Month: February 2012

It is said that ‘the wild beasts’ who troubled Jesus in the wilderness is a figure of speech which Mark used to describe all these secular forces of the volatile world in which Jesus lived. Like the wild beasts in Daniel and Revelation, these wild beasts in the wilderness were the powers of the kings of the world ruled by the Prince of the power of the air – Satan. The context for Jesus in the wilderness was a world conflicted and broken by the forces of evil.

And Mark wants to show us this – that when Jesus presented himself to John and was immersed in the waters of the River Jordan, that full immersion symbolised a full and total abandonment of the influences of the world, of Satan and the wild beasts; and a full and total abandonment to the will and purposes of God. Jesus’ full immersion has been described as a ‘death experience of repentance’. In that total submersion Jesus ended his participation in the structures and values of society. In those waters his debts to that society were cancelled. ‘He became totally unobliged’. Renouncing the old world order Jesus emerged from the waters signalling the creation of a new humanity.

From After the waters, the wilderness, my talk today. I admit, very Ched Myers.

Genesis 9.8-17, 1 Peter 3.18-22, Mark 1.9-15

Bridestowe, Okehampton, First Sunday of Lent, 26/2/2012

 

After the floodwaters subsided in the north Devon village hit by winter storms, and people began to make their way through the mud and debris of their streets, Stephen and Emily Bridgman stood in wellington boots on the sodden carpet of their saturated living room picking out ornaments and family photographs from the slime, and wondered aloud together about what on earth they should do now. [1]

After the ark came to rest on the top of Mount Ararat, and Noah and his family took their first steps outside, gingerly negotiating their way into the miry swamp beneath, the entire world looked grey to them, a grey, dripping, uninhabitable waste, and they wondered what God had in store for them next.

And after Jesus immersed himself in the depths of the Jordan river, and emerged soaked through, after the Spirit had descended like a dove on him, and a voice from heaven had spoken of him as his beloved Son, that same Spirit immediately drove Jesus out into the wilderness, where he stayed for forty days, tempted by Satan among the wild beasts. And there he worked out his purpose for the future.

After the waters, the wilderness…. After the deluge, the doubting. After the flood, the uncertainty. After the baptism, the time of testing.

Isn’t this the way that things go for us in the world, vulnerable as we are to forces greater than ourselves, lost in nature, struggling in faith? 

After the waters, the wilderness. The waters are always a greater force than us, whether the destructive waters of a terrible flood or the auspicious waters of a baptism of full immersion, and because of this our encounters with them inevitably change our lives, and we find ourselves driven onto new ground – a strange, difficult territory, a challenging terrain – feeling like we have been broken from a past to which we can never return, needing to find our feet again. 

After the waters, the wilderness. And so our gospel reading from Mark shows us the Son of Man, the Human One [2], experiencing the same forces which humankind has experienced from time immemorial. And thus being able to understand and stand beside those who have been exposed to those forces, broken from a past to which they can never return, needing to find their feet again. Jesus stands with the Stephen and Emily Bridgmans of this world, on the sodden carpet of their saturated living room; he stands with the thousands of people displaced by the floods in Pakistan in 2010 still living in refugee camps in Karachi. Jesus stands with people who have been swept away by other forces in the world: the refugees of Kabul displaced by war and currently trying to endure persistent snow and low temperatures in the temporary shelters they have built for protection; the newly-unemployed in Okehampton wondering if their industry will ever revive, if there will ever be work for them again, and in the meantime how they will feed their family; the person emerging from a hospital consultants having just been told that regrettably their condition is irretrievable, their situation terminal. After the waters, the wilderness: Jesus, the Son of Man, the Human One, understands, and stands with us there. [3]

The wilderness always has a context. The context for the refugees in Kabul and Karachi is poverty exacerbated by violent conflict; the context for the unemployed in Okehampton is  the global economic downturn; the context for Stephen and Emily Bridgman’s situation is national policies on flood protection, housing and insurance.

The context for Noah in the flood was a despairing God seeking to erase the evil from the world by taking desperate measures. But the context for Noah in the wilderness immediately after the flood was a magnanimous God returning with a new promise, a covenant with Noah’s people and their descendants after them, and with every living creature with them, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with them, a covenant ‘that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.’ (Genesis 9.9-11)

And as God made this promise to Noah and his family we can imagine his words melting  away the greyness to reveal the colours of the earth again, opening the skies to the rays of the sun and creating a rainbow which God would forever after regard as a sign of the promise he made. The context for Noah in the wilderness immediately after the flood was God returning with a new promise.

