Becoming Ourselves

Won't get the chance to preach this today as I'm isolating at home with Covid, but as it was written I thought I'd share it.

Well, today’s readings take us on quite a journey, and perhaps take us to places we’re not entirely comfortable with. 

In Deuteronomy we have a prophet promised, a text we might interpret as referring to Jesus, and then some uncomfortable reading about the fate of false-prophets. 

From Revelation we have mystical, mysterious and mythical verses. John’s writing in this book can never be taken at face value, but again our interpretation would be that this poetic birth refers to Jesus.

And then in the Gospel we have Jesus beginning his ministry, he’s been baptised, spent his time in the wilderness and now he’s ready to go public. Mark’s account of this, as we heard this morning, includes a demonic possession and exorcism, and whilst our contemporary interpretations with our modern, scientific minds would try and interpret demonic possession as something more worldly, we do a disservice to the gospel when we don’t acknowledge that the world we’re shown here is one that does believe in demons, there’s 4 exorcisms in Mark even though it's the shortest of the gospels. This probably leaves us, like those present in the synagogue, asking “what is this”.

But I’m not, you’ll hopefully be glad to hear, planning on analysing the nature of biblical possession this morning. I must admit when I read the texts for today I was thinking, like the synagogue congregation, “what is this” and more pressingly, what does this say to us today, on this final Sunday of Epiphany as we come to the end of the Christmas season? 

The mystery and joy of the Incarnation and of the Christmas story are intimately woven through these readings. We have Moses promising a prophet from amongst God’s own people, our very human Messiah, but then we have John’s poetic, mystical retelling of God being born of a human woman, a child who escapes evil and returns to God.

The Gospel reading brings these two things together and shows us the reality of what the incarnation means as Jesus stands up to publicly declare his ministry has begun, and is immediately confronted with something we’d interpret as evil. An evil which immediately identifies who Jesus is, and an evil which Jesus immediately overcomes.

The possessed man is restored to who he was or who he should be, which is what I think a relationship with Jesus, the incarnate God, does for us. We each have a concept of God the Father, or the creator, whichever language you find the most helpful, and for me that aspect of God is awesome and endless and everywhere, so vast and entwined in everything, for all time, that it can be hard to comprehend.

In Jesus God becomes knowable, relatable, and we have a person with whom it becomes more comprehendible that we can have relationship with them, a relationship God wants to have with us, the ultimate goal of which is for God to delight in us and for us to delight in God. It’s a relationship of healing and restoration where, as it deepens, we get closer to seeing ourselves as God sees us, and move closer to fulfilling our potential as the people the creator created us to be.

Jesus restored a demon-possessed man to his true self.  Our demons might not be quite so literal but this is God’s deepest desire and yearning for our lives. Whilst we might not believe in evil as it’s presented to us in today’s gospel there’s many things in the world and in our lives we would perhaps call evil.

There’s the big things like war in the Middle East, child soldiers, institutional racism and misogyny, human trafficking and climate destruction, all huge evils in our world, but what I’m reflecting upon today is more personal, more everyday. Things which touch us personally. What are the evils in our everyday life that interfere with our relationship with God? 

Each of us have to deal with things which can prevent us from fully leaning into our relationship with God. Things that are preventing us from being the “us” God knows we can become. Some are bigger than others, such as addiction or illness, chronic pain or mental health concerns. But there’s also the more mundane, the things we think are a barrier between us and God, and because we believe they are a barrier, they are.

Short tempers, bad parenting choices, bad financial choices, sexual shame. The evil in these things can be how our less than ideal choices make us feel about ourselves, or how we judge others we see exhibiting them. A bad choice doesn’t make us a bad person, but we can convince ourselves that we are, and that makes the barrier between us and God.

One of the things Huw wanted to instil in us when he arrived is that it’s ok to be vulnerable and it’s ok to make mistakes. It’s all part of being human, and in many cases it’s how we grow and learn. I can’t help thinking about how in today’s gospel Jesus expels evil from within a congregation, a community which probably had complexities, relationships and came together in ways not too dissimilar to our own.

The life Jesus models for us – the life the Trinity models for us – is one of community. We’re not just called to be vulnerable and break down the walls between ourselves and God, but also with each other. To grow as God intends is to grow personally but also communally. 

