The fox and the hen – a sermon about the journey to resurrection

Sermon given at Creaton United Reformed Church, 17 March 2019. Text: Luke 13:31-35. See also earlier address about Abram and covenant.

We’re all about the animals in this passage. St Patrick is said to have chased the snakes out of Ireland (he didn't), but here we have a fox and a hen appearing. They make a nice contrast, and we’ll come back to them later.

Image: Endless Road by Margret Hofheinz-Doring,
via Vanderbilt University

So Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem. The gospel of Luke has a lot to say about journeys, and especially the journey of Jesus to Jerusalem. We first hear about him ‘setting his face to Jerusalem’ in chapter 9, and the account of Palm Sunday is in chapter 19. In other words it takes 10 chapters, out of a book with 24 chapters, for him to reach Jerusalem after he starts on his way there. And he’s still got a long way to go, here in chapter 13. There’s an admirable sense of determination here. Jesus is absolutely sure he’s got to be there, to accomplish his task. And yet also lots of things happen on the journey. Much of Jesus’ ministry, his teaching and his miracles, his encounters with crowds and with individuals, happens on the road to Jerusalem. He’s on the journey, but part of that journey is what he does on the way.

Why Jerusalem? Why does it matter so much? That might sound a strange question, but why was his work not happening in Galilee? Or further afield, in one of the Roman garrison towns such as Caesarea Philippi, or even in Rome itself? That might sound an odd question, but the answer sheds important light on Jesus and his mission. He was going to Jerusalem because he was a Jew, and because to the Jewish people, Jerusalem was the most important place in the world. It was the place where God and humanity communicated. It was the place of worldly power and authority, but it mattered much more as being the place of spiritual authority. Everything that mattered happened in Jerusalem. It’s not literally true when Jesus says that all the prophets were killed in Jerusalem – Jeremiah died in Egypt and Ezekiel died in the land of the Chaldeans, to name two, but it expresses the truth that Jerusalem was absolutely central to Jewish life.

We do well to remember this, in our fevered atmosphere of us-and-them, of Leavers and Remainers, of Jews and Muslims, of Protestant and Catholic. There’s no us-and-them between Jesus and the Jews, and when we find Jewish leaders persecuting Jesus that doesn’t reflect some kind of separation, and should never ever have been a justification for the church’s poisonous brand of antisemitism that has marred our faith for centuries and killed so many. The Jews are not the enemy here. Likewise, the gospels are full of invective against Pharisees, but that’s mostly because Jesus was so close to the ideas of the Pharisees so it was one of those wars of small differences, like the Judean People’s Front against the People’s Front of Judea in Life of Brian. There were differences of emphasis, but Jesus is forever hanging out with Pharisees, often arguing with them, but eating and spending time with them. And importantly we see Pharisees warning Jesus that Herod’s out to get him. So the Pharisees aren’t the enemy either.

So who is the enemy? That would be Herod Antipas, son of Herod the Great, ruler of Galilee under the Romans, killer of John the Baptist and eventually of Jesus. Herod Antipas ruled for 41 years, and while he wasn’t the worst of the Romans’ client kings, like all rulers of the day he was dedicated to power, violence, hierarchy and exclusion. And by contrast, Jesus was dedicated to the opposite of these – to living with the outcasts and marginalised, to preaching hope to the downtrodden, to proclaiming the kingdom where power would be turned on its head. He had a job to do, he said – to cast out demons and perform cures. He knew Herod was the opposite of this worldview, had the opposite mission to him in the world.

And thus the fox reference. In the Greek world, foxes were cunning and quite impressive – think of Aesop’s fables. But in the Jewish world, they were a destructive pest, and their cunning was one of evil rather than something to be impressed by. They got in the way, and they were horrible. But they also weren’t the worst of enemies that could be found in the animal kingdom. It’s not like Jesus called Herod after the kinds of animals that threatened people and sheep in Israel – say a lion, or a wild beast, or even an eagle like the Roman one. So there’s a double insult here – Jesus is being quite dismissive of Herod, at the same time as he’s saying he’s untrustworthy. He’s a nasty piece of work, but he’s also not up to much. I’ve been thinking about Harry Potter analogies here – the cunning and nasty bit sounds a bit like Jesus is saying Herod should be in Slytherin, except it would be a version of Slytherin that was simultaneously nasty and a bit rubbish.

Jesus, of course, has a nice farmyard contrast to the fox. He wants to nurture the people of Jerusalem like a hen protects its chicks under its wings. I love this image, because it’s so loving and caring. It reminds me of the Celtic blessing that ends ‘until we meet again, may God hold you in the palm of his hand’. God will hold us all in the palm of God’s hand, and will care for us under her wings. It’s also a feminine image that stands in contrast to all those God-the-father images. Many of us know perfectly well that God has no gender, yet the scriptures are saturated with masculine imagery, and sometimes they’re not good enough to capture the full nature of God. If we can only think of God as a father, and our father was abusive or controlling or absent, how can we love God? If we only have images such as Lord God of Hosts, at the front of armies, how can we react if our lives have been blighted by war? God goes beyond gender, but our images don’t. At best we might have a sense of the holy spirit as female, but even that gets resisted by some people. And yes, Jesus as a human being was male, but a man who can’t embrace feminine imagery for themselves is emotionally impoverished. So I really like this image of Jesus the mother hen.

Image: Circle of Hope

But of course Jesus notes that ultimately he was expecting to be rejected by people in Jerusalem. Because he’s realistic about what he’s facing. He knows that whether or not people saying “blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord”, as of course happened on Palm Sunday, his ideas are too radical to be accepted. He knows that what he preaches, the way he lives, goes against the ideas that the powerful in his world will accept.

Jesus knows that when he finally gets to Jerusalem, he’ll face struggle and death. And he’s willing to embrace it, but I don’t think that’s the point of his journey. Because in this reading we hear twice about Jesus finishing his work on the third day. Not the day of the cross, but of the empty tomb. Not the crucifixion, but the resurrection.

And here’s the good news about this passage. We heard in the first reading that God formed a covenant which, if broken, required the death of God. Well we know that covenant was broken many times. We know that relationships between humanity and God broke down, and have broken down. But they broke down precisely because of the violence and oppression which Herod Antipas and the Roman Empire stood for. And they weren’t going to be cured by a continuation of the same thing again.

So for Jesus to die wasn’t enough. That wouldn’t solve anything. The cross by itself, that instrument of torture and Roman power, solved nothing. But what came next was the third day. The day when God took the power of violence and turned it on its head, when the nurturing God remade not just the covenant with Abraham but every covenant, and every idea of every covenant. On Easter Sunday, God changed the rules themselves. He brought up the powerless, and sent the rich away empty.

Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem wasn’t to go and get himself killed. He went with a much more important mission – to change the nature of the world, to set aside the power of empire and to bring forward the new reign of God on earth.

So as we prepare in the coming month to journey towards Easter, we must remember that when we stand for equality and justice, and stand against authority and power, we are on the side of Jesus. When we approach defeat by the powers of the world, we are in the same position as Jesus. And we can be assured that, like Jesus found, love and hope will prevail even in the deepest darkness. Amen.