The context for Jesus in the wilderness was a region in conflict – the administration of imperial Rome, native kings struggling to hold onto their weakening power, a powerful high priesthood and clerical aristocracy, the shifting political alignments of Jewish renewal groups particularly the Pharisees and Essenes, and various strands of popular resistance and rebellion among the masses. [4]

It is said that ‘the wild beasts’ who troubled Jesus in the wilderness is a figure of speech which Mark used to describe all these secular forces of the volatile world in which Jesus lived. Like the wild beasts in Daniel and Revelation, these wild beasts in the wilderness were the powers of the kings of the world ruled by the Prince of the power of the air – Satan. [5] The context for Jesus in the wilderness was a world conflicted and broken by the forces of evil.

And Mark wants to show us this – that when Jesus presented himself to John and was immersed in the waters of the River Jordan, that full immersion symbolised a full and total abandonment of the influences of the world, of Satan and the wild beasts; and a full and total abandonment to the will and purposes of God. Jesus’ full immersion has been described as a ‘death experience of repentance’. In that total submersion Jesus ended his participation in the structures and values of society. In those waters his debts to that society were cancelled. ‘He became totally unobliged’. Renouncing the old world order Jesus emerged from the waters signalling the creation of a new humanity. [6] 

And after the waters, the wilderness; after the baptism, the time of testing when the forces of the old world order tried to win him back. But the effect of his baptism was absolute. Though the forces of the world continued to work their evil – with the arrest of John the Baptist, a prophet they needed to silence – Jesus emerged from the wilderness proclaiming the dawning of a whole new age: ‘The time is fulfilled,’ he said, ‘and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’ (Mark 1.15)

Our context is just like his. Ours is a world conflicted and broken by the forces of evil. And the waters and the wilderness are concepts we can grasp. The flood and the uncertainty, the deluge and the doubting: we have been through such things, we may be at the centre of such things right now. Others around us certainly are. And after the baptism, the time of testing: each of us knows that our Christian faith is a vulnerable thing, that the forces of the world, the forces of evil, weigh in on us to tempt us away, to lead us astray.

But because our context is just like his, then it is equally true to say that we are now living in the the time which is fulfilled; it is equally true to say that the time of the kingdom of God has come near; the time when it is possible to repent, and believe in the good news, to totally abandon the influences of the world, of Satan and the wild beasts, on us, to totally abandon ourselves to the will and purposes of God. Jesus invites us to a ‘death experience of repentance’. To end our participation in the structures and values of society, to cancel our debts to that society, to become became totally unobliged, to renounce the old world order and emerge from the waters with Jesus, made into a new humanity. [6] 

This might sound like extreme language, too extreme to relate to in our everyday lives. Apocalyptic language out of touch with our present-day realities. But it isn’t. It is purely and simply the language of Lent. It expresses precisely what is at the heart of this season of penitence: the possibility of our emerging from our wilderness no longer obliged to follow the ways of the old world, but forgiven and liberated into the ways of the kingdom of God.

The language of Lent reminds us that we are driven by forces greater than us. Mark’s gospel presents this as an open contest between the ruler of the powers of the world – Satan, and the Spirit of God. Our choice is to open ourselves up to the force of either Satan or the spirit. Mark shows us how Jesus exercised his choice, when he tells us that, after his baptism, ‘the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.’

Lent challenges us to be driven in this way. It invokes in us a willingness to be driven by the Spirit: to the waters, and then the wilderness. And our world is full of believers who have immersed themselves willingly in the waters of faith, and while remaining citizens of the old world and subject to its structures, have shown themselves longer obliged to follow the ways of that world, but who, forgiven, now follow the ways of the kingdom of God in their life and work. We might include in their number those Christian small business people striving in hard times to find new patterns of employment and training for their workers, those trying to help their newly-unemployed neighbours practically and with encouragement and guidance, those who befriend and counsel the terminally ill, those offering themselves wholeheartedly to work with relief agencies in the refugee sites of Pakistan and Afghanistan, those working in housing departments or insurance companies doing all they can to ease the distress of flood victims, in the spirit of God’s generous promise to Noah.

