his right mind (verse 35). The Gospel heals his relationship with society. It heals social brokenness. Relationships are restored. Ostracism and exclusion are dissolved.

The fourth Gospel effect in Jesus’ confrontation with evil is that the healed man becomes a disciple. No longer is he subject to other powers, he is now free to follow Jesus. And so much so that he wants to leave his home and go on the road with Jesus (verse 38), although Jesus has a different task for him, a missional one among his own people of proclaiming what God has done (verse 39).

This all reminds us, then, that the mission to which we are called will be a fully rounded one. Some Christians talk as if you can pick a preference: the Gospel is about conversion, or it is about supernatural healings, or it is about reconciliation, or it is about social justice. However, there is no ‘or’ about it. The Gospel affects all areas of life, and we need to share it with that in mind. Jesus cannot be limited to a small compartment of our lives: he comes to reign in every area of life. This is the Gospel of the kingdom of God: that God seeks to act as king in every sphere. This is what we proclaim, and this is what we are to live.

Naturally, there are no guarantees here. People are not computers that can be programmed to provide a guaranteed response. Hence, when the townspeople become fearful and ask Jesus to leave them (verses 35, 37). And perhaps the frightening thing for such people is that Jesus honours their terrible request to go away.

But, but, but! If Jesus had not taken the missional initiative and confronted evil, that man would never have found healing and faith. It is because Jesus went away from the familiarity of Jewish Galilee to Gentile Galilee that the man was blessed and became a disciple.

I ask you to draw a contrast between where we are in many churches now and where we might be. Mostly, we wait for people to come to us. We follow Einstein’s definition of insanity: we keep doing the same thing, but we expect a different result. We ought to have got the message by now: doing the same old same old over and over as we do a credible impersonation of a heritage industry rather than a living organism will not get us any other result than the current one of decline and aging.

I hold out to you instead a vision of a church that is prepared to cross the stormy waters from safety to vulnerability. A church that is not interested in self-preservation but in overflowing with the Good News of God’s kingdom in every area of life, expressed in word and deed. A church that in doing so is willing to risk the negative responses of those who will tell her to go away for the sake of those who will drink the message of the kingdom as life-giving water, as the afflicted man in this story did.

Friends, if you compare where we are now with where we could be, which future do you want? The present scenario is sometimes expressed in terms that I find uncomfortable: I hear some of our older members in some churches saying, “As long as this church sees me out, that’s all I care about.” In other words, as long as the congregation doesn’t die before they do, that’s enough. I find that depressing and distressing.

We have a better alternative. Yes, it’s a bit scary, but it’s the way of life. It’s the way of Jesus.

We have two choices before us. I pray we choose the way of life.

June 22, 2013 1

Tag: exorcism