Growing together is how we work towards a world where those bigger evils simply cannot exist, to model a way of living and being in the world that rejects evil by accepting each other, with our flaws and idiosyncrasies, knowing that with Jesus as our companion through life we’re standing with the source of all love and all power, we stand with a God who chose to come and stand here, with us, and share our lives, to live as we live.

As these last few days of the Christmas season pass by and we head so quickly this year into Lent, we go from Jesus standing by us in our wilderness, negotiating day-to-day life, to us standing by him in his wilderness, along with all the evil he was confronted by. This is what it means to be in relationship, to journey together, to share the highs, lows, sadness and celebrations, and as we live and grow, with Jesus and each other, we move ever closer to that revelation of hopefully seeing ourselves, and each other, as God sees us, fully ourselves, fully loved by God and knowing there is no evil that in that relationship, the eternal dance of love, cannot be silenced and cast out.

Our Relationship Begins Here

I had the honour of preaching at the Ascension Day service

When I first started to come to St Michael’s Mike and I sat in this side aisle, so each week we were looking directly at the Ascension window. It was probably the first thing within the fabric of the church that I ever used for prayerful contemplation. It’s so beautiful, and the colours so vivid. When the sun shines through it, it takes on a magical and mystical quality, which I’m sure is what the artist was aiming for. I never, back then, thought much about the meaning of the Ascension, but of the ethereal beauty of the window.

The Ascension itself is nothing if not magical and mystical. It’s probably one of the most if not the most supernatural elements of the gospels, and that’s understandable as Jesus moves from the earthly realm to the heavenly one. And yet it’s quite tricky to get your head around. What we see in our window and in other art is the artists earth-bound imagination trying to literally depict a holy mystery, but kind of ends up looking more like Mary Poppins, floating above the clouds.

I think part of the problem is the linear way we think about heaven and earth. Heaven is above and earth is below. God up there and mere mortals down here. Up is good and down is bad. Even further down in this linear thinking is hell, super bad. It’s no exaggeration that the first astronauts thought they might glimpse heaven as they ascended beyond the earth’s atmosphere.

Celebrating Ascension day is a good thing because it’s a time be reminded of and ponder upon several things. 

Firstly, it’s a reminder that Jesus’ story and ministry in the gospels don’t end at the cross or even with the resurrection. He spent anther 40 days preparing the disciples for what lay ahead of them, and their stories will continue way beyond this. And our relationship with Jesus is only beginning here.

Secondly, as Jesus disappears from view it’s a reminder that there is so much about God which remains a holy mystery. Yes, our God is the God who became incarnate and dwelt among us, but there is, as David Bryant writes, a built-in invisibility, incomprehensibility, and otherness about God.

Finally it gives us an opportunity to contemplate what it means to have Jesus having been fully human, living amongst us, suddenly return to his place as the eternal Christ at God’s right hand, and the good news is that the last thing it makes Jesus is absent from us.

To understand this we need to stop thinking of heaven as a physical place up there. Heaven is God’s realm and exists alongside us. When Jesus was earthbound as a human man it revealed to us so much of what God and God’s realm are like, but during that time he was subject to the rules of time and space which God has built into creation. He lived amongst us but was limited to being present to such a small number of people.

In ascending, David Bryant continues, Jesus is no longer time-bound, culturally limited, and lumbered with the ethics and thought-forms of his day. He has taken on cosmic significance, and become universal, transcendent, and beyond time.

It’s by ascending that Jesus becomes accessible to each and every one of us. Far from being absent, the Jesus who has lived amongst us now sits and intercedes for us in God’s realm. The Jesus who has lived our lives, knows our joys and our sorrows takes all those joys and sorrows back to our Father and creator.

If we think of the readings we have at Michaelmas we have Jacob’s dream – the ladder between heaven and earth, then we have the Gospel where Jesus states he is now that ladder, the link between the earthly realm and the Heavenly realm.

In the ascension we have this revealed to us in an incredibly  dramatic and poetic way. It’s not just Jesus waving goodbye, it’s his anointing and his coronation, as he takes his place in the heavenly realm as King, High Priest, and Intercessor.