Covenant in the dazzling darkness: Abram, qarrtsiluni and hope in despair

Opening address given at Creaton United Reformed Church, 17 March 2019. Text: Genesis 15:1-18. See also sermon about Jesus' journey to Jerusalem, which followed later in the service.

Image: Total eclipse, by Jim Friedrich

Two shorter addresses on two passages today, as they’re linked but too important to treat together.

What promises does God make to God’s people, in the depth of darkness and despair? The psalm says that “when evildoers assail me to devour my flesh, they shall stumble and fall”. What really happens then? We have hope from the psalm, but is that the experience that most people actually have? Because there are people in real despair, in real darkness. People in Christchurch whose whole world was ripped apart on Friday by a far-right terrorist. People who are living on the street, only kept going by alcohol or drugs that are also killing them. People who are watching the ones they love slowly fade and die. People who don’t know where the next meal is coming from. That kind of despair.

So to Abram, in a weird kind of despair. If you have a spare half-hour, I do recommend reading the whole story of Abram-who-becomes-Abraham, which occupies chapters 12 to 25 of the book of Genesis. He was quite a peculiar character with all sorts of peculiar events in his life, not all of them especially commendable. Genesis as a whole is a semi-mythical account of the backstory to why the Israelites were the people of God stranded in slavery in Egypt. It’s a mistake to take it too literally. And Abram is at the start of it all, representing the creation of the people of Israel through one individual, showing God’s covenant with Israel in one person. And this is a story about covenant.

Abram begins the story basically whining. He’s rich, he has plenty of power, and in the previous chapter he has just defeated his enemies in battle and been blessed by the local high priest. Yet he’s annoyed because he’s been promised an heir, a child to take up his mantle, and he doesn’t have one. That sounds trivial compared to the kind of darkness I’ve mentioned, but for Abram it’s a real issue. It’s about his future, about whether everything he stands for will come to an end after his death. If you know about the life of Henry VIII, he was desperate for a male heir because his kingdom was invested in the individual, and the Tudor monarchy was very precarious. So it is with Abram, and as I’ve said he’s not just an individual but a symbol of the people of Israel. His lack of heir means a lack of continuation of the whole people of Israel. The whole story wouldn’t get off the ground. So for Abram it’s real darkness.

And God makes a covenant with him in the darkness. And the weird story about heifers and goats and pigeons is important. Because in the later years of the Jewish people, when this text was written down, that was how you solemnised a covenant. Trigger warning for animal lovers and vegetarians: this bit’s not very nice. You take an animal, or several animals, and cut them in half, then you separate them, leave a good-size gap between them. Then the two parties who are making some kind of agreement with each other walk down the middle between the halves of the animals. And that seals the bargain. Because symbolically it’s saying “if we don’t keep our side of the bargain, may we be cut in two like the animals”. Sometimes this kind of covenanting was done with individuals, but much more often with groups. It was a collective undertaking.

So here we see God coming to Abram in what’s described as a deep and terrifying darkness. And in that dark time, that dark place, Abram sees a symbol of God, fire and smoke, passing between the two halves of the animals. God has come to Abram in the dark. God has stood alongside Abram in the dark.

I read recently that the Inuit people of the Arctic regions have an amazing word for this experience, “qarrtsiluni”. It means “sitting together in the dark, waiting for something to happen.” Groups sit together in the darkness, and out of that darkness comes… insight. Sometimes, in the hunting communities of the Inuit, it’s song or storytelling. And to Abram, it’s life, and it’s hope for the future. It’s the promise of God, that all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.

And from that experience Abram, and through him the whole people of Israel, had strength to continue. Because God had been with him in his darkness. An Anglican priest called Rachel Mann calls this dazzling darkness, and writes that “this is the God we cannot use for our purposes and devices, for deep darkness consumes us and denies us the means to chart our way. We are liberated from our own convinced power of control and talent and mastery.”

And it leaves us with the love and power of God. Because God has made a covenant with Abram, and God has guaranteed it with his own life. So that when the covenant becomes stretched and broken, the only thing that will repair it is the death of God himself. The faithfulness of Abram and the faithfulness of God lead us towards the cross. It takes us on the journey of Lent that will end in Good Friday. But the cross is not the end, and that’s where we come to in the second passage later. For now, let’s rest with Abram, accompanied and blessed by God in covenant relationship, sitting in that dazzling darkness.

Who is my enemy? Do I really have to love them?

Sermon preached on 24 February 2019 at Duston United Reformed Church. Text: Luke 6:27-38.

Image: Pulpit Fiction

Let’s imagine a parable – or at least a variation on a well-known one. Jesus had been preaching all day on a to a large crowd, teaching about God’s mercy and how we should show love for our enemies. A man came to him that evening at the house where he was saying, and asked him “Teacher, who is my enemy?”. And Jesus replied: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho when he was set upon by thieves, passed by people who should know better, and helped by someone his people had been in conflict with for centuries. Now, who do you think was that man’s enemy?”. And alas, the man’s answer was not recorded in the parable. But perhaps we might guess it for ourselves.

And that’s my question for today. Who are our enemies? And alongside that, do we really have to love them? And what does it really mean to have an enemy? It’s tempting to domesticate this passage, to bring it to the equal of petty disputes with neighbours or at work, but the biblical scholars tell us that the word translated as enemy means people who pose you and your tribe a real threat, or the people that your tribe poses a real threat to. Armies at the town gates, terrible persecution, long history of rivalry and dispute, that kind of thing.

For much of my life I was rather sceptical about this teaching. I believed it strongly enough but also thought it didn’t really apply to me. I’ve spent my whole life as a pacifist, and never really identified with the various wars my country has fought. In my lifetime, British soldiers have been at war in the Falklands, twice in Iraq, in Afghanistan, as well as lower-key involvement in lots of other places. Then there was the Cold War, and terrorist attacks from Northern Ireland and more recently from Islamic extremists. But they always felt like other people’s battles, and I have seldom been convinced that the British response was appropriate or proportionate. I don’t say this to make a case for my politics, and I recognise that others feel quite differently about this subject. But it made me uncertain who I really could call my enemy.

Now some of this is due to privilege. I’ve experienced little sense of persecution in my life. I’m white, male, middle-class – all thoroughly privileged groups. And the wars I mentioned were far away, and although I was afraid as a teenager of nuclear war like many of my generation, these things were complicated and mostly happening somewhere else. So I’ve had little sense of persecution or threat, no real sense of enemies facing me.

And yet I’ve gradually come to realise that I do have enemies. There are people who would hate me enough to kill me because of where I live and my background, and who don’t care about the nuances of one British person against another. There are people who hold my opinions to be reprehensible and would like to see them weeded out. And there are opinions, groups, that I also find reprehensible; and I might not hate the people individually who hold them, but I certainly see myself as the enemy of their opinions and would like to see those come to an end.

