The journey of 1,000 miles

I find it interesting that many times when I have written my blog, and words like follow and discipleship come up, the readership goes down. I find it interesting because people seem to not want to hear it for whatever reason. Yet that is exactly what the Gospel and the Kingdom are about. The Gospel of Mark is about the collision of the Kingdom of God with the kingdoms and idols that we have set up. The Gospel shows how God in Christ deals with that.

The Gospel this week is about following Jesus. Nothing more than that, but then nothing less than that either. Many seem to think that what needs to happen is for everybody to find salvation or “get saved” and then everything will be fine. In fact, coming to know who Jesus is for you, and knowing that he has come to your rescue, is only the beginning, the foundation of a life that is to be lived with Jesus because it is going to be lived into eternity with him. We do not live on our own and we do not follow Jesus in a vacuum. We live and follow from within community. We need each other. I need you and God, in his wisdom has determined that you need me.

We cannot preach, cannot live or fulfill our vocations without one another. And it is increasingly truer every day. It is hard to follow Jesus these days, to be a person of integrity and to preach the truth when our society is suffused with technology which is constantly blaring information, news and opinion at us to the point our senses are bludgeoned and blotted out. It is hard to be faithful when a 15-year-old boy, who was out for supper with his family, is shot to death because someone was trying to kill someone else. Following Jesus is so much more than getting rescued – getting into heaven. That is only the start – the foundation. We are to work at building a life and a relationship with Jesus while learning to depend upon Jesus, broadening and deepening it.  This includes our relationships with one another and how we relate to the wider world. We are to be more than impressive people: we are as a community, mean to have impact one each other and on the world for good and for God. The Gospel is more that good news about God. The good news is coming from God to all of us.

This is the moment that has been chosen and we are the people chosen by Jesus himself to call others into the path that we are walking. As the Markan Gospel points out, “Many are called, and few are chosen.” We are to bring every person into the path we walk, those whom Christ is calling to follow him. And at the same time, we need to be considering who Christ is calling to leadership in his Church. From time to time, I remind myself that the Lord and the Church chose me. Yes, I answered the call. Yes, I went and did the academic exercise to make sure that I had the right training and preparation. When the time was right, I was publicly chosen, prayed for and had hands laid on me. That was many years ago now. But I remember the ordination as if it was last night. The resounding “Yes, it is” to the question asked by the Bishop, “Is it your will that he be ordained?” And the weight, not only of the Bishop’s hands but of the many priests who where there and consented to that ordination, laying their hands on me as well.

It has served as a reminder that I am not in this adventure alone with Christ. I march with the great company of disciples along the road, with and behind Christ.  I am a part of a community that lives and moves and has its being as a body of believers. We will not find our satisfaction, our rest until we are with Christ and at home with him in the care of our heavenly Father.

A journey of 1,000 miles begins with its first step. This is the moment that needs your decision. Will you come and follow with me?

Jason+

Knowing and following Jesus

If you were aware of this, we’re still in the place where Jesus was baptized last week (John 1.43-51). It has been a few days. Jesus now decides that it is time to shove off, move on and get on with things. The trek will be towards home in the North. The day before, Jesus had called the first of his followers, Andrew and his brother, Simon (Peter) along with John and his brother James. This morning he goes and calls Phillip, telling him, “Follow me”. Phillip then goes and finds his friend Nathanael and he is invited to come along.

The pericope reminds me of the time that I visited the Church where I was baptized when I was a baby. I wasn’t expecting anyone to know me or anyone to recognize me. I was baptized in the quiet, as my family got ready to leave the area for a new community where my father had found work. The move took me away from family and from my birthplace. When I enquired about the old building with its font, I was told they did not exist anymore. The congregation had been growing you see, so they leveled the first Church (the one where my baptism took place) turned the land into a parking lot and built a second. When that was out grown, they built there new and current building, adding onto the second one immensely. The font? No one was quite sure where it went.