After the waters, the wilderness… Lent is a time for you and me to fully immerse ourselves  in the ways of the kingdom of God, it is an invitation to a ‘death experience of repentance’ which releases us from our deathly obligations to the world and into the life-giving obligations involved in following our God. If we accept this invitation then we will still walk in this world, still work in this world, but the God of covenant, and Jesus the Human One who brings good news, will walk and work with us – and the kingdom of God will grow ever stronger, come ever nearer.

 

Notes

[1] I have invented this couple but their story resonates with many who have been in that very situation in the UK in recent times see eg, 2009 Great Britain and Ireland floods in Wikipedia.

[2] The influence of Ched Myers in this sermon is evident here, in the use of the term ‘Human One’. See Myers, Binding the Strong Man, p.37

[3] H.M. Naqvi, Scenes from a Karachi refugee camp,www.globalpost.com, August 23, 2010; Afghan refugees face icy chill, Aljazeera, 8 Feb 2012; Tom French, Praise for town that refuses to give up, Okehampton Times, 1 February 2012

[4] Myers, p.54

[5] Myers, p.130

[6] H. Waetjen quoted in Myers, p.129

 

Lydford (Joint Benefice) Holy Communion with the imposition of ashes, 22/2/2012

2 Corinthians 5.20-6.10, Matthew 6.1-6,16-21

 

There is power in penitence.

But at the start of Lent, our season of self-reflection, our time to place ourselves in a wilderness of wondering about our salvation and its shape, our time of special openness to the spirit of God for judgement, healing, and direction, at the start of Lent let us not make mistakes about the sort of power which is available to us in penitence.

Jesus is clear in the words which Matthew recorded: ‘don’t be like the hypocrites’ – don’t make the mistake of religious people from time immemorial and regard a time of self-imposed austerity as a sign, in itself, of salvation. Be austere, if that helps your Lenten reflections. Make extra space by denying yourself a luxury or two, or by getting out of bed earlier for extra prayer, or by reading a difficult but ultimately rewarding theological or devotional book. Of course there is a power in doing these sort of things. That’s why well-intentioned Christians encourage others to do them; that’s why it’s good, for instance, to gather in a group for a Lent course, making in our lives a special time of sharing and learning together.

But don’t think that these activities in themselves will reward you. The power is not in doing these sort of things.

It is not the act of austerity, to show your penitence, which connects you to God. No, the power in penitence has a simpler and more fundamental source. It is the simple act of turning towards God that releases the power of Lent to you, that opens the healing, reconciling power of God to you.

It is the simple act of turning. Turning away from that space in your heart and head which is concerned with what others think of you, what they see in you, what they expect of you, which causes you to behave accordingly. 

The power in penitence is in the simple act of turning towards the Other in your life – the One whose only desire for you is to receive his love; the One ‘who for our sake was made to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.’ (2 Cor 5.21)

The power in penitence is in the simple act of turning towards that space in your heart and head which is concerned with what God thinks of you, what he sees in you, what he expects of you, that space which is simply and solely concerned with God.

Turning to the space where God is – or as St Paul entreated the Corinthian believers: ‘Be reconciled to God’. 

Now we practicing believers find this hard sometimes. Because we misplace the source of our power in all the activities in which we involve ourselves. Because these activities are the way we deal with how we think others think of us, what they see in us, expect of us.

And sympathetic, open-minded unbelievers often find it hard to turn towards God because they also are deeply concerned with how they think others think of them, see them, what they expect of them. And turning away from these concerns is very hard indeed. Their power holds and constrains us all.

The T. S. Eliot poem Ash-Wednesday begins with three lines which seem to express this sense of trappedness, constraint, the inability to change perspective:

Because I do not hope to turn again 

Because I do not hope 

Because I do not hope to turn

And later in the poem Eliot seems to underline this as he writes,

I renounce the blessed face 

And renounce the voice 

Because I cannot hope to turn again

Eliot speaks for all who want to find hope in life but can’t; for all who want to find faith but don’t know where to look; for all who want to be reconciled to God but don’t know how to turn from those concerns which entrap them. Lent belongs to such as these. 