Christmas Day 2018

John 1, verses 1-14, according to the Street Bible;

Nothing. No light, no time, no substance, no matter – the Voice was there. Before anything moved, mutated or mated, Jesus, God’s Voice, was there with God from the kick off. How come? ‘Cos Jesus, ‘God’s Voice’, is God. Before anything began, they had always been. Before there was even anywhere to be, they were there.

Jesus got the name ‘God’s Voice’ because he just spoke and stuff started. From nothing to everything, sparked only by the Voice. There’s nothing that doesn’t have the phrase ‘made by Jesus’ stamped on it somewhere. His words were life itself, and they lit up people’s lives – his light could blast its way into the dingiest corner, and yet the people who preferred darkness still missed it.

So God sent John Baptiser to raise Jesus’ profile: to lift up the Light. His job spec doesn’t exactly fill a page of A4 – it just reads. ‘Help people take it in and take it on’. Obviously, John’s not the Light: he’s just there to build expectation and commentate when the genuine article makes his entrance and starts lighting things up.

And when he does? Bizarre! No one recognises him! He speaks them into existence, but they don’t recognise him or his voice. He arrives at the front door of his people, and most don’t even peek out of the spyhole to check. The few who take the risk realise who he is, open up and knock a meal together. To these guys he starts doling out adoption papers to sign them up as God’s children. Conceived by human passion? No, by God’s passion!

So God’s Voice gets flesh, blood, skin and bone. He spends time with us; we hang around with him, get to know him, see what he’s like. And? As magnificent, as superb as you’d expect God’s only Son to be…and heaps more! God’s OTT gifts oozing from every pore: everything he does and says rings true.

Sometimes a story is so familiar, so much part of us and our lives and we know it so well, that we don’t really hear it. sometimes we need the story rephrased to make it new, to remember how it felt for it to be new and unfamiliar.

The Street Bible has none of the poetry of John’s gospel but something about it just cuts straight to the heart of the Gospel’s meaning.

Through Advent we’ve been waiting, we’ve been preparing and we’ve been anticipating the birth of Jesus, and now it’s here. The big day. Yet the gospel tells us one thing; he was always here. He’s always been here. Before all things and after all things. He was always in creation, yet not until that tiny baby do we begin to perceive it, to understand it, to fully know it and fully know him.

He always was, but in that outhouse, stable or shed- however you see it- he came physically, he came to be vulnerable and live our frail, yet remarkable, human life. We’ve seen the signposts throughout history and through the scriptures, that this would be the culmination of God’s continuous, creative love.

God sent us the truest reflection of himself, a part of himself, and this reflection was a helpless new-born baby. What does this tell us about our God?

Whilst there’re many things within scripture that are shared with other religions and traditions- such as the creation narrative and great flood narrative- no other tradition has a God who makes them-self this vulnerable. God wanted us to know him, recognise his constant presence in creation, his thirst for justice and equality and this was the way he chose to do it, to live among us- and remember Jesus lived his human life for 30 years before beginning his ministry. 30 years of ordinary, extraordinary human life, and it begins here.

God wanted us to know him and he wanted – wants - to know us. This relationship has always been a two-way thing. The creator of all that is wants a relationship with you- with me- we’re not ordinary and we’re not insignificant because each of us contains a divine spark, the presence of the God is within us. The baby in the manger is the culmination of millions of years of creation, thousands of years of human narrative history and the pinnacle of the love God has tried to communicate to us throughout it all.

As we step back from the enormity of that, we see a family, a new family. A mum, dad and a new baby. A very ordinary story in some ways. We see love and we see relationship. God came to us this way because relationship and connection are all that really matter.

This Christmas, as we contemplate the mystery, the enormity and the overwhelming outpouring of love, let’s remember to connect and reconnect, to build and rebuild relationships, because our God is the reconciling, radical God of relationships. If we take our lead from the one who created us and chose to live amongst us, we see that this is what we created for, and this is God’s will for our lives.

Celtic Lent Day 16

There is not in the world a way of life more sweet, nor more delightful than continual converse with God...If I were a preacher, I should preach nothing else but the practice of the presence of God
Brother Lawrence

Anyone younger than me might have no clue who Thora Hird is, so for the uninitiated she was a northern comic actress very much present on UK TV screens during my childhood. She was also one of our most recognisable Christians, presenting Songs of Praise spin off Praise Be.
I remember watching an interview with Thora towards the end of her life, whilst she still lived independently. Her daily routine was a constant conversation with God, whether in formal prayer or searching for the sugar. I can't remember if I was attending church at this point, but I remember thinking that continual conversation was the sort of relationship I wanted with God.

