SERMON PREACHED at St MARY’S,
NORTH OAMARU
ORDINARY
SUNDAY 14 (4th July) 2021
Readings:
Psalm 48
2 Corinthians 12:2:10
Mark 6:1-13
You may be interested to know that Rev’d Anne kindly suggested,
as she proofread my notes for our pew sheets, that I really didn’t need to
preach a sermon, but could simply leave you with those notes. It has
attractions, not doubt for both you and me. But perhaps I had better go a little
way further towards earning my keep.
But I will briefly expand those notes. In them I have suggested
that we really have two quite distinct but interrelated vignettes, pithy little
scenes than can stand quite happily alone, from Mark. The first gives a glimpse
of the blood family, the whanau of Jesus, just not getting him. It’s not really
surprising. He was a tricky customer, was not the easiest
sibling or son to have alongside. We get a glimpse in Luke’s gospel account of
the quite precocious child-Jesus hanging out in the temple, after Mary, Joseph,
and by then no doubt some of the sisters and and brothers of Jesus have headed
home. No matter how sparse Luke’s
telling of that scene is, we might well guess that the long trek back to Nazareth
after Mary and Joseph collected the wayward eldest son was not the most jolly
of journeys.
The prophets in whose line Jesus firmly stood were not easy to
get one with. Those who challenge our lazy, nonchalant lifestyles and habits never
are. I’d go further – even the God whose values the prophets proclaimed with
their lives and words and deaths is not the easiest of fellow travellers. The benefits
probably outweigh the drawbacks but there are certainly times I remember with nostalgia
the nonchalant atheism of my youth. It was all so easy then – no God to bother
my selfish chasing after dreams, no God to be judged by.
So Mark gives us a glimpse of the difficulties of growing up
with Jesus. Underlying the glimpse – and we learn later that eventually the family
of Jesus did get what he was on about and join the growing Jesus
movement, after that first easter – but underlying the glimpse we have of family
life we also have a group of people who feel the good news of Jesus should be
neat, packaged, contained in a tidy envelope.
Jesus and his gospel will have none of that, and he bursts out.
He bursts out, too from the tidy envelopes in which we try to package him
today. The middle class envelopes, the Europeanised envelopes – even the
Christian envelopes. The actions and values and living presence of Jesus
exceeds our cautious boundaries.
But in the second scene Mark warns us of another dimension of
the Jesus story. He sends us out. Most of us haven’t been sent to exotic places
or to high profile roles in our community. Most of us have been called just to
stumble along a more or less normal life. Yet we are still called to be
Christ-bearers, to declare by the quality of our tolerance and compassion and
love that ours are lives infiltrated by the one who enables tolerance and
compassion and love and justice. You and I won’t have our names written in the
neon lights of sainthood but are called, each day, and always by the help of
God, to bear the love and the hope and so much more that is the hallmark of
Jesus’ life, the hallmark of the heart of God.
So may it be – that we don’t restrain the possibilities of God,
package God, restrict God, but rather that we open ourselves in prayer and
worship and fellowship to the God who can touch lives even through our lives. That way the Christ in us will out, like glimpses of light in the darkness, or a spring flower beneath a winter hedgerow, and
resurrection may still be rumoured in our worlds.
The Lord be with you.
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