Lent isn’t for the religious people who think they know precisely what to do to get right with God. Jesus makes this clear when he says,

‘When you fast, do not look sombre as the hypocrites do, for they disfigure their faces to show men they are fasting. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full.’ (Matthew 6.16)

I think those are among the scariest words in the gospels: they have already received their reward, these people who know what they need to be seen to be doing. Their hearts are  turned towards the expectations and desires of others. They’re happy now, God says; leave them to it – there’s nothing else for them from me. But Eliot writes,

Because I do not hope to turn 

Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope 

I no longer strive to strive towards such things

Eliot is a man in tune with Lent, for Lent isn’t for those whose lives are driven by desires to do what the next person expects, to have what the next person has. Lent is for those who reject these desires in the hope of finding the Other, and who can live with the irony of saying, Because I cannot hope to turn again, which is actually an expression that hope exists. 

Eliot published Ash-Wednesday in 1930, four years after his conversion to Anglicanism. And because of this we might read his opening line another way.

Because I do not hope to turn again 

 Eliot has turned to God, in his conversion. He does not hope to turn again: he does not hope to turn away from God again. He wants to continue to receive the power in penitence by continuing in the simple repeated act of turning towards the One ‘who for our sake was made to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.’ (2 Cor 5.21)

Although at times we do not dare to hope, Christianity offers us hope anyway. The penitential season of Lent encourages us to turn to face ourselves honestly, and most of all to turn and face God and to find him in our hearts, waiting to reward us with his love, waiting to redeem us. 

The power in penitence. It’s not in the doing of things, it’s in the attitude of turning. As Eliot’s poem puts it,  

Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood 

Teach us to care and not to care 

Teach us to sit still 

… 

Our peace in His will 

Mountaintop experiences are sometimes a mystery to us. I can’t explain what really happened on the day that two friends and I were caught in a white-out on a peak in Snowdonia, where we couldn’t see our way any more because all there was before us was snow – in the sky, in the air, on the ground – we were surrounded by white, in the blizzard our footsteps had disappeared, and we knew that whichever way we headed we were in danger of stepping off an edge into a drop of hundreds of feet. Our minds play tricks with us now as we recall the moment that a man emerged from nowhere, and greeted us as we stood stranded and stricken there in the white-out, an old man, ill-equipped for a winter mountain climb with a string bag hanging from his shoulders. Was he real? He was real enough to help us overcome our fears that day. Did that incident actually happen? All we know is that he guided us down into safety.

– from my talk today, On mountaintop experiences (which also features a reworking of my M62 Ainley Top poem Junction 24: thanks for the high places in Walking the M62, and an extract from Martin Luther King's last speech). All to do with The Transfiguration, of course.

Lydford Parish and Community Magazine

March 2012

 

‘Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?’. Joni Mitchell’s lyrics have become an iconic lament for the loss of the beautiful, valued things in our environment, the displacement of meaningful infrastructure: ‘They paved paradise and put up a parking lot’. It was penned after the singer opened a hotel window in Hawaii and contrasted the distant mountain view with the more immediate ‘parking lot as far as the eye could see … it broke my heart… this blight on paradise’.

‘You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone’ has been echoed in countless villages – I’ve heard it said here in Lydford – of the loss of farms with their families, of local shops, pubs and post offices: places of meeting and exchange. The lament sounds lame in retrospect – if only we had appreciated them more at the time, if only we’d fought harder to keep these places alive then we wouldn’t be without them now – but it nevertheless conveys a deep truth: of how much we deeply value and are influenced by such places. 

The importance of these places to us is not in their physical presence alone – some farms or shop buildings might have looked quite ugly, for instance – but in the memories which they hold, deep evocations of human interaction and interchange. When Liverpool City Council in the 1970s voted to concrete in the cellars of The Cavern Club and build a car park on top, those protesting were not bewailing the loss of the brickwork: they were driven by a keen appreciation of a community developed through the networks of relationships around the city’s music scene, the energies of human exchange in which The Cavern was catalytic. 

And so, at a deeper level, ‘You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone’ is really about people and our affect on each other, in the places where we ‘live and move and have our being’. I’ve been thinking about this in relation to the people who we have lost recently in our community, whose lives we have gathered to give thanks for at the crematorium or in the old church building, whose presence has enriched Lydford over the years.