Scripture
For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: 
a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to throw away;
Ecclesiastes 3.1,6

Travelling Light

Sermon based upon Isaiah 35:3-6, 2 Timothy 4:5-17 & Luke 10:1-9

It’s become something of a tradition here at St Michael’s to dedicate the Sunday closest to St Luke’s Feast Day, the 18th of October, to a service of Wholeness and Healing. The author of the Book of Acts and Luke’s gospel is responsible for over a quarter of the content of the New Testament, so he’s a bit of a big deal when it comes to the history and theology of our church.

The link between Luke and healing is because of the belief he was a Greek physician. Other opinions are available but we take this opportunity as a community to pray for wholeness and healing, whatever that means to each of us.

Today’s gospel reading from Luke speaks of risk, vulnerability and urgency. I think if I was allowed I would have actually wanted to reverse the order of today’s readings and have the Luke reading first.

In it we see the instruction to the seventy chosen disciples to go out in mission, just as they are. No money, no possessions, no suitcase or rucksack. I don’t know about you but I’m a “pack for every conceivable scenario” kind of a girl.

This usually means I have a case or indeed car full of things I never use or need. What it does bring me however is comfort, I feel a gentle reassurance in having my “just in case” items with me.

The thought of going out, like these seventy disciples, with no purse, no bag and no sandals fills me with dread- never mind sandals I also need my walking boots, wellies, trainers and something pretty just in case we go somewhere nice!

But Jesus was preparing the disciples for a particular mission, preparing the way, in towns he would later go to himself. He was also asking a group of Jewish people to eat whatever was placed before them, whether it abided by the strict Jewish food laws or not. These people are being put right out of their comfort zone.

Finally, he tells them to cure the sick. It doesn’t elaborate whether this is through prayer or physical care, but the disciples have their instructions and are to get to it ASAP. No time for small talk. Off you go.

How scared, vulnerable and maybe even a little excited would they have been? It’s the beginning of an adventure but one where they risk losing everything.

So, if I were reversing the order of today’s readings I’d still put Paul’s second letter to Timothy in the middle. He reinforces our need to be missional people, Jesus has given us a ministry which we must carry out in full; God gives us strength for this.

Paul also serves as a reminder of the risks we take by following God’s will for our lives, and to be honest it’d probably put most of us off! He’s banged up in jail at this point, but crucially he’s still full of hope, happy in the knowledge that he’s followed the path set out for him. Paul’s very much a “bigger picture” sort of chap.

Finally, I’d have the Isaiah reading at the end as it shows us what’s possible when we follow where Jesus is leading or go where he sends us. It’s so poetically joyful!

Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened,
   and the ears of the deaf unstopped;
then the lame shall leap like a deer,
   and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.
For waters shall break forth in the wilderness,
   and streams in the desert

If this were to happen, as the disciples go about the land, what truer sign would there be of the kingdom of God truly being near?

For many of us the words from Isaiah reflect a kind of healing, an idea of what wholeness in our relationship with God and indeed our lives and the world might look like. It’s something we long for but may never expect to experience.

I mentioned earlier that healing means something different to each of us, but I believe that central to it is the idea of the completeness of our relationship with God. There’s tiny glimpses in these readings of how we might be able to actually achieve this.

It’s important to remember that the instructions in our gospel reading aren’t being given to us but to a particular group of people, with a particular mission, two thousand years ago. That doesn’t mean there isn’t something we can’t learn, particularly about vulnerability and baggage.

There’s a quotation from Dorothee Soelle I’d like to share with you:

He who takes the most with him and leaves little behind, and therefore remains much the same as he was before, has little chance of finding what he seeks…he who does not give up anything cannot find anything…

We’re each carrying things with us which prevent us from moving forward, stops us from finding our true purpose and from being in a more complete relationship with God.

It might be stuff that like me with my holiday packing we hold on to for comfort. When our lives are so filled up with stuff we often lose sight of what really matters- we can’t hear over the noise of activity or see the spaces between the clutter.