Plenty of other people are in a similar position. I don’t really want to use the B-word, but political debate has become more and more heated in this country since the Brexit referendum was called. Whatever your opinion about the right outcome, the discussion has become dangerously polarised, with positions becoming harder and more extreme. Our two main political parties are dominated by the edges of their political traditions, not their centres. So many people see the other side as their enemy. We haven’t had much political violence in this country, apart from the murder of the MP Jo Cox, but MPs and activists get all sorts of abuse, online and in person.

When Jesus talked about enemies, he was speaking from a far worse context of powerlessness and persecution. The Jewish people had been marginalised and persecuted for centuries, most recently by the Roman occupation. We were on Hadrian’s Wall this week, and had a real sense of the power and ruthlessness of the Roman empire. They built their forts on an identical plan, from Britain to Germany to Palestine, they co-opted local leaders, and they expected total compliance with Roman authority in a whole range of ways. They taxed highly, suppressed local religions, and crucified rebels. And by the time Luke wrote his gospel, the temple at Jerusalem had been destroyed, the Jewish people scattered, and the great split between Christians and Jews had occurred and was becoming irrevocable, but not yet recognised by the Romans. This meant that Christians were persecuted both by the Romans as a Jewish sect and by Jewish authorities as heretics, and it’s in that context that Luke put together his gospel and chose to quote Jesus’ words in this way.

So Jesus, and Luke after him, had a lot of reason to think about people who hated them, abused them, cursed them and so on. And that’s why the passage assumes that the listeners are victims, not victimizers – these people may have enemies but they’re not the ones doing the persecution, they’re not the ones with the armies, they’re not subjecting people to abuse on Twitter.

And of course there are so many people today who are genuinely persecuted, across the world. People who are subject to abuse for their gender, or their race, or their religion, or their sexuality, or their disability, or their age – there are so many ways to persecute. And so many powerful groups treat these people as enemies. I’m sorry to say that this includes church groups, past and present – so many churches have marginalised women, or people of colour, or gay people, or disabled people, or foreigners. Too many people have awful experiences at the hands of Christians. In these places the church has turned itself into an enemy of the people of God, and it’s shameful.

But in the face of this kind of persecution, Jesus doesn’t say, meet violence with violence, meet curses with curses. He says: do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. This might sound passive but it’s incredibly radical. He doesn’t say that persecuted people should ignore their persecution, should let their enemies off the hook. He says, acknowledge that you’ve been hurt, but don’t let them think that they’ve got the better of you. They’re wrong and you’re right. But also: you’re better than they are. Their violence doesn’t need to be met with further violence, because that only makes things worse.

And then he goes further, to advise persecuted people that they should confront those who hurt them, and turn their negative experiences upon their persecutors. You may well know that there was context behind these sayings – that turning the other cheek after being struck with the right hand meant someone would either have to strike you with the back of the hand or the less-favoured left hand. Likewise if someone takes away your cloak, which for many people in Jesus’ time would be their only outer garment, then they’re depriving that person of so much protection that they might as well be stripped naked – which is basically Jesus’ advice. Because turning the other cheek doesn’t mean to be a doormat; it means radically to face down the persecutor and confront them with the consequences of their actions, not allowing them to damage you and then let it go. These are deeply subversive acts.

A good recent example of this pattern of behaviour is the #MeToo movement, where women who had been assaulted by powerful men came together to stand up to those men, to show them that their behaviour was unacceptable. They didn’t fight the men, they brought the truth into the open, showed the extent to which these men had not only behaved unacceptably, but thought they were too powerful to be challenged. And these brave women, many of them perfectly ordinary people as well as a small handful of celebrities, stood up and told of their experiences. Recounting the story of their abuse must have hurt, had to take a lot of courage. And very often their courage has stopped powerful people from continuing their abuse, frequently requiring them at last to face the justice they’d avoided for a long time. Sometimes it wasn’t enough – I’m thinking of the extraordinary testimony of Christine Blasey Ford in front of the US Senate last year, confronting the past abuse done to her by a would-be judge. In that case, politics won the day, but her voice was powerful and the judge and his political supporters left damaged by it.

This kind of active non-violence has been practiced by peaceful but assertive liberation movements on many occasions. It was the method used by Mahatma Gandhi in India, by Martin Luther King in the United States, by Desmond Tutu and others in South Africa. But it’s an old tradition, and goes back to Jesus’ call to love your enemies, to break cycles of violence and persecution through being better than them.

And being better than your enemy has spiritual value as well as being practically effective. As well as his involvement in the anti-apartheid struggles, Archbishop Desmond Tutu led the amazing Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. He became deeply aware of issues of forgiveness, and has written and spoken at length on why forgiving others is a radical act. He wrote the following:

Forgiveness is not dependent on the actions of others. Yes, it is certainly easier to offer forgiveness when the perpetrator expresses remorse and offers some sort of reparation or restitution. Then, you can feel as if you have been paid back in some way. …  We don't forgive to help the other person. We don't forgive for others. We forgive for ourselves. Forgiveness, in other words, is the best form of self-interest.

This is put in a slightly different way towards the end of the passage by Jesus himself, when he says “be merciful, just as your Father is merciful”. Because ultimately this is about how we live our lives, and it’s about the model we take for our lives. And mercy is absolutely at the heart of the gospel of Luke, the heart of the good news that Jesus brings us. God is love, God’s mercy is absolute. The kingdom of God that Jesus proclaims is not one where people’s wrong-doings are counted up and weighed against them. It’s one that says that God loves us all, with a rich and deep love so great that it’s like measuring out flour, or some liquid, and keeping on pouring and pouring until it flows everywhere. It’s a love, a merciful love, that desires wholeness and peace for everyone, with more generosity than you can possibly imagine. But it’s also a demanding love, because it says that if that’s the nature of God’s love, then it needs to be the nature of our love too. The only possible response to that level of love is to share it with others, to always be on the side of the downtrodden, never to side with the persecutors or the powerful, and always to respond to violence and abuse with still more love.

That’s a tough call, and there’s one more thing to say. Some of this passage, like the Joseph story, is a bit dangerous. Ideas like turning the other cheek can be misused by the powerful to try to shut up persecuted people. Nobody has a right to do this. If people who have suffered harm choose to stand up to their abuser in this kind of way, then that is their right, and it serve them well. But this is the invitation of Jesus, not his commandment, and it can never be used to silence or tell the downtrodden what to do.

And lastly, as so often, Martin Luther King puts it beautifully. Dr King was in jail for his activism and was accused by public opinion of being an extremist. And he wrote the following, with this passage today in mind:

Was not Jesus an extremist for love… So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?

May we all love our enemies, and in that way be extremists for love. Amen.

Hope in the darkness, hope in the apocalypse: a sermon for Advent Sunday

Sermon preached on 2nd December 2018 at Long Buckby URC. Texts: Luke 21:25-36, Jeremiah 33:14-16.

So Advent is here, and it’s time for preachers everywhere to remind congregations that this is not a time for feasting. Nor is it just a time to prepare our houses and our families for Christmas. Because we live in the time between the first coming of Christ and the second coming of Christ. And Advent is a time to prepare for the second coming as well as to prepare to remember the first.

