This coming Sunday (Sept 30) the Middle Zone kids will be exploring the Gospel of Mark 9:37-50.  You can read it here: http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=215842840.

There are two scenes in this episode in the life and times of Jesus the Preacher of the Dream of God (Mark 1: )we see Jesus the pastor and then preacher in action. (I’m not going to talk about Jesus the preacher in this post, I’ll save that for later!)

The first scene, where Jesus is pastor, is comical really, in the way that great comedy points through humour to a deep truth.  He’s making headway teaching the disciples about this upside down dream of God where the last are celebrated, and the little people are treated like kings, he’s teaching them that the sick and old and young are not to be cast aside – as happens in a kingdom where the human is valued only for her or his capacity to produce or work.   He’s sent them off to ‘live the dream’ – to heal the sick, to welcome the outcast, and he’s probably sighing contentedly, only to have that interrupted by John, who comes rushing up to him in a tizzy.

“Hey, Jesus, there’s this man who’s doing kingdom work, only he isn’t wearing your logo! You’ve got to tell him to stop!!”  Jesus’ answer is what we’d expect: ” Why would you stop someone doing good in the world, just because they are not ‘one of us’?”   We get the wisdom, we get the consistency of message…. but do we really?   It got me thinking about how  I have tended to criticize certain global outreach organizations because they don’t share my theology…..and of the tendency to assume that the Seminary I was teaching at was the only one that could do the job right…… and of the possibility that we might think that the Gospel is really only happening where ‘we’ are, and not where ‘those others’ are.

You see where this is taking me?  It’s all too easy to want to see our way astheway.    But when we do,  what do we lose?  We lose a sense of the expansiveness of this dream of God, we lose a sense of the possibilities of it actually making a difference if we share the dream with people who dream it slightly differently.   We lose a sense of being part of a much larger movement for healing wholeness than can possibly be contained in our tiny corner of the world.  We lose the ground for hope.

Why did I say Jesus was “pastor” in this incident? Because his response to John was truthful and challenging, but the way he offered truth and challenge was also empowering and encouraging. Jesus opened up for John a broader, more hopeful disposition to the world, and that, at heart, is the ‘role’ of the pastor.  To point to the dream of God and invite others  to become part of it in ways that enrich their own lives, as well as the life of the world.

Thank you Jesus, for reminding me.

 

The Gospel for this coming Sunday is Mark 8:27-38. You can read it at this link:

http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=214644061

There is so much going on in this text it’s hard to know where to begin, or stop! I’ve said before Mark is not a waster of words, so every one in this passage is like an iceberg, deep and holding a LOT of water! What follows is a ‘stream of consciousness’, snippets of thoughts that may provoke your own.

Jesus is on the road -again! this time in the Roman ‘model city’ of Caesarea Philippi. Built over an older town, this piece of Herodian hubris was built to impress the locals with his Romanized power, and to try to impress the Romans with his emulation of their style.  Jesus’ question “Who do (those) people say I am?”  is worth asking in that context;  who do the Romanizers think Jesus is? People looking for hand-me-down power from Rome are not likely to think too highly of this preacher, healer, teacher of the very Hebrew God. All his talk of a kingdom of God is as oppositional as the current round of sovereinty talk in Quebec.  Fans and haters. Few on the fence.

And what’s with that condemnation of Peter for getting it right, for once??  8 chapters and finally someone gets it – Jesus is the Christ – God’s anointed one!  Jesus should be ecstatic, not ‘stern’, and certainly not vitriolic!   Something’s going on here, and this is likely where my sermon will take us on Sunday, so do come and see where this question leads us.

Another question that puzzles me is the connection between that initial question about Jesus’ identity, and his sermon in the second half of the passage about ‘denying self’ and ‘losing life’.  Often the two parts are divorced from one another, and I’m not at all sure that they should be.   I’m less convinced that this is about ‘sacrificial Christianity’ than about choices we make about our identity.  Are we going to be defined by “people”  or by “culture”,  constrained by the values of whatever society we live in,  or is the question of identity a call to look deep within, to that place where we know ourselves to be a unique, beloved child of our Creator?  What happens when society’s definition of us is not consistent with this essential core?  (You’re ‘old’ , when you don’t feel old, for example).

Yet again this Gospel digs really deep, while at the same time remaining firmly grounded in a real, flesh and bones world of choices and consequences.

Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

September is almost upon us, with another season of Lectionary musings in preparation for Sunday’s worship and sermon at Cedar Park.

This week, after a summer long lectionary diversion into the Gospel of John, and a Cedar Park month long diversion into a sermon series on Psalms,  we are back to the Gospel of Mark.  And boy, are we back!!  The text for this Sunday is a dream come true for preachers who will want to tell their congregation how ‘evil’ they all are.  I’m not one of those preachers, and you’re not those ‘evil’ people.  So we have quite the challenge on our hands to find “Good News” in this text that shows Jesus stiff-lipped and unfiltered in an argument with the Pharisees.

If you want to read the text, click this link: http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=213291687

If you got lost in those purity laws, couldn’t find the ‘parable’ or were disgusted by the catalogue of heart-hidden evils,  I don’t blame you.  My working title for this week’s sermon is “Dirty hands and a dish of red herrings”  – the text is full of them.   It’s also filled with typical Markan bluntness and exaggeration, a prime example being “for Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat without ritual washing of hands.”  Not all first century Jews engaged in such rigorous ritual practices, nor is it even a Biblical injunction for ordinary people (there is a stipulation  in Exodus 30 that temple priests wash before touching food offered in sacrifice).  Another ‘exagerration’ occurs in the NRSV translation: ‘unclean’ and ‘defile’ are strong, suggestive words, and perhaps misleading, because the words they translate are “koinos”  and its related verb, which means “to make ordinary” or “common.”   In other words, this isn’t a lesson in hygeine, but a fogged -up window into a religious culture far removed from our own, in which people wanted to come close to God’s house in a state of preparedness to meet the holy. But all this is a ‘red herring’  or a Markan ploy to set up such a strong contrast to the teaching Jesus is about to offer.