In our villages the church is one of the few structures to survive, in which we can gather to cherish our memories and cradle our responses to the lives we recall with thanksgiving. And though the Church of England is currently in a vulnerable position  (you can read an outline of our delicate financial position elsewhere in these pages this month; I’m keenly aware of the tensions involved in being just one-fifth of a vicar to a parish which has enjoyed generous clergy provision in the past), nevertheless here continues a place in which we are able to contemplate together that ‘You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone’, and a place where ‘what you’ve got’ can be re-energised, re-celebrated. 

Mothering Sunday offers such a possibility. Some people approach this day with sadness because it brings to the surface memories of their deepest relationship, now passed and much missed, or in some cases because of failed relationships or a lack of mothering in their lives. But even these will appreciate the converse meaning of the occasion – the Mothering Sunday service is a time and place in which to gather in celebration of mothering, of those who have nurtured us, who continue to sustain us and who give us confidence for the future. 

Mothering Sunday in church unites generations, and those we lament are present with those we currently hold dear, and the special ‘what we’ve got’ together is the source of our thanksgiving. This year Lydford’s newly-formed after-school club will feature strongly in the church occasion (11.00 on 18 March), reminding us that in this place our institutions do continue to provide places of meeting and exchange for our young people to develop another generation’s appreciation of family, friendship and community, and begin to reinvent that for themselves, with the help and encouragement of those who nurture them.

As Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi has helped energise countless environmental initiatives since it first made its impact back in 1970, as the backlash from the concreting-over of The Cavern carried the germs of Liverpool’s reinvention as a tourist city, so too in a modest-looking but equally valid way do our gatherings in church, school, pub, village hall and sports pavilion offer possibilities and potential for the future. We needn’t wait ‘till they’ve gone’ to appreciate ‘what we’ve got’ here; in fond memorial of those who have blessed Lydford with their presence in the past, and with a keen desire to assist our young people to enjoy a good future here, let’s celebrate these places now, let’s get involved in keeping them going and growing.

2 Kings 2.1-12, 2 Corinthians 4.3-6, Mark 9.2-9

Bratton, Sourton, Sunday Next before Lent, 19/2/2012

 

We all know something about the mountaintop experience. 

Most of us at some time have had the sensation of standing at a  peak we’ve just climbed, thighs aching, lungs pumping, exhilarated and taking in the wonderful panoramic view which has opened up before our eyes.

And we give thanks for the high places: where it is possible to take a long view of the temporarily tiny towns, fields and farms which spread beneath our feet.

The view from the high places reduces to scratches and smudges on a vast canvas all those monuments to human folly we can see – the massive mansions ennobling their donors, the failed industrial sites, the old private estate churches deifying their buried benefactors.

In the mountaintop experience the geography of the roads and railways, the rivers and coastlines, the clusters of homes, villages and cities, all connects, resonates and reveals, and even the scars on the landscape – old quarries, abandoned works, stacked storage units and tarmacked roads ripping through the country –  take on shape, pattern, shade and colour.

We are usually thankful for the the high places when we reach them, for the mountaintop experiences they give us, which stop us in our steps, give cause for reflection, permit us to turn our back for a while on the trivialities and irritations and anxieties of the everyday, and give us renewed energy to face them on our return; to face the grass we tread beneath  our feet, to face ourselves. [1]

We might say, then, that mountaintop experiences are about the gaining of perspective, that on the mountaintop we see things in a new way. If we are inclined to such language we might say that the mountaintop gives us a God’s-eye view of the world to which we shall return. And that view lifts our spirits, prepares our hearts, guides our thoughts for the inevitable come-down, the descent from the mountain.

This is even true when our mountaintop experience is not such a healthy one. Those involved in accidents at altitude, those returning from a mountain rescue scene, will doubtlessly be altered by the situation they’ve been involved in. And the Air Ambulance operators and rescue volunteers will have perspectives on life profoundly formed by all they have seen up there, and brought back down to earth with them.

Mountaintop experiences might be especially meaningful when they come in the midst of difficulties or conflicts in our lives. 