This is why, as a Scottish Presbyterian who grew up without much awareness of liturgical seasons, I’m now really keen on Advent. Because it’s a solemn time. The gospel readings are full of doom and woe and foreboding, solid Presbyterian themes. But let’s face it, also themes which resonate with today’s world. And they’re threaded through with hope, with words of consolation and reassurance that look forward to the future. Because we know that 2000 years ago, a baby was born in difficult times and in difficult circumstances, and that baby ushered in a new world. And we’re promised that one day the world will change, and the kingdom of love and hope will surround the whole world, when Christ comes again. And that to me is the hope of Advent.

But we can’t get there the easy way. There’s no point in Advent, no point in Christmas really, if it’s all about sentiment and jingle bells. Let’s not mince words. The world’s in a terrible state just now. Authoritarian and far-right leaders are in power in Brazil, Italy, Turkey and the United States among others. Our own country is split down the middle over Brexit, facing an uncertain future with little prospect of a positive outcome. Homelessness and food bank use are increasingly rapidly. The oceans are polluted, with coral reefs dying and plastic waste everywhere. Global temperatures are rising to dangerous levels, maybe to the point of irreversible damage. And many of us have personal stories to match.

Yes, there have been worse times in history. And who knows, there could be worse to come. But just now feels like a really dark time. So it’s timely to think about apocalyptic pieces like this one we heard, with the sun and the stars and the sea and all that. Now apocalyptic literature needs to be treated carefully. There was a lot of it written around the time of Jesus, and it had a very specific form and purpose. It’s not prophecy. It’s not to be taken literally. It’s partly poetry, partly commentary on the current world, partly a cry for help. Because apocalyptic literature grows when people are oppressed. The book of Daniel was written when a Greek king threatened to destroy Jewish worship in the temple at Jerusalem. The book of Revelation was written when the early Christians were being persecuted across the Greek-speaking Jewish world. And the various apocalyptic stories of Jesus’ time were told and written under Roman persecution of the Jewish people, culminating in the destruction of Jerusalem.

But you need to read it carefully. In the weeks leading up to Advent two years ago, I read and blogged my way through the book of Revelation, the longest and most vivid piece of apocalyptic writing in our scriptures. That’s an extraordinary book, full of incredible imagery and poetry, weird symbolism, vicious commentary on the wickedness of the Roman empire, and texts so beautiful that they’ve been set to music by some of the greatest composers. My head was full of song as I read Revelation. But what I found I couldn’t do was look at it directly. It’s like one of those optical illusions by Escher - it only makes sense if you look at it from the side, if you look at it head-on your eyes go funny and your brain hurts and nothing makes sense. And one of the great problems with Revelation is that it’s read as if it was a weather forecast, and you get bizarre American websites tracking the events of the book against real life and scoring how close we are to the events shown, or trying to make movies and popular books showing the events of Revelation in our current world. None of that makes any sense of the book, and at worst it can be actively harmful if it’s used as a guide to policy or life.

And all this goes with our passage today. I don’t believe that the detail of the signs Jesus is talking about are important. He’s using these as symbols, within the accepted style of the time, to give a clear message about what happens in situations of disaster. He says that the signs will be clear that the kingdom of God is coming near. The form of the disaster isn’t so clear, but what is entirely clear is that the kingdom of God is coming.

So if we think of the end of the world, we can think of it as the end of this world. As the end of the world of pain. As the end of the world of oppression. As the end of the world where power is everything, where hierarchy is central, where climbing the ladder and pushing others down matters. The end of the world where violence is the heart of society. The end of the world where if you gain, then I lose. The end of the world that mistreats people because they’re black, or female, or a minority religion, or gay, or disabled, or transgender. The end of that world. Carrying on with Revelation, we’re told at the end of that book that “Death will be no more, mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away”.

Now that’s a hopeful kind of apocalypse. And it goes back to another Jewish theme, the coming of the Day of the Lord, which is a day of judgement and trial for evil forces in society, for those who put others down, but for ordinary people is a day of hope and a day of celebration. This is the promise given through the prophet Jeremiah in the Old Testament reading that we heard – that God will fulfil his promises, and will save Jerusalem and Judah through the descendants of David. We hear this as relating to Jesus, as a descendant of David, but it’s a promise given to the Jewish people in a time of their great need. It’s a collective promise rather than an individual promise, a gift given to a whole people who were suffering and struggling. Jeremiah has a reputation of being a rather gloomy prophet, but that section of the book is sometimes known as the Book of Consolation and it’s full of reassurance and hope for the people of Judah in dark times.

And in the same way Jesus offers reassurance and hope in dark times. He tells us that the kingdom of God is near. That phrase is familiar and occurs throughout the gospels, but here he uses it to refer to the coming kingdom at the end of days, when the justice and righteousness that Jeremiah promises will spread throughout the whole world. He says that his words will never pass away, that redemption is coming soon.

All this is more important than the troubles that will be found in the apocalyptic times. And so Jesus instructs his disciples to be alert, to be watchful, to be ready for that day to come. Now we know when Christmas will come – 3 weeks on Tuesday, check those last posting dates and the deadlines for turkey orders – but we have no idea when that second coming will occur. The early Christians believed it was imminent – there is a statement of that in Jesus’ words that “this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place”, and there are many occasions when St Paul writes of expecting the second coming happening within his own life. In the ensuing Christian centuries, people have often believed it to be imminent, and lived their lives accordingly.

In the strict sense of the calendar, they were wrong. Christ has not come again in glory, evil still walks on the earth. And yet the process of waiting, of watchfulness, of readiness for the kingdom is a very powerful one. For if Christ could return at any time, how can we not be ready? If he has instructed us to love our neighbour, indeed to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, to feed the hungry and to clothe the naked, how can we possibly not be doing those things right now? This instant! How can we possibly be so self-indulgent as to hate others, or to allow those who work in our name as churches and governments to treat others badly? How can we tolerate mistreatment of immigrants, or allow poverty to persist, or permit prejudice and discrimination in all its ugly forms? Because Christ could be coming back any moment, and he will call us to account for the keeping of his word. That’s the kind of watchfulness that I think he’s calling us to in this passage – to live as though the kingdom of God has already arrived, to live in that upside-down kingdom where the powerful are brought down from their thrones and the hungry are filled with good things. And that’s a true calling of watchfulness.

The early church knew this. They were watching for the return of Christ, and they lived in that spirit. My son is called Gregory, which means watchful, and that name was so popular in the first centuries of Christianity because the church was watching for the return of Christ. And they were living in the spirit of this kingdom. And yet the passing of the centuries and the deal they eventually did with the Roman Empire meant that this spirit was lost.

There’s another way in which we can look for the second coming. Various religious groups have believed that Christ had already come again, such as the early Quakers for whom the return of Christ was an inward experience. George Fox, the founder of Quakers in the mid-17th century, said that “Christ has come to teach his people himself”, and this led them to challenge the powers of the world and still animates their mixture of social action, radicalism, and contemplative worship. In a more mainstream form of liberal theology, the late American theologian Marcus Borg wrote:

During Advent, we remember the first coming of Jesus, even as we prepare for his second coming. And the second coming occurs each year at Christmas, with the birth of Christ within us, the coming of Christ into our lives. Christ comes again and again and again, and in many ways. In a symbolic and spiritual sense, the second coming of Christ is about the coming of the Christ who is already here.