Why do I share this with you? Because it is important to be reminded about the necessity of going to Jesus to get to know him and to be known by him. After all, did he not tell his disciples: “You did not choose me, I chose you and appointed you to go, to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last.” We are called to follow. It won’t always be easy. It won’t always be nice. But will we never be overcome. As a disciple, we are much like a backseat driver – we like to think we are in control. We like to believe we know better. But it is about Jesus and he is the one in control. It is not about me. It is about him. We have enrolled in the School of Christ and we are going to be taught what we need to know and witness what is going to be said and done. Then we are going to go and do something about it ourselves. We as disciples, are going to learn and to understand: about God and about Jesus.

And some would not at first call what happened with Nathanael, “miraculous”. Phillip goes to him and interrupts Nathanael’s study of the Law under the shade of a fig tree to tell him about Jesus. “We have found the one that Moses wrote about in the Law, and about the One the prophets wrote about – it is the man, Jesus bar Joseph of Nazareth” (v.45) And Nathanael asks a simple question, “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” Many zealots and rabble-rousers and other such things had come down from the North.

What is different, what is special about this guy over the others? Want to know? Come and see him.

It is a basic principal of Evangelism – you cannot know someone you have never seen. In Nathanael, Jesus recognizes someone who is honest, frank, without lies, who has not prostituted himself to other gods. He is ready to see God fulfill his promises to the nation and to make Israel great again. Jesus heard the cry of this man’s heart. Jesus knew Nathanael but Nathaniel is just meeting Jesus. In this encounter, there is something that we do not expect: Jesus asks Nathanael to deepen and broaden his expectations beyond going back to a glorious past. In fact, Jesus points out to him that he is going to see things that are going to amaze and mystify him even more so.

The place where we will know God best is not at an earthly altar. The way we will get to God is not the ladder at Bethel. These things are now in the person of Jesus. He will see and experience angels ascending and descending from Jesus to God. Jesus is the One he has been looking for. What is necessary is for Nathanael to deepen his faith and his witness so that God can in him and through him, do deeper things. It is a true confession – that Jesus is the Son of God and that he is the King of Israel, but he has Jesus’ agenda misunderstood. Jesus has come to do things that will rescue the world, not to make Israel great again as it was in the days of David and Solomon. Jesus comes that we might know him and see the Father and the kingdom. Lives will be transformed teaching them who God is; through Jesus being the bridge, the way to the Father and will be the just King who brings his righteous rule to the earth.

Do you want to go with him? Do you want to see and to live? Then it is time to learn to trust Jesus and to participate in what he is doing because he is doing as his Father is doing. We can trust Jesus for the things we don’t know, and we need to go and participate in the things we do know and understand, because we are needed to, for the sake of others who are coming into the kingdom.

Jason+

It's not about how wet one gets, but how one proclaims it

When I sit down with a couple for the big moments in family life, I often ask a question like, “Is this an event we are having or is it part of something bigger?” Whether it is marriage, or baptism of a child, or confirmation of an adolescent is this just an event or is it a part of something bigger? So then, let me ask you, when it comes to your Baptism, was an event or a did it start a process?

Many will struggle to choose one or the other, when in fact, I perceive that it is both. Baptism is an event, through which people are responding to what I see and the prompting of the Holy Spirit in their lives to make this step in their lives and in the lives of their family members. Where things tend to fall a part, is following through on the promises that are made in the service, both on the part of the parents and Godparents/Sponsors and moreover, on the part of the Church to uphold these people in their lives in Christ. The Church, meaning here the Anglican Church of Canada has not done a good job of teaching new believers.

When we are baptized, we receive a whole new identity – we leave the old life behind and begin a new one. We are dead to the old life, it’s idolatries and attending sin, and to death itself. We are alive to God the Father through Christ by the workings of the Spirit in our lives. We are, as new creations, called to live a life that is directed towards Christ and his coming kingdom. As a professor mine used to remind us, we are directed to live out both Christ’s death and resurrection in our lives, even if that means we die and rise again daily.

Something else that is important to all of this is the need to persist in this life after the Baptism itself. Sure. There is a moment and it is sacramental, maybe even sacerdotal. There is entrance of the newly baptized into the priesthood of all believers and into the community of the Resurrection that is the Church. It is within the community that we need to continue to grow, to be fed and to know the presence of the Lord Jesus. I say this because there is something that the Church needs to realize: until they belong to Christ, they have no part in us. Like when Peter, after refusing to allow Jesus to serve him discovers that if he does not, he will not be to participate in what comes next, so we need to invite people to come in and be served, then learn how to serve in Christ’s name.