Trouble is, with the cultural and religious distance of 2000 years, we spend so much time trying to understand the distractions, we can easily miss the point.  Which I hope to uncover on Sunday in worship!  See you there? Or read the sermon on the Church website next week!.

A version of this blog post appeared during Holy Week, 2010. I hope you’ll find it useful as we use our worship Service this coming Sunday (April 1) to “Walk through Holy Week.”

When I was a child, “Palm Sunday” was one of my favourite Sundays… children joined in the choir procession, we got to wave palm fronds (a decidedly romantic-exotic item in our Northern English parish), sing “Hosanna” at the top of our lungs.  It was the one Sunday  of the year where we kids were allowed to be heard as well as seen!  I think the sense of forboding of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on the colt of a donkey, just a week before his execution, was lost on most of us under the age of 12. We truly were part of a jubilant crowd having no thought or concern for what would follow in the days ahead.

But, Palm Sunday in my childhood parish was also the beginning of a weeklong marathon of Church services:

• “Stations of the Cross” on Wednesday night, (a Roman Catholic tradition in which parishioners walk around the church and stop to meditate and pray at various “stations” – graphic depictions of the events leading from the Last Supper to the placing of Jesus’ body in the tomb).
• Thursday was “Maundy Thursday” with its bizarre ritual of footwashing.  (“Maundy” from the latin “mandatum” meaning “command”, it’s a reference to Jesus telling the disciples  (John 13:32) why he washed their feet, as a sign of the servant-love of Jesus, which we too must exercise: “A new commandment I give you; love one another”). You may want to check out the sermon for March 11, 2012 “It begins with a Towel” http://www.cedarparkunited.org/2012/03/12/march-11-2012/
• “Good Friday” – a day drenched in sadness.  The Good Friday service was long, painfully so for a small kid, but nevertheless enthralling, graphic, tangible. While we read the version of the story from Luke in my home parish, Mark’s normal brevity is replaced by graphic bluntness in chapter 15. Mark even tells the time all the way through, “the third hour, the ninth sixth hour”… and so on.  When Jesus’ last words on the cross were read (15:37), the church bell rang slowly, nine times. Not another word was spoken, but a series of actions took place which spoke volumes:  the gold coloured altar cross was taken down and replaced with a very graphic ‘Crucifix’ complete with dying Jesus.  The organist played Stabat Mater  (an ancient hymn about Mary standing at the foot of the cross) while all the church banners were taken down, and women in the congregation covered all the statues (it was a Catholic church) with deep purple cloth. Even the baptismal font was emptied of its water, and draped in black cloth, something I found particularly sombre, full of forboding and dread.   We filed out of the church in silence, an unspoken rule that no-one conducted church business or gossip on the steps on this day.
• Good Friday was also a ‘day of fasting and abstinence’ in my tradition. We ate no meat, no treats, no dessert. We made (but did not eat) Hot Cross Buns, the cross symbolism self-evident, the spices symbolic of the spices used on Jesus’ dead body, the raisins symbolic of the blood he shed.
• Holy Saturday.  Was a long, draggy day, brightened only by eating the Hot Cross buns for breakfast. (In our house, still no meat on Holy Saturday).  Nothing happened that day until long after my normal bed-time, when we would be bundled back to church for the Easter Vigil, beginning at 10:30 pm, a service with lots of kneeling and silent prayer in a darkened church lit only by four small candles.  …Then…… ( What happens next belongs to Easter Sunday, so you’ll have to wait til next week for that!!)

The drama of Palm Sunday and Holy Week was powerful, visceral, evocative, dramatic, ‘liminal’ (hovering on the edges of holy and ordinary), and it had a profound impact on my faith, not only as a child, but I suspect also as an adult.  Although my understanding of God’s role in the ‘passion of Jesus’ has undergone transformation, it is still a story central to who we are as followers of “the Way” of Jesus Christ.  I am grateful to have grown up in an era  and in a tradition that ‘walked’ so graphically through Holy Week.

Perhaps all this liturgical drama was unnecessarily sombre?   I’ve wondered, but I don’t think so.  Life isn’t easy, while it has its measure of joy, delight, growth and wholeness,  it is as full of chaos, malevolence, injustice, hurt and hatred, suffering, grief, loss, despair.  This Gospel  narrative of Jesus’ last week, is the story of the hard side of human living. Perhaps this is the hardest part of the Gospel, one that on our best days we wish wasn’t there at  all, but it’s Gospel – “Good News” –  for the worst days.

At Christmas we celebrated the birth of Jesus as this miracle of God-with-us.   This week’s narrative tells us  that God-With-Us  will walk to the gates of Hell with us, will suffer injustice with us, will hurt physically, emotionally, spiritually, mentally with us. God-With-Us. No Matter What.  It’s worth walking with God-With-Us, right through the palm-waving throng  best days, right through the last meal and betrayal  worst days, the dying days, the empty silent Saturdays, because when we do, we will, we most assuredly will, find ourselves on the threshhold of Easter…… but that’s next weeek!