So perhaps this is the hope for Advent, and the message of this passage. In the midst of desolation, in the midst of despair, be watchful, be ready, live your life so that Christ can come again within you and among you at any time. And he will give you strength, and hope, and new life and transformation.

Amen.

Courage, faith and healing: a sermon on Bartimaeus as a model for discipleship

Sermon preached at The Headlands URC, 28 October 2018. Text: Mark 10:46-52.

NB: As an 'introduction to the theme', I spoken about healing in the understanding of the Iona Community (and my own recent experience of the Iona healing service). In particular, I stressed that 'success' in healing is not an indicator of one's level of faith; and that healing may take many forms, not just physical. I did not stress these points further in the sermon but they form an important backdrop to the sermon.

Image: Jesus Mafa

We have here one of the great healing stories in a gospel full of healing stories. But more than that, this is a story about the faith and courage of one man, and what that tells us about discipleship. Bartimaeus is a man who suffers but he’s also a man who shows great courage, and who begins to follow Jesus before he’s healed. It’s also a story about how one of the most marginalised people was able to see things that the privileged people couldn’t.

A few words about context before we look at the content of the story. This encounter is the very last passage described before Jesus arrives in Jerusalem, before Palm Sunday. Jericho is about 15 miles from the edge of Jerusalem, a day’s walk or so, and there wasn’t much between the two. Remember that the parable of the Good Samaritan happens on the Jericho road, and preachers often talk of the isolation of that road. So it’s next stop Jerusalem, the donkey and palm branches, the events in the temple, and ultimately Jesus’ betrayal and death. There are no other healings in this gospel. Bartimaeus has no further chance to be healed by this electrifying young rabbi. So he simply can’t afford to be denied by those around Jesus.

That’s looking forward in the text. Looking back, the story of Bartimaeus comes after a series of dialogues that Jesus has with his disciples and with those around him. We’ll come to a few of them, but in short, Bartimaeus, a blind beggar, shows himself to have more insight than any of the disciples, more wisdom than James and John, and more courage than a rich man. The ongoing theme of Jesus’ dialogues before entering Jerusalem is that the first shall be last and the last shall be first, and we see this really clearly in Bartimaeus. He’s a disciple for our times.

The first thing we learn about Bartimaeus is his name. He’s the only person Jesus heals in Mark’s gospel who gets a name. As I’ve said, there’s a lot of healing in 10 short chapters of Mark, but the healed person only gets a description – the leper, or the person with unclean spirits, and so on. So he could have been just the blind beggar, and in fact that’s how he appears in Luke and Matthew’s versions of the story. But it’s an odd name. Bartimaeus simply means ‘son of Timaeus’ in Aramaic, as Mark tells us. Naming someone as the son of someone was common enough – Jesus would have been called ‘Yeshua bar Yosef’ in Aramaic, just as the most famous holder of my first name was called Magnus Magnusson because that’s still the style in Iceland. But Bartimaeus only gets his father’s name – it’s as if in his misery he doesn’t really have an identity. Commentators disagree about the meaning of Timaeus as a name, but it’s a Greek word not an Aramaic or Hebrew one, so there’s a further sense of distance, and at least one possible meaning is ‘unclean person’. Bartimaeus does get a name, but it’s the name of a downtrodden and marginalised person.

Carrying on with the story, he’s told that Jesus is here, and he starts to shout out “Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me”. This is the first time that Jesus is referred to as the Son of David in Mark’s gospel. It’s a pretty political statement, fifteen miles from Jerusalem and just before the Passover. Son of David is a way of saying that Jesus is heir to the throne of David, that he’s a ruler; because David was an anointed king, it’s also a way of saying Messiah. The fact that the crowds are quick to silence Bartimaeus may have been simply because he was yet another person wanting something from Jesus, just as earlier in the chapter the disciples rebuked those who brought young children to Jesus. But I think there may have been a political fear as well. The Roman occupation of Palestine, and its client rulers, kept a watchful eye for political insurgents and often stamped hard on it. So close to Jerusalem, in a town such as Jericho where lots of priests from the temple lived, and so close to the Passover, they would have been really watchful. By calling Jesus the son of David, Bartimaeus was putting himself in immediate danger and possibly also those around him in danger. So they’d want to silence him for his sake and for their own.

But the attempted silencing has no effect on Bartimaeus, and he shouts all the louder, “Son of David, have mercy on me!”. He’s quite insistent – he will be heard, he won’t be silenced. As one commentator writes on this passage, the last time there was shouting like that outside Jericho, the walls came tumbling down. Because another aspect of kingship is a care for the downtrodden and the ability to heal. So Bartimaeus is almost issuing a challenge to Jesus: if you really are the Messiah, then do your job and heal me! Of course, Jesus had the compassion and healing ability of the expected Messiah, but the kingdom he was bringing was a very different kind, not based on violence and power but on justice and sacrifice.

And Jesus listens and calls Bartimaeus over, and then we have a key pair of verses, perhaps the heart of the passage. Bartimaeus throws off his cloak, springs up and comes over to Jesus. And Jesus asks Bartimaeus what he wants Jesus to do for him, to which he replies that he’d like his sight restored. There’s so much in that about discipleship.

First is Bartimaeus’ trust and courage in throwing off his cloak. He was blind and a beggar, so his cloak was quite likely his only possession. It kept him warm, it kept him safe. He would spread it out on the road to beg for money to live on. In throwing it off, he was making himself incredibly vulnerable for the sake of this Jesus. Now that is a sign of trust. And it compares amazingly to the rich young man who spoke to Jesus earlier in this chapter, who Jesus said had to sell his possessions and give the money to the poor, in order to gain life in all its abundance. The rich man refused and went away grieving – we might imagine him walking head down, dejected, his enthusiasm lost. By contrast we’re told that Bartimaeus leapt up and came over to Jesus – full of hope and trust in this new opportunity for life.

Then we see Jesus ask a question which might seem surprising but is entirely in line with his way of thinking. He asks Bartimaeus “what do you want me to do for you?”. He doesn’t assume what Bartimaeus wants or needs, he doesn’t tell Bartimaeus what ought to happen. He waits for Bartimaeus to tell Jesus for himself. Too often, the church has told people what ought to happen to them, what’s best for them. But people know themselves what they need. This requires Bartimaeus to articulate for himself what’s wrong with him, to admit that he’s blind. This matters as well: we have to face up to what’s wrong with us. The first step to healing for anyone, whatever is wrong with them, can often be to name their condition. And if you’re not willing to give your condition a name, not willing to say out loud that you need to be healed, it’s often much harder to help.