Take Moses, for example. In anger, Moses had broken the two tablets of stone containing the commandments because when he brought them down from the mountain he found his people had turned their back on God. But out of that conflict God told him to return to the top of that mountain carrying two replacement stones; and on Mount Sinai the second time God renewed his covenant with Moses’ people, and coming down again from that mountaintop with the tablets of the covenant in his hand, the skin of Moses’ face shone because he had been talking with God. [2]

And in fear, Elijah, a fugitive on the run from enemies whose prophets he had condemned to death because they refused to worship Israel’s God, hid in a mountaintop cave and met God on that mountain, and coming down from that mountain Elijah’s face was still raw with the the storms and the earthquakes and the fire which had passed him by up there, and he returned to the people with confidence and renewed purpose in the ways of his God. [3]

Mountaintop experiences are sometimes a mystery to us. I can’t explain what really happened on the day that two friends and I were caught in a white-out on a peak in Snowdonia, where we couldn’t see our way any more because all there was before us was snow – in the sky, in the air, on the ground – we were surrounded by white, in the blizzard our footsteps had disappeared, and we knew that whichever way we headed we were in danger of stepping off an edge into a drop of hundreds of feet. Our minds play tricks with us now as we recall the moment that a man emerged from nowhere, and greeted us as we stood stranded and stricken there in the white-out, an old man, ill-equipped for a winter mountain climb with a string bag hanging from his shoulders. Was he real? He was real enough to help us overcome our fears that day. Did that incident actually happen? All we know is that he guided us down into safety.

And maybe it was Jesus playing tricks with the disciples, or the disciples’ minds playing tricks with them, that day when he took Peter, James and John up a high mountain, by themselves. Was that really Jesus standing there with Moses and Elijah on each side, his clothes suddenly dazzling white? And when the cloud descended around the terrified group, whose was that voice they heard saying, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!’?

Was this real to the disciples? It was real enough to help them understand more about Jesus that day. Did it actually happen? All they knew was what the voice of God directed them to do: to listen to him. 

Just before the disciples went up the mountain Jesus had begun to teach them that the Son of Man would undergo great suffering, that he would be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. As Mark records,

He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.’ (Mark 8.34)

And as the disciples returned from the mountain Jesus ordered them not to tell anyone about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.

Things had taken a significant turn for the disciples. Their mountaintop experience gave them a new perspective on Jesus, on the mountaintop they saw him in a new way. The  God’s-eye view of the world to which they returned contained something new – they went up the mountain having heard that there would soon be a cross and a death; they came down from the mountain now understanding that there would also be a resurrection.

This is a major turn in Mark’s gospel; and it is a major turn in the story of the world. It makes possible for the first time the opening up of a new perspective – an eternal perspective, the belief that here, now, and for eternity, for those who embrace it, there will be a resurrection.

This impacts tangibly, radically, in the lives of those who embrace it. One of the greatest public Christians of the twentieth century, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, took on a mission inspired by the covenantal laws of Moses in which God commands each to respect and care for their neighbour regardless of their differences, developed a style of speaking inspired by the prophetic witness and monumental preaching of Elijah, and most of all, lived out a hope inspired by the new perspective of the kingdom of God as taught by Jesus, and demonstrated by Jesus in all his glory – the perspective of the possibility of new life springing from old, the perspective of resurrection.

As we know King aroused the conscience of his nation, and the campaigns he led eventually brought into being the Civil Rights Bill giving equality to black people in that previously racially-divided land. But we know that his campaigning came at a price; everywhere he went he travelled under threat of death. 

On April 3rd 1968, at a church in Memphis, Tennessee, King spoke of these death threats and of his faith in the resurrection, and of how that faith impacts in the here-and-now, and in what turned out to be his final speech he famously said, 

Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind.

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land! [4]

This major turn in Mark’s gospel; this major turn in the story of the world; this opening up of a new perspective – the belief that here, now, and for eternity, for those who embrace it, there will be a resurrection: is this a major turn in our lives? Can we embrace the perspective which Peter, James and John embraced as they came back down to earth with Jesus that day?

Most mountaintop experiences take a while to process in our hearts and minds; if they are to achieve significance and depth in our lives then that process of reflection is essential. And so Peter, James and John kept the matter to themselves, as directed by Jesus, questioning what this rising from the dead might mean.

We might come to worship expecting a mountaintop experience, for here in this place we draw close to God, here we listen to his voice speaking new words into our experience, here in the physicality of communion our spirits are touched and changed. We expect to leave our place of worship with our perspective altered, to go back down to earth with Christ at our side directing us forward, changing the way we see and do things, changing the way we perceive and behave towards others.