We can also take baggage with us that we feel chained to, that we can’t shake off- whether the emotional baggage of a past we feel we can’t escape from or the obligations we feel locked in to.

Jesus advises to travel light because only then can we discern what’s of real value; only then do we create space in our lives to be filled up by God.

Healing is about transformation and we’re transformed when we set aside things which don’t really matter and give space to the things which do.

This can be scary, transition often is. We like comfort and we fear transition and change. Take away the familiar and the comforting and we’re vulnerable, but this is the model of being that Jesus has left us with; strength through weakness, life through death.

If we’re brave enough to model gaining strength through vulnerability others will see it and be less scared to do it themselves. Through this the words of Isaiah become more than just beautiful poetry, they become a fulfilment of prophecy and of God’s will for our lives.

We can achieve healing and completeness in our relationships, we can make peace with ourselves and with the world around us.
We can be a sign of hope, reconciliation and healing,
we can be water bursting forth in a desert.

It’s risky and it’s scary, to step forward and go out just as we are, and I don’t know how far down that path I am myself, but for a chance to live a healed, more complete, reconciled life it’s got to be a chance worth taking; to ask ourselves what do I need to let go of? What’s my baggage?

Because if we do this, dump the baggage and make that space for God, not only do we make ourselves more complete but we become God’s instruments of healing and reconciliation in the lives of others, and that’s got to be worth taking some risks.

Strengthen the weak hands,
   and make firm the feeble knees.
Say to those who are of a fearful heart,
   ‘Be strong, do not fear!

Sometimes we need to hear that ourselves and sometimes we need to be the ones saying it.

So I want to say to you “be strong and do not fear”, and you can say it back to me later if you like! We live in God’s love, he guides or steps, let’s see if we can take the risks he’s asking of us.

Amen.

Day 26

Home is a movement,
a quality of relationship,
a state where people seek to be "their own",
and increasingly responsible for the world.

(from The Journey is Home by Nelle Morton; theologian and Christian Educator)

A suggestion for your prayer and meditation:

Take a moment to sit quietly.
Consider when you have felt most "at home".
Imagine that place or time or experience.
Recall the sounds, smells, the texture of it.
Breath in a blessing and exhale a blessing
for the home that allows you to be "your own".
Pastor Patty Fox 40 Days with 40 Christian Mystics

For me home is being with those people who make me feel the most comfortable, the most loved; the most like myself. Our relationship with God should feel like home.

Day 19

“All mysticism is characterised by a passion for unity. To the mystic, true Being and Ultimate Reality are One…Christian mystics aspire to an intimate union of love with God, seeking God’s presence as the very ground of the soul. The human being is endowed with a spiritual sense that opens us inwardly, just as our physical senses open us outwardly.”

(Ursula King, Christian Mystics: Their Lives and Legacies through the Ages, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988 p.15.)

A suggestion for your prayer and meditation:

Contemplate:  Consider what inward "spiritual sense" means to you.  What does it mean to you to experience a "union of love with God"? 

Prayer:  I feel the earth beneath me, the air around me, and the presence of the Holy Spirit within.
Pastor Patty Fox 40 days with 40 Christian mystics

A passion for unity, for connection, to not view difference as something to fear or hate. To be motivated by love, a desire to understand. To celebrate diversity, relate to those who are not our "tribe". Calling someone who is not like us "sister" or "brother". We are one body.

Advent word - Rely

I'm not the sort of person who's good at letting stuff go- even if I'm trusting someone else to do something I'm really not letting go of it. This means, preferring to do things myself, I end up with too much on my plate and get overwhelmed.
When I've got a big task or difficult day ahead, or I'm feeling overwhelmed, I try to remember one of the most important things we were told (in a self-care session at vicar school): we're not doing any of this in our own strength. We can't.
If I were to look back at the events of the last three years and the last twelve months especially I know I could not have done it on my own. Learning reliance on God is a difficult but necessary skill.

When we are inconvenienced, we have to rely on God. When we have to rely on God, the impossible becomes possible, and we find that we are able to do and achieve that which we never could do or achieve on our own power. We have to have God’s help.