I find it striking that none of the apostles demanded that the Church make disciples or that the Church fulfill the Great Commission. St. Paul for example, encouraged people to pray and give thanks to God and to make the time to cultivate the interior of one’s life by contemplating the inexhaustible mystery of Christ. The Church today needs what Robert Cardinal Sarah would call a ‘heart to heart conversation’ with Christ, in terms of conversion.  Without such a conversation, there is no ability to remain under the discipline of the Master.

Renewal of the people in their faith leads to the revival of the community in the Spirit. If you want to see God move in your life and that of the Church community that you live in – then maybe you need to get out of the way. Jesus must increase, and we must decrease. As disciples, as followers of the Master, we are to be taught and to listen. We are to listen and to learn from him and one another. Then we are sent, and we are to go doing and teaching as we have been taught.  In the going we are to raise the sight level of people by sounding like, looking like and acting like Jesus. People need to see the family resemblance. And in coming together for worship, we should endeavour to re-enter into the presence of the Almighty God and the worship which is constantly ongoing, not just seek to reproduce experiences in which we feel good or great.

It is not about how wet you get – but how you live and proclaim your baptism that matters. What matters is declaring who Jesus is for you and making him known where you are to whomever you know. Let us live it well in Jesus’ name and for his sake.

Jason+ 

They came. They saw. They went back praising and glorifying God.

How do you react when you have good news to share with other people? Certainly, I shocked a couple of family members when I went in the house a different way because that way had been close, damaged for some time. I showed them that the new way was there and ready. There was shock and awe. There was celebration and a little bit of anger that they weren’t clued in. This is not unlike what we have happening through the story of the birth of Jesus and God coming near to us; in a way that we could understand. It took a lot of work and setting up for things to happen – centuries of people following God, failing and falling; of being disobedient and petulant. It all started with Abraham, and the call and life of one man and his family.

The trip of one family – a husband and wife to the man’s ancestral home was down right difficult. Walking about 75 miles over difficult roads while face weather and potential robbers, growling people because they too are on their way somewhere else – families, businesses, lives and countries in chaos all because Rome wants its taxes. When the young couple found their destination in Bethlehem (House of Bread), the Town of David, there was no room for them to stay in the Inn. So, they found a place in a stable, bedded down for the night, and made things as comfortable as possible.

That’s when it all happened, Suddenly, boom! An angel came and announced that the baby was born. But it was not to someone powerful, or to a king or queen that the angel went. It was to the poor and the outcast shepherds in the fields near Bethlehem – message: Boom! Glorious bright light during a time real darkness and then a message from Gabriel and the Message Department: Do not be afraid! To you in a certain place, at this moment a child is born for you and to you this sign will be given to you – he will be found in manger wrapped in rags and laying in a manger.  Like a cymbal crash, the birth of the timeless Son of God into human history happens, shattering the rhythm and hum of our meager existence. 

The shepherds left their flocks in the care of God to see the sight that had been proclaimed to them. They went. They saw. They worshipped and gave praise to God as they returned to their lives and livelihoods. It is what I hope for you this Christmas – you came, you saw Christ and you go home praising God, ready to come back and do that again and again.

Not everyone reacts to the news of the birth of Jesus with joy.  Some where amazed and terrified like the shepherds. There are those who would be baffled like the people of Bethlehem at the commotion. There are some who are amazed and become angry like Herod the Great.

The greatest thing that can happen in this moment is not a change in position or in place – but rather a change in spirit. Like Old Ebeneezer Scrooge, who after he ponderous and more than slightly disturbing night, is overjoyed to discover he has not missed Christmas but rather that he gets to enjoy it as a redeemed man and the chance to make mankind is his own business.

We too need to come to the manger to see the Child, to enjoy his presence and then to return to our lives changes people – different because we have encountered the Christ and because of that we can never be the same again. The mundanity of human life is now beside upon by the entrance of its Creator.