So as Peter, James and John left the mountain of Transfiguration keeping the matter to themselves, but questioning what this rising from the dead might mean, we might leave this place prepared to enter Lent questioning what this rising from the dead might mean for us too. 

 

Notes

[1] ‘High places’ passage based on my poem Junction 24: thanks for the high places in Walking the M62. 

[2] See Exodus 32-34

[3] See 1 Kings 19

[4] Martin Luther King, Jr, I’ve been to the mountaintop, Mason Temple (Church of God in Christ Headquarters), Memphis, Tennessee, April 3rd 1968.

 

We are with the gospel of Mark for quite some time now. Which means that the Ched Myers season begins – and what a great inspiration Binding the Strong Man will be. Mark 1 – The slow unveiling of the man of mystery, today's offering.

Sourton, Bratton Clovelly and Germansweek, 5/2/2012

Mark 1.29-39

 Charles Dickens once wrote of ‘A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other’. We are mysteries to each other. You have to struggle to reflect on that statement in today’s world of certainty, where everything and everyone is packaged and commodified – where, for instance, the mystery of love between two people is reduced to the card-flowers-meal formula presented to us by the commercial Valentines Day. We all know the reality: that what makes a loving relationship is far more complex and difficult to grasp. Love can’t be bought from Clinton’s. Love is an ongoing exploration in the profound secrets and mysteries between us.

‘Every human creature is a profound secret and mystery to every other.’ Today we begin a season of adventures in the Gospel of Mark. And in Mark’s gospel Jesus is first portrayed as a man of mystery. He seemed to want to make a secret of himself. Every time Jesus cast out a demon or otherwise healed someone, he told them not to tell anyone else what he’d done. ‘Be silent!’ he would say. This wound up the religious people who thought they had God boxed off, packaged and commodified, and wanted to categorise and contain Jesus. And this frustrated his followers who wanted to get more people on the road with him. 

Mark’s Jesus is a man of mystery. This is an embarrassment to Jesus’ evangelically minded followers. His call to secrecy confounds our belief in Christianity as a missionary religion.  In Mark’s gospel it is not obvious who Jesus is. But if we are honest then we might gladly admit that it is not obvious who Jesus is to us, either – we who, two thousand years later, try to walk alongside this wandering exorcist of Galilee. There is hiddenness about the Son of Man, this strange figure who seeks to escape the crowds, who speaks of the coming reign of God as a secret, who urges silence on a demon, because he knows who Jesus is, as later he urges silence on the disciples, because they don’t yet know who Jesus is. 

But his hiddenness makes Jesus real to us – it makes him fully human. For if God is truly one of us and not merely stealing our clothes, then it makes sense that we won’t immediately know who he is; he will take time and care to disclose himself fully. It will take us time to begin to understand him. The dialogue between Jesus, the demons and the disciples in today’s reading helps us begin to understand.

In Mark’s Gospel we face an unholy trinity, the ugly threesome of demons, disease, and death. In his breathtaking narrative, moving rapidly from place to place, incident to incident, over and over again Mark shows us Jesus confronting and overcoming each of them in turn. Demons, disease, and death. These terrible triplets are all children of one father, and the scriptures make clear how Jesus relates to them all: ‘The Son of God was revealed for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil’ (1 John 3.8). 

We get told that we live in a secular, unspiritual world world these days, but I wonder about that. People still have great fear of the demonic, and whether here in rural West Devon, or in the past in parishes on council estates or posh suburbs, from time to time I have been asked to come and say prayers in a house where the people are sure that the spirits are up to no good. Whether or not demons exist, it is my duty to act on other people’s assumptions that they just might. 

People also see demons at work in the systems of the world – in what scripture calls the principalities and powers. Some first century Jews and Christians saw in the Roman Empire a demonic spirituality which they called Satan, or the ‘Dragon’ of Revelation 12, and encountered this spirit in the actual institutional forms of Roman life: legions, governors, crucifixions, taxations, the sacred emblems and standards of Rome, and these became the ‘beast’ of Revelation 13. Likewise, many contemporary believers see the same sort of spirituality and structures at work in the empires of our times: the American Empire, the Chinese Empire, the multinational media empire, for instance. [2]

But Mark isn’t primarily interested in questions of who believes in demons, or why. Mark is interested in who believes in Jesus, and why. Today’s reading is not concerned with who knows what demons are. It’s about who knows who Jesus is. And Mark’s answer might surprise us. Because it’s the demons who know who Jesus is. It’s the disciples who do not.