Last week’s gospel reading had Jesus talking with James and John, who asked to sit on his right hand and left hand when he came into his glory. His question to them was exactly the same: “what is is you want me to do for you?” – but their answer was about power, about maintaining the same kind of authority structures in the kingdom of God that we have on this earth. And Jesus told them off for it, because that was precisely not what he was here to do. He came to turn upside the power, to put the first last and the last first, to give sight to the blind and hope to the downtrodden. So Bartimaeus had it right – he didn’t ask for power, he asked for sight. He asked to be able to see the world clearly, to live a life like others.

One more point from Jesus and Bartimaeus’ conversation that fascinates me. When he replies to Jesus, Bartimaeus uses the Aramaic word ‘Rabbouni’, my teacher. It’s a version of the word Rabbi, but more intimate and direct. It occurs only one other place in all the gospels, in the beautiful encounter of Mary Magdalene with the risen Jesus on Easter morning. Mary doesn’t recognise Jesus at first, until he says her name, and her response is that word Rabbouni. For it to be said by a blind beggar on the roadside in Jericho is a sign of enormous trust and faithfulness. And of course he follows Jesus on his way to Jerusalem – where else would he go now?

The story of Bartimaeus is a fascinating one, as much about the nature of discipleship as about healing. It can give us hope – if we want to be a disciple of Jesus, or if we want to be healed, or both, we must first learn to name our needs and be willing to trust Jesus. And as the church, if we really want to be able to follow the gospel, we need to look to people like Bartimaeus rather than the rich young man – to be willing to say, our mission is to these people. And then to be able really to listen to them and their needs, to build relationship with them, and answer their needs.

I want to give the last word to an American writer and activist called Ched Myers who has written and preached and based his ministry on Bartimaeus for forty years. He writes that:

What this tale has taught me over the years is this: that embracing Jesus’ call is not a matter of cognitive assent, nor of churchly habits, nor of liturgical or theological sophistication, nor doctrinal correctness, nor of religious piety, nor any of the other poor substitutes that we Christians have conjured through the ages.  Rather, discipleship is at its core a matter of whether or not we really want to see.  To see our weary world as it truly is, without denial and delusion: the inconvenient truths about economic disparity and racial oppression and ecological destruction and war without end.  And to see our beautiful world as it truly could be, free of despair or distraction: the divine dream of enough for all and beloved community and restored creation and the peaceable kingdom.  Discipleship invites us to apprehend life in its deepest trauma and its greatest ecstasy, in order that we might live into God’s vision of the pain and the promise.

Amen.

Widening the circle of God’s love: a sermon on being wrong and being corrected

Sermon preached at Duston United Reformed Church on 9th September 2018. Texts: Mark 7:24-37, James 2:1-17.

Have you ever had that kind of conversation where someone you really like and admire suddenly says something offensive or obnoxious – something racist, embarrassingly sexist, toe-curlingly old-fashioned, that kind of thing? And your heart sinks and you wonder whether to argue back. Bad enough if it’s directed to other people. Awful, really horrible, if it’s directed to you. And worse still if the person saying it has power over you, or you need something from them.

So it is in the story which begins today’s gospel reading. And yet it has a happy ending of sorts, which shows Jesus widening the circle of what he understands as God’s love, of where he sees as his mission field, going beyond the narrow confines of the people of Israel to people everywhere. Now this might sound shocking in a different way. We know that Jesus had a temper had times, that gentle Jesus meek and mild was no such thing, but the son of God being actively racist? Or the son of God learning from his mistakes? Well he was human as well as divine, and humans say dumb things, humans do dumb things, and then learn to do things better. So is a story of hope for us all.

We start by seeing Jesus in foreign lands. The city of Tyre was an important port in what is now Lebanon, and was then part of the province of Phoenicia or Syria. But as you can see from the map, to Jewish eyes it was a long way from home. Remember that Galilee, the heart of Jesus’ ministry, was already seen as the distant north to the people Israel and Judea; and Tyre was far away from Galilee. Like various of their neighbours, the Jewish people didn’t much like the people of Tyre, and those living there would definitely be seen as foreigners.

It’s not clear from the text why Jesus was in Tyre, but we are told that he didn’t want anyone to know he was there. So he could have been on some kind of retreat, or just needing a bit of space. And speaking as an introvert, I can empathise with him getting grumpy with anyone invading that sense of privacy. But then a woman comes to his door. The gospel writer takes care to describe her as doubly-foreign. First she’s described as Syro-Phoenician, which is to say from the coastline around Tyre. Second, in many translations she’s called a Gentile, but the word in the original is simply ‘Greek’, part of the Greek-speaking culture found all around the eastern Mediterranean. The point from the gospel writer is clear: she’s a foreigner, she’s the Other, she’s not one of the chosen people.

Image: Ilyas Basim Khuri
Bazzi Rahib (1684),
via Vanderbilt University

But she’s in the kind of desperation that often brought people to Jesus – her daughter has some incurable condition and she’s in search of healing and she’s heard that someone is in town who might help. She throws herself at his feet, begs for his help. So does Jesus take pity on her, proclaiming that her faith has healed her daughter?

No, he does not. Instead he continues with this othering process and he refuses to heal her daughter. His mission is to the children of Israel, and they must be fed first – to take that from them is as bad is taking food from children and giving it away. And then he uses a racial slur, comparing the Syro-Phoenician woman and her daughter to dogs. This wasn’t an uncommon comparison for Jesus’ day as a term of abuse by Jewish people towards foreigners, but it needs a few words. Here’s how we think of dogs today – pets, companions, members of a household. Whether you’re a dog person or not, most of us have a similar sense of dogs. Certainly there are badly behaved dogs, with strays and the like, but mostly they live with humans and mostly behave themselves.

In Jesus’ time, dogs were seen very differently. They were frequently wild, often scavengers. Unpleasant, wild creatures. You didn’t throw food to them, you didn’t give them little treats. If they were under a table, it wasn’t to be given food as part of a family, it was picking up what they could get where they could get it. So to be compared to a dog, to have a gift of healing compared to giving food to dogs, that was pretty insulting. And let’s be clear – this was explicitly a racialised insult. I have no wish to sully this church by speaking out modern equivalents, but I’m sure you can think of some. There are abusive words which are spoken by the powerful to the less powerful, and which are specific to the abused person’s race, or gender, or sexuality. They continue today and they’re horrible. That Jesus was in a foreign land is not relevant, because history is full of people whose culture had led them to believe themselves superior, going to foreign lands and treating the natives badly. Think about the British in India, or the Belgians in the Congo.

Now, the idea of the son of God speaking in a racist manner punctures a lot of what we like to think about Jesus, so over the centuries there have been attempts to explain this language away. The word for dog is a diminuitive form, a little dog, so perhaps he was playfully calling her a puppy. Or perhaps he was testing her, in the way that rabbis sometimes did, being deliberately provocative to bring out an answer. Or perhaps that the woman was actually part of an economic elite in Tyre and he was criticising her for her privilege. Or something else. I get why people feel the need to defend Jesus, but I’m not convinced by these, it doesn’t fit to the text. In my view, this simply shows Jesus in a bad light, but demonstrates that nobody is perfect, even the one who was sent by God to change the world and who hung out with the poor and the downtrodden, that even Jesus had his moments.