This message comes not just to the shepherds, to the people of a small town or even to a young couple, it also comes to us. To you is born this day, a Saviour who is Christ the Lord.  You will find him if you seek him. The wise always do.  We must come. We must see and we must add our voices to the myriads who are praising God for the wonders he is doing. 

Jason+

Are you interuptible this Christmas?

People ask me all the time, “Why does Christmas have to be so busy?” – There is good news and bad news in that answer and it is the same answer: It’s not Christmas – yet. We have until sundown today before the feast begins.

We live in a society that does not like to wait. We are always in a rush to get somewhere, do something or whatever. We are Content with a drive through meal that take 30 to 90 seconds to deliver rather than being patient for 25 minutes and getting the steak and potato. Moreover, we live in a society that must have information on a screen for it to be true – won’t be believed otherwise. This has led to a breakdown in communications not only with each other but also with God. It reduces the ability of Christians because we are not limited to 280 characters of poor English and slang.

Therefore, if there is nothing else that gets said here in this moment let it be only the name of Jesus. He is the visible image of the invisible God. The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. 16For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. 17He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. 19For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, 20and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. (Colossians 1.15-20)

And I want to dispel some misinformation about Christmas – it was not taken from the pagans and made a Christian feast. Christmas or the Mass of Christ was celebrated by the Church 50 years before the pagan feasts of Saturnalia began, The pagan feast was started because of the desire to go back to what was in the Empire. The Christian faith was the faith of the Empire and thus the Celebration of Christmas which started some time between the Edict of Milan in 313 and the Council of Nicaea in AD 325 was rampant wherever the Empire was.

The question I want us to consider is a simple one – are you willing to have your Christmas interrupted this year, by this same Jesus? After all it is his day. Christ is Christmas. Will you allow him in and will you make room for him?

The message to Mary was important – her day, her upcoming marriage and her whole life was disrupted. There is always the possibility that Good News must start out and heard as bad news and then must be lived to become Good News. Mary was troubled and afraid when saw heard the Angel and his greeting – What do you mean God has been watching me? What does God want with me?

God had been watching Mary and wanted her to be a part of his plan, his mission to redeem the world. God wanted her to allow her heart and mind, her life to be open to the silliness of the possibilities that he wanted to work in her life. He indicated that he was near her and watching her and would continue to do so – her life had found favour because of the way in which she lived it – towards God and the kingdom.

She is told that she would conceive and give birth to a son who would be in the line of David and would be King over David’s people for ever.

I want you to know that there is a counter point to get us to see how remarkable this woman and her faith was – Zachariah the Priest and his old wife Elizabeth. If you read though the start of Luke’s narratives of the birth you will notice the differences between the old priest and the young woman. Mary was poor, about to be married, with little knowledge compared to a priest. What she did have in Joseph was a good man who like her, believed in God and was willing to listen to God through his dreams, like the Joseph of old.

If you read through the Old Testament, God now and again causes women who had been “barren” or childless to conceive a child – a son. The thing I want to point out to you is that in each case that I can think of, this was to women who were mothers of the ancestors of the line of David and therefore enabled the coming of the Messiah.

Zachariah was older, long married to a faithful wife. But despite his knowledge and experience as a priest, he was not willing to believe that God could do what he wanted to do. He chose to believe that he and the wife were about to wither and die on the vine and there was nothing that could convince him otherwise. Therefore, he spent nine months quiet, unable to speak because he did not believe. It was not until he said that his wife was right and that the boy’s name was his tongue loosed and he praised God for what he was doing.

We look even now for Jesus to come again the purpose of Advent these days and for God to restore things to the way that they were at first – in the Garden. We call for God to come down to fix the broken, to free those who are bound and to find that which has been lost. To deal with the adversaries of the people and the threats that had been made against the people. We want God to come down and sort things out because of the devastations that are happening across the world. We are dirty, despair and naked.

Jesus’ coming to us is about renewing the hope that we place in God for this very thing – to honour the prayer that we pray as churches in this town and across this nation – your kingdom come, you will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Don’t be afraid of what is coming – be ready for him when he does. Allow your Christmas to be interruptible that God might make know his favour for you and show you what you are going to be lead to do so see prayer answered that his kingdom will come. Don’t be afraid – Believe. Don’t be fearful – take courage and stand firm on what you believe. Don’t run away – come and participate in what it is that God is doing. In doing so we discover what we believe and even more importantly that God believes in us and is watching and encourage us to keep going and to keep doing.