-Br. John Braugh

Advent word - renew

Today's photo was taken on our date day- going to see Fantastic Beasts.
Annual events which are often in many ways unchanging, like the Christmas traditions we enjoy, can shine a spotlight on what has changed for better and for worse over the previous year. There's been quite a lot of change in my marriage in the last 12 months- change of jobs, change of roles, ordination and at times it's been a difficult year.
One complaint you hear a lot in relationships is about change; one partner feels the other has changed and aren't the person they fell in love with. My viewpoint is that change is inevitable and healthy. My husband and I are 38 and 43, we were 17 and 21 when we started dating- how unhealthy would it be for us to still be the same people we were 21 years ago? We've been shaped by relationship, children, joys, disappointments and bereavements.
Change will happen, and it can be scary, but it can also be a renewal, something which breathes new life; something which transforms.

Christ is all in all. He is here symbolically in a stone altar He is here sacramentally in bread and wine. He is here spiritually in hearts lifted up and returned to us renewed, transformed, consecrated.

-Br. Mark Brown

Advent word - Love

Tim Booth sings "love can mean anything", Johnny Bramwell's take is "to be loved is to be divine". If we're honest we probably take a lot of what we think about love from the lyrics of the songs we listen too, in the same way much of our theology is formed by hymns.
My stance is probably somewhere between Booth and Bramwell; love, which can take many forms, does indeed give us a glimpse of what God is like. Most of the metaphors we have are inadequate to explain or understand divine love. Jesus works with the parent/child metaphor, which comes the closest to helping our understanding but which we will still never fully understand.

Falling in love is one of the most profoundly spiritual experiences a person can have. By falling in love we discover our capacity for selflessness. We experience what it means to entrust ourselves, our souls and bodies, to another. When we fall in love as God does, we too will ultimately “stretch out [our] arms of love on the hard wood of the cross,” just as Jesus did.

-Br. James Koester

Bad things happen to good people

Sermon preached 12th July 2015 at St Michael's Flixton Summer Wholeness and Healing service. Based on Mark 6:14-19 and Ephesians 1:3-5

The section of Mark’s gospel that we’re reading through over the summer is so rich in scripture that helps us celebrate the ministry of Wholeness and Healing.

If we just remember back over the last 2 weeks we've had the story of the haemorrhaging woman and healing Jairus’ daughter. Last week the 12 disciples were being sent out in mission, and whilst it appears elsewhere in the gospel one of the few things Jesus directly commanded them to do was heal the sick. Spoilers for what’s coming over the next few weeks include feeding the 5000, Jesus walking on water and more miraculous healings, all of which would provide fantastic endless material for an uplifting sermon on Wholeness and Healing. These stories reveal to us God’s healing power, abundant love and give us clues to the relationship between Christ’s humanity and divinity.

But placed in the middle of all this miracle and wonder is a flashback to the Death of John the Baptist. A moment of defeat, and pain. A moment which caused Jesus to withdraw (when you look at the narrative in Matthew’s gospel). It seems out of place amongst these other tales of miracles- all these overwhelming displays of God’s love and power.

In John’s death we see frailty. We see a bad thing happening to a good person. We probably don’t remember that it comes in this section of Mark’s book, because of the narrative that surrounds it.

Why would it be in this part of the gospel? What purpose does it serve? And what can it tell us about Wholeness and Healing?

Whilst the stories either side of today’s reading are full of some of the most famous and miraculous events from Jesus’ ministry, it may be rare or perhaps even completely unimaginable that we would experience something even close to those miracles in our own lives. We may feel that whilst we hope for miracles, what we experience in our lives is much more mundane, and often the reality of the lives we lead is we’re faced with difficulties and sometimes sadness. It can be easier to relate to bible stories of people going through tough times, or the psalms which cry out in lament, than relate to the miraculous.

In stark contrast to the miracles pouring out from the gospel narrative, with this one story of sadness in the middle, If we watch or read the news the opposite is true- economic crisis in Greece, commemorations for lives lost in the 7/7 bombings, abuse inquiries within our own church. I think it’s safe to say that neither the miracles of the bible or the sadness in many of the media stories we read give the true picture of what we experience in our lives.

We can’t however deny that we do have to deal with difficulties more often that the miraculous, and at those times we may ask ourselves “where is God in this?”