And fortunately it doesn’t last. Because the woman replies with an argument that changes Jesus’ mind. In a few words she convinces him that he’s wrong. These are calm words, the kind of words that oppressed people have often used to challenge those in power. She doesn’t dispute the dog imagery, but she says that even if that’s so, then the dogs get crumbs from under the table. This is standing up to authority. This is speaking truth to power. I like this image, because this is the image of a woman coming out from oppression and seeing her own power

Image: Ched Myers

. This is saying that she matters, that her life matters, that her daughter’s life matters. It’s the same spirit that inspired the civil rights movement in the US, and that today inspires those young people who stand up and call for gun control. It’s the same spirit that inspires gay people to march in Pride parades and demand equal marriage from the state and from the church. It’s the same spirit that inspired the women’s suffrage movement. It’s the same spirit that inspired the anti-slavery campaigner Sojourner Truth, herself born a slave in the USA, to say the words “ain’t I a woman?”. It is, ironically, the spirit of Christ, of the gospel of liberation and love, but it’s words spoken not by Jesus but to Jesus.

In fact, and I use this phrase carefully and with respect, the woman is saying that Syro-Phoenician lives matter. Her call is for racial justice. And Jesus, because all his message is about widening the circle of God’s people, about bringing justice to people in all sorts of oppression, Jesus hears her argument. And here’s a thing – he doesn’t commend her for her faith, he commends her for her argument. The Greek is logos, often translated as word with a capital W, identified in the gospel of John with the eternal Christ who comes before the human Jesus, and is the spirit of wisdom. Logos is not something you attributes to dogs, to sub-humans, to inferiors. Logos is a word you use of someone you respect. It’s a sign that Jesus has really heard this woman, that her words have touched him and affected his ministry. He immediately says that her daughter is cured. But then, as this slide says, he understood justice more deeply because of the Syro-Phoenician woman’s insistence on justice for herself and her daughter.

And then Jesus moves on, not south back towards Galilee or Jerusalem, but north, further into Gentile territory, to the city of Sidon and then back to the Romanised area of small towns called the Decapolis. He’s heard the Syro-Phoenician woman’s argument, and he’s off to heal and preach to the Gentiles. And as if to emphasise the point, he heals a man who is deaf and mute, in quite a physical way that’s described in detail by Mark. He allows the man the power of hearing and speech, by urging him to Be Opened – which is Aramaic is that splendidly unpronounceable word ‘Ephphatha’ which most of the translations preserve. Because opening is what this whole passage is about. Opening up an understanding of God’s justice. Opening up an understanding of who is welcome in the kingdom. Opening up an sense of God’s love as wider than human boundaries or categories or prejudices.

We say in the church that we’re open to all. But are we really? There are too many stories of churches which said they welcomed everyone, but only on their own terms, only if they’re willing to fit in with the dominant culture. Churches which say they’re open to children, but make no effort to change their wordy sermons or archaic liturgy. Churches which say they’re open to autistic people or those with dementia, but give no pointers to help those people make sense of their worship. Churches which say they’re open to gay people, but not if they want to bring a same-sex partner or get married in the church. Even churches which say they’re open to women, but refuse to let them have leadership positions.

The United Methodist Church in the USA has a slogan based on these ideas, ‘open hearts, open minds, open doors’. Which are wonderful words, except that members of that church have pointed out the many ways that the United Methodists fall short of that ideal [see the Pulpit Fiction podcast for this week]. And they’re not even bad as American churches go, they’re a long way from the evangelist megachurches. Openness to all really matters. It’s at the very heart of justice. But we have to be able to live out what we say.

So a quick return to the epistle of James that we heard before the gospel. A few verses before the passage we heard is the wonderful phrase which in the King James Version reads ‘be ye doers of the word, not hearers only’. I quote this version because it’s on the lectern in the chapel of Westminster College in Cambridge, and there’s something rather charming about having those words on a lectern. But it’s the way to truth: not only to hear the word of God, but to live it out.

Put in a different way, we heard in the reading from James that ‘faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead’. There was a lot said in the Reformation about faith and works, about what you believe and what you do, and Martin Luther didn’t like this book much, but I find it very profound. If we don’t put into practice what we believe, is there really any point in believing it? The church doesn’t exist as a cosy club of people who believe the right things, it exists to transform the world, to help to bring about the kingdom of God on earth. And Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a much later member of Luther’s church put it so well: without works, there’s no faith at all, and no obedience to God.

I’ve not spoken about the long and interesting story with which the passage from James began, and it would make this sermon too long, but it’s quite scary that people might judge those who come into a church and give the best seats to those they consider rich. Not us, you say, and probably not – but in some places and some times yes, and there are certainly those who are more favoured in going into new churches than others. But where it connects back to the rest of this sermon is the idea of dishonouring the poor and favouring the rich. Our society does this so well, especially if we extend the word rich to mean those with privilege and power, those who are white or male or able-bodied, those who aren’t too young and aren’t too old. Even though we know the rich, the privileged, don’t always have the interest of others, and although we know the world is stacked in their favour – we still let the world turn for them.

And yet here is the message that the Syro-Phoenician woman, speaking her truth to power, taught to Jesus and can teach to us: the circle needs to widen. The rich might always be there, the privileged might always have fortune, but the kingdom of God belongs to those who weep, to those who mourn, to those who are downtrodden by life and by the world. God is on the side of the poor, God is on the side of the foreigners, God is on the side of those who have been ruled out by those who claimed to speak for God. It’s sometimes taken the church a long time to work this out. It even took Jesus some time to work it out. But Jesus worked it out, and Jesus widened his understanding of God’s love, and with the grace of God, we can widen our understanding too, and the church can widen its understanding, and come to heal all people and to love all people and to value all people. For of such is the kingdom of God.

Amen.

Sent out to transform the world - a sermon on rejection, repentance and discipleship

Image: Rev Andy Stoddard

Sermon preached at Duston United Reformed Church, 8th July 2018. Main text: Mark 6:1-13, with Ezekiel 2:1-5.

Movie writers sometimes talk about a backstory. Behind the hero, there’s some kind of past history which can floor them completely and makes them unable to function. Perhaps it’s an undisclosed secret. We watched the movie of Les Miserables the other day, and you learn near the end that the former convict Jean Valjean has never told his adopted daughter Cosette about his past, for fear she’ll reject him. Or perhaps it’s an object that renders you powerless, like the way Superman is unable to function in the presence of the element Kryptonite. But for many people, it’s to do with past relationships. The people we used to know years ago can have a hold on us, and their over-familiarity, or their belittling, or their contempt, can reduce us as a person, and make us quite unable to be the selves we’ve become. This is why school reunions aren’t always a great idea.

Because people change over time. I’m quite different from the person I was before I became a parent, or before I got married, or before I started work at the Open University. It’s not just that I’m older. I may or may not be wiser. But I’ve gained skills, I’ve gained experience, I’ve seen and done things, and I’ve matured as a person. The same is true for all of us. If someone from your distant past comes along and expects you to be the same, or judges you according to the things they knew from those days, then not only will they be wrong, but they could well do you damage in the process.