Earlier in this chapter the first person in Mark’s gospel to confess Christ as Lord is not Peter at Caesarea Philippi, but a demon – an ugly thing inside a man, a malign thing that had made its home in a poor soul in Capernaum. The demoniac doesn’t know what’s got into him. But ‘what’s got into him’ – the demon – knows that it has met its match. He knows who Jesus is. If Jesus is a man of mystery the demon is about to blow his cover and reveal all.

‘I know who you are, the holy one of God,’ the demon screams, reminding us of that verse in James (2.19): ‘The devils also believe and tremble’.  The demon knows who Jesus is. The man of mystery isn’t happy to have this demon shouting about him like that. ‘Be silent’, Jesus says. 

‘Be silent’ is a very strong demand indeed. Literally, Jesus is saying that the man’s mouth should be muzzled. In Mark, it’s not just the demons who are told to shut up. Jesus says this over and over again. People who are miraculously cured are repeatedly told to keep quiet about who Jesus is and what he is doing. And not in these exact words, but by his reaction to them, Jesus also silences his disciples:

In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed. And Simon and his companions hunted for him. When they found him, they said to him, ‘Everyone is searching for you.’ He answered, ‘Let us go on to the neighbouring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.’ (Mark 1.35-38)

The disciples wanted Jesus to meet up again with the masses who had followed him from Capernaum looking for exorcism and healing. But Jesus sidelined their requests and told them they must move on, for his chief concern was not the exorcism and healing. His chief concern was proclaiming the message.

So whereas the demon punctured the mystery of Jesus by announcing, ‘I know who you are, the holy one of God,’ Peter and his companions couldn’t see past the exorcism and healing that Jesus was doing. They hadn’t yet got the message that Jesus was proclaiming.

It was the demons who recognised that Jesus wasn’t just another exorcist, wasn’t just another healer: after all, there were plenty of exorcists and healers already around Galilee in those days. It was the demons who recognised that Jesus, through his exorcism and healing, but more than that through his message, was beginning to bring in a new rule, a new kingdom, a new way of being in the world: the way of the holy one of God, a way of opposition to the demonic ways of empire which dominated the lives of the people who massed towards Jesus outside Capernaum. It was the demons who first got the message that Jesus was proclaiming. The disciples still had it all to learn.

The purpose of evangelism is not to dispel the mystery surrounding the figure of Jesus, not to provide set answers, but to provoke questions. When Jesus cast out the demon people responded not by saying, ‘So now we know,’ but by asking, ‘What is this?’, ‘Who is this?’ 

Our journey through Mark’s gospel will provoke such questions in us. It will be an exciting ride. For Mark sees the message which Jesus proclaimed signified in every single thing Jesus did, and in every place he went – and Mark shows the message which Jesus proclaimed consistently challenging and upsetting the prevailing ways of empire. 

Today’s reading is an example of this, as Jesus performs a healing on the Sabbath, breaking the oppressive code of the religious authorities, challenging the spirit of empire. But he does so in the home of the sick woman, he does so in other words in private, so as to avoid notice. 

In the home of Peter’s mother-in-law, this message is quietly proclaimed: the kingdom of God is coming, is slowly starting to show itself. The demons felt the power of this coming kingdom, and named it; it remained a mystery to the disciples at the time. But this is a mystery we can celebrate and give thanks for, and as we spend more time with Mark in church – and perhaps also at home – in these coming weeks, we will watch as his gospel slowly unveils the Son of Man as the Holy One of God, and we will see what effect that has on his disciples, on the crowds, on the forces of empire, and we will experience the effect it has on us as we respond to all that he reveals.

Notes 

 [1] Drawing on sermon notes by John Pridmore in the Church Times, 20 January 2006, and Mark 1 – Meeting Demons, a sermon preached at the Good Shepherd, Liverpool, on 29/1/2006.

[2] See Walter Wink, The Powers Trilogy [summarised here], and Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man.