Over the 15 years I’ve worked at The Christie I’ve prayed for hundreds, maybe 1000s of patients in my care. Some have got better and some haven’t. I’ve wondered if some of those who recovered, despite the odds, were miracles or simply the result of really good medical care and a lot of luck?  And I’ve wondered why were some not physically healed?

The church is very reluctant to claim healing miracles but there’s also no satisfying answer as to why God doesn’t intervene in the way we would want him to when we or someone we love is suffering or ill.

This must all sound a little bleak so far, not at all like “Good News” but John the Baptist’s death reminds us that even with huge amounts of faith bad things happen to us.

Yet sometimes the worst things we experience are often those which are the most important in forming the person we are or will become. During the ministry selection process one of the things I had to do was list the most significant events in my life up until that point.

When you look back at a lifetime of significant events you realise it’s often the things that have caused you pain, or caused you or those you love to suffer, that’ve had the most influence over the person you now are. The painful stuff shapes our faith, moulds our relationship with God and helps move us towards that wholeness we wish for. Would you be the person you are without some of the more difficult things you’ve experienced?

My friend Dave, who was a lay Methodist preacher, told me his cancer had given him the opportunity to talk to new people about God, making him feel he was drawing nearer to that relationship of Wholeness, despite his cancer not being treatable.

Something else we see in the Gospel reading is Herod’s brokenness. It’s too easy to see him as the pantomime villain, or a man manipulated into action, here what we see is a man broken by guilt. The reason the flashback to John’s death is here is because Herod, hearing about Jesus through the miracles and healing he'd performed, is driven by his uneasy conscience to think Jesus could be a resurrected John the Baptist. His murder of John wasn’t a great defeat or triumph, his marriage, to the wife who had wanted John dead, broke down and his own actions pushed Herod further away from being able to have a relationship with God. We see a man in desperate need of Healing and Wholeness but completely unable to ask for it.

There’s another purpose in recounting John’s death. It acts as a foreshadowing of Jesus’ death, a reminder at the height of his active ministry that Jesus too will die, shattering the lives of those around him and causing them to believe that all is lost.

When I wrote my ministry application form, reflecting upon those significant but painful events, one thing I realised was that whilst in the middle of it all it was almost impossible to see where God was in it, or how it could ever bring me closer to a whole relationship with him.

Yet years later, writing it all down, God’s presence in each part of my life became clearer. I think it’s true that sometimes God is so close we can’t see him. The theologian Leonard Sweet describes this closeness as being like asking a bird to see air or a fish to see water.

If you’d asked the disciples the day after the crucifixion where God was in it all I doubt they’d have had an answer for you, but ask them later, in the light of the resurrection and how that shaped their lives and relationship with God, They would hopefully tell you that what had seemed like the worst day of their life was actually the greatest, even though each of them subsequently suffered for it.

The bible is full of stories of bad things happening to good people, what counts is how those people respond to what has happened to them and if they are able to keep trusting in God.

The good news teaches us that good things can come from bad, we’re reminded of this in the Ephesians reading-

“In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace that he lavished on us.”

Our inheritance from God is through Christ’s blood.

Here we also see God’s plan for our healing, by making our relationship with him whole-

“He set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth”

God wants to gather us to him, maybe so close that at times we lose sight of him. He wants us along with all the things, good and bad, that’ve made us who we are. He wants our brokenness, if, unlike Herod, we’re able to offer it to him.

Our wholeness may not come in the form of a physical healing, a miracle, or the resolution of things which have hurt us, but from us being willing (during our good times and our difficult times) to let God gather us in and draw us nearer to him. 

Mini Meltdown

Today it really hit me how unready I am in the practical sense for Christmas, and I'm not faring much better spiritually. Most of my relationship with God at the moment seems to centre around my ordination training which sometimes seems to leave little room for us to simply "be" in relationship together. I need to work hard to prevent this relationship from becoming an academic exercise, to seek a deeper connection and understanding though my assignments and essays.
Another work day today meant not considering my LLLA task until I got home, the task being to set a jar aside to collect loose change though Advent to give to charity. After this I wrote some prayers for tomorrow morning's service. The jar sitting beside me helped to focus my prayers towards who the marginalised are in my town and city and where Jesus might find himself here. So many of us are anticipating what a joy Christmas will be, but for many people this simply isn't the case.