As we participate in drawing in the kingdom to this world, as we learn to stand and to walk with God, we encounter God more deeply – and in doing so find the courage to do the silly, or even the outrageous (by the world’s standards) thing so that others may come to believe and to participate in God and his mission.

The dynamics of divine grace are such that it is not just for those moments that we need faith and to be great, grace is for life that is lived in between the moments that need to be lived. Miracles will come to the unsuspecting. Restoration will be given to those who are desolate. And blessing will be bestowed on those who believe and participate in what God is doing to redeem this world. We don’t have it all worked out. We must be ready and prepared to follow where the Spirit leads, to say, “Yes, Lord” and to be led in the ways that we need to go. Remember, God’s work, done God’s way, will not lack God’s supply.”

Remember, God is watching you and you are in his favour. Don’t be afraid of what’s happening next – be ready for him who is coming to you. 

Marantha!

Jason+

We are filled with joy because of what God has done

I was listening recently to Bishop Tom Wright on YouTube, who was talking about the use of Scripture in worship and why it matters. He basic case was that we need to know and understand the basic narrative of the Bible, so that we can understand what it is that God is doing in this world and more so, so that we can understand what it is that God is saying to us. Without that, we do not understand what God is doing and how we are to respond to God and his mission in this world. Wright suggests that we need to be like children who go up to a shop window and press our noses hard against the glass to see what is going on and know the bigger picture.

I want to tie this together with the Christmastide (The feast and season of Christmas) for it will soon be upon us again with all the usual complications. There will be the usual complaining about credit card debit; about how commercial Christmas has gotten and how there aren’t any good modern Christmas songs anymore, forcing one to go back to the old days and listen to Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole and Perry Como. In the days ahead, we will express a desire for the days when Christmas was more real and simply better. It is all too common this time of year. Isn’t it weird that those times we long for, are the times when we were kids?

In contemplating the words of Bishop Wright along with the year that has been and the words of the Scriptures for Sunday, there was a line in the Psalm this week that captured my eye and then mind that I want to share a bit about with you:

When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dreamed. Our mouths were filled with laughter, our tongues with songs of joy. Then it was said among the nations, “The Lord has done great things for them.” The Lord has done great things for us, and we are filled with joy. – Psalm 126.1-3

We don’t often put the whole story together to see what it is that God is doing where Christmas is concerned. I need to ask, what great thing has good done for you lately? What kinds of things do you see God doing and how are you responding to them and participating in them? The Bible opens for us as human beings, vision of the creation that was in the time of its infancy, and then the fall of humanity and God’s work to bring about the new life in the new creation. Scripture reminds of the fact that while sin is an issue and God in Jesus deals with that, the real issue is who or what we have at the centre of our lives, personally and collectively. If it is not Jesus Christ, then what idol are we holding on to? We need to recognize that God is speaking to each and to all of us. We need to spend more time in the Bible and to allow the Spirit to speak to us so that we can increasingly live more of it. The Bible is so much more than the recorded heroic acts of a few people who are, from our perspective long since dead in a society that is, compared to us, relatively primitive.

Pressing our noses to the glass, we can see how things used to be and, also to see how things will be when the new life in the new creation finally comes. We started in the Garden with a close relationship with God and with each other: we were creative and building community until the Fall. But know we can also see the new city with the new Life where we will be the royal priesthood and God will be our God. He will be the Temple.

Taking time to read Scripture in worship, as Wright points out, is the Christian equivalent of the burning bush on Mt. Sinai or the pillars of cloud and fire, the parting of the Red Sea. Reading the Bible is the invocation of the people of God into presence of God almighty so that we might remember and celebrate the mighty acts of salvation that God has done over the centuries, and that in doing so, he has saved us, and given us the joy we celebrate. Reading the Scriptures allows us to enter and to inhabit our story which is God’s own Gospel. And in living into what the Scriptures teach us, we can see and know what idols we are hanging onto so that we can rid ourselves of them. Allowing for idols in our lives degrades our worship and messes up our lives, personally and corporately.