And so it is for Jesus. He returns to Nazareth, where he grew up, and people don’t see the healer and the preacher, the one who has been wowing the crowds around Galilee. And they begin muttering about him.

“I’ve always thought there was something a bit odd about him.”
“He’s not properly educated, just some labourer.”
“And what about that story about his birth? OK he’s Mary’s son but nobody ever worked out who his father was”
“Plus he left his mother and sisters at home to be looked after by his little brothers, while he went waltzing around with weirdos.”

Image: Cerezo Barredo

Because small communities are like that. They remember gossip. They use little innuendos to put people in their place. Israel was a patriarchal society, men were referred to as the son of their father, not as the son of their mother. To call Jesus the son of Mary meant that at best his father was dead, but more likely it’s a way of saying he was illegitimate. And the word translated as carpenter, tekton, is a pretty demeaning word – it’s not a skilled role, more like a day labourer on a building site. So he’s low status, of questionable parentage, and he’s left his family behind in the village when he should be looking after them.

No welcome with open arms for Jesus. When he later told his parable about the prodigal son, perhaps he remembered this moment – but there was no fatted calf in his story. Instead: demeaning language, belittling him and his background. Sounds horrible. No wonder he couldn’t do any deeds of power there in Nazareth.

Now you might think, well he’s ok, he has his friends. There are plenty of people rejected by family and their past associations who find a new life with a set of friends instead. Except Jesus never quite does what you expect, and as soon as he’s been rejected in his hometown, he sends them all away to get preaching.

Except of course he sends them away with a purpose – to start to preach the gospel. He sends them off with a mission, to preach repentance and to heal those who were sick. Notice these two emphases fit closely with what Jesus has been calling for throughout the gospel to that point. The first five chapters of Mark are full of healings – a leper, a paralysed man, someone with a withered hand, a man with a severe mental condition, a child who had died, a woman who suffered years of haemorrhages. We’re told that he healed many more, but these are told as stories. These healings are interesting. They are all people whose conditions cut them off from society, which made them unable to care for themselves or made them outcasts, unclean and unfit to associate with devout Jews. So Jesus healing these people was not just a kind deed. It was a set of actions which challenged oppression, which challenged marginalisation, one person at a time.

But Jesus went further than this. His first recorded words in the gospel of Mark are “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news”. In our time, the idea of repentance and good news are often tied up with a post-Easter vision of the crucified and resurrected Jesus. But the good news Jesus was talking about was a different sort. And it had to do with repentance, the key to Jesus’ preaching and the command he gave to the disciples.

Image: Kimberley D. Reisman

Jesus called people to repent. In the Greek, that’s the word metanoia, which means a changing of your mind. Not simply a change in mind about whether you want pizza or curry for dinner, but a complete mental shift in your worldview, in everything you understand about the world. The point is not to condemn yourself, but to recognise that you’ve strayed from the right path, that your true self is better than this. The Hebrew word for this idea, the lovely word teshuvah, has a sense of homecoming about it. You are a beloved child of God, you can come home to the love of God. But in the process you show love to others. So this is a repentance about changing your life around.

Image: Rabbi Rachel Barenblat

It’s a repentance that’s deeply related to the idea of the kingdom of God. It says: turn away from violence and hatred, come home to the power of God’s love. It says: turn away from power and hierarchy, come home to equality and care for the downtrodden. It says: turn away from war, come home to peace. It says: turn away from the kingdom of the emperor, come home to the kingdom of God. It was a deeply radical and transgressive message. It echoed the words of the Hebrew prophets for centuries but it was an incredible challenge to the Roman and Jewish authorities. It’s still a challenge today, in a world governed for the benefit of power and money, run by puffed-up egos such as Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, full of their own self-importance and with little care for those who get in their way.

So a proclamation that people should repent, and an offer to cure them of their sicknesses – those are radical ideas for Jesus to be sending out his disciples to fulfil. This story in Mark has parallel versions in the gospels of Luke and Matthew. In Luke’s gospel, Jesus preaches in the synagogue at Nazareth, and he quotes from the prophet Isaiah. He speaks words there that have been described as the Nazareth Manifesto, the foundation of Jesus’ commandments to his disciples then and now. They read:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”

And in case there’s any doubt, Jesus says plainly that these words are fulfilled today in the hearing of the people in Nazareth. That’s what repentance is about. That’s what the healing he conducts in Mark is about – proclaiming good news to the poor and setting the oppressed free. It’s not about just about individual healing. It’s about healing society. It’s about radical social change.

Repent, and put your faith in the power of God to change the world, and you will be healed.

There’s a further challenge in the way he tells the disciples to go out. Travelling preachers weren’t uncommon in Jesus’ day, but they went equipped – spare clothes, food, money. The disciples aren’t to do that. They’re to accept hospitality wherever they can. That has its own challenge. Because leaders are supposed to be givers, not receivers. But part of the upside-down kingdom of God is being willing to receive when something is freely offered, no matter how meagre. It’s not about getting rich on others’ giving – Jesus says his disciples were to stay in the first house they entered, not to go climbing up the social hierarchy of a town. There are no private jets here for the followers of Jesus. This kind of simplicity reminds me of the Franciscans, travelling people in simple robes who accepted the hospitality they were given. And St Francis emphasised the value of action in addition to words, saying that “The deeds you do may be the only sermon some persons will hear today”.

Jesus has been rejected by his family and those he grew up with. He’s lacking in authority in Nazareth. But he has great authority in himself, and he passes on that authority to the disciples.

Yet the rejection Jesus received from his family was similar to the rejection the disciples would receive from society. Yes, they healed and they preached. They spread the good news of the kingdom, and they transformed through their lives, and they slowly built up followers of Jesus, especially after his death. But within a fairly short time, all of the twelve sent out by Jesus would be killed for their teaching and their actions, for the challenge they posed to Roman domination. And Jesus’ followers continue to be persecuted for their faith, from the Christians thrown to the lions, to Martin Luther King shot down for preaching equality and justice. They are persecuted by their own, like the singer Vicky Beeching who was the darling of the evangelical church and then ostracised when she came out as a lesbian. And yet, as Ezekiel was promised by God for his own preaching, “whether they hear or refuse to hear (for they are a rebellious house) they shall know that there has been a prophet among them”.

Because it was the sending out of those twelve disciples that began the slow road towards the establishment of the church, towards the spreading of Jesus’ message throughout the world. And it’s through that message that the gospel is spread today.

The world needs repentance today as much it did 2000 years ago. People today need healing as much as they did 2000 years ago. And the pattern established for the twelve is a pattern for us today. We are called to walk the way of Jesus today. We are called as followers of Jesus to urge others to repentance, to cast off the power structures of this world, to become lovers of justice, to show the power of God through the way we live our lives. We are called to heal others in whatever ways we have power to do so, but also to heal society in whatever ways we have power to do so. We might not have to wander the streets to do so, but we can preach the gospel of love in the places we find ourselves daily, in the places we are sent when Jesus calls us to go. We might face rejection, but we will be acting in the authority of Jesus. And we will play a part in bringing about the kingdom of God.

Amen.