So, if God has done great things for those who have believed in the past and is undertaking for us in the present, is he going to stop? Will he suddenly abandon us because he has had enough? Did he not use Abram, so that the faith of one man is shown to be more powerful than the rage of all the nations put together? Didn’t God lead his people out of bondage in Egypt into the Land he promised them. Did he not tabernacle at the Temple? Did he not punish the people for their idolatry and disobedience, sending them into exile? Did he not say, ‘Destroy this temple and I will raise it again in three days?” Has he not restored, time and again the fortunes of his own people? Does this not encourage, even compel us to pray, knowing that God will answer? Does not our future with God arrive as a gift in a manger? Will we not proclaim all that God has to others so that they will receive and participate in it?

In sending Jesus to us, God has done this great thing for us and we are filled with joy at what God is doing. Thanks be to God!

Marantha!

Jason+

The Hairy Mantle of John the Prophet

It takes time for a plan to come together. God had been planning for some time but now was the time to act. The Gospel this week (Mark 1.18) tells us that his Gospel is the foundation of Good News for the entire earth. Why? Because Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God has come to us; the timeless Son of God enters human history. God took the opportunity to enter human history to affect our exodus back to him through himself. And why is this Good News? Because it is what we were created for – to know God and to enjoy him forever. Jesus’ coming is the beginning of the shinning of the resurrection light into human existence. Jesus is going to be revealed as the Christ, the Son of the living God by who he is and what he does.

Jesus is here for us and to draw us back to the Father is news that needs to be shared because it is a big deal. We are coming to the Feast of the Nativity or the Feast of the Incarnation – better known as Mass of Christ or Christmas. How do we let people know that there is something important that is going to happen and that it is not fake news?

Consider John the Baptist – he came to do two simple but powerful things: to baptize people in preparation of the revelation of the Christ (Messiah) and to proclaim the need for people to get back to God because the kingdom was coming to them and was very near. It is through Jesus that we will learn to know and call God, “Father”. Jesus will reveal his own relationship as a Father-Son relationship. He will reveal God as “Father, Son and Spirit”. Jesus will call people to follow him in discipleship – to undergo a baptism not just of cleansing but also being drench in pain and suffering. Jesus is going to call everyone he meets to repentance and to faith because the kingdom of God is coming near to them. John proclamation was a call, a demand for people to return to God so that they could be led back to him.

It should be made clear that confession of sin both in public and in private was common in First Century Judaism. Jews were well acquainted with purity law as and baptism could happen anytime a person wanted.  Those converting to Judaism were baptized only once for conversion – not unlike Christian baptism which is imposed once, for the forgiveness of sins. Historian Josephus once pointed out that “God is very easily reconciled to those who confess and repent” There is a need to know the Truth in the Christian faith and then to live it. Faith and repentance are at the core of who we are as people of God.

People when from all over the South of Israel to hear John preach and to be baptized in response to what they were hearing. Why? Because they were getting ready for the kingdom and for something else that is important for the Church, even today: revival. What did they go out to see and to hear? What God was asking of him. When I went to General Synod the first time, more than 25 years ago now, the Synod was covered by both the Church and secular media because people wanted to hear what God was saying. They may have disagreed with what was being said but they were still interested in what needed to be heard. The people of John’s day heard a message that called them to immediate repentance and faith in God because God was coming to them. People responded to that because they became aware of the fact that they were separated from God and wanted to reconnect. People needed God because they desired hope and were searching for something that the religious leaders of the day could not offer them: renewal and revival. The time was right for revival in the Land. People were hungering and thirsting for God and what God could do for them.

We are called to proclaim the Good news too – calling people to repentance and to faith because the King and his kingdom are coming to them. Like John, we are not bound by our surroundings. People will respond when they are called. We need to live what we preach then and preach what we live. We must do both because faith without works is dead and works without faith are empty gestures. And just as importantly we need to proclaim the kingdom with power. It is not necessarily doing the extraordinary thing every day but rather with extraordinary love, hope and trust in God.

Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus, come soon. 

Jason+