Sunday 25th January, 2009 Third Sunday after Epiphany
Sentence
The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the Gospel
Mark 1:15
Collect
Bountiful God, through Your Son You have called us to repent of our sins to believe in the good news, and to celebrate the coming of Your Kingdom; teach us to hear the call to discipleship, and forsaking the old ways, to proclaim and live the gospel of new life to a broken world, through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen
OLD TESTAMENT LESSON Jonah 3: 1- 10
A second time the word of the Lord came to Jonah: "Go to the great city of Nineveh; go and denounce it in the words I give you.' Jonah obeyed and went at once to Nineveh. It was a vast city, three days' journey across, and Jonah began by going a day's journey into it. Then he proclaimed: "In forty days Nineveh will be overthrown!'
The people of Nineveh took to heart this warning from God; they declared a public fast, and high and low alike put on sackcloth. When the news reached the king of Nineveh he rose from his throne, laid aside his robes of state, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. He had this proclamation made in Nineveh: "By decree of the king and his nobles, neither man nor beast is to touch any food; neither herd nor flock may eat or drink. Every person and every animal is to be covered with sackcloth. Let all pray with fervour to God, and let them abandon their wicked ways and the injustice they practise. It may be that God will relent and turn from his fierce anger: and so we shall not perish.'
When God saw what they did and how they gave up their wicked ways, he relented and did not inflict on them the punishment he had threatened.
PSALM 62: 5 – 12
Nevertheless, my soul, wait in silence for God: for from Him comes my hope
He only is my rock and my salvation: my strong tower so that I shall not be moved
In God is my deliverance and my glory: God is my strong rock and my shelter.
Trust in Him at all times, O my people: pour out your hearts before Him for God is our refuge
The children of Adam are but breath, the children of earth are a lie: place them in the scales and they fly upward, they are as light as air.
Put no trust in extortion, do not grow worthless by robbery: if riches increase, set not your heart upon them
God has spoken once, twice I have heard Him say: that power belongs to God
That to the Lord belongs a constant goodness: for You reward each one of us according to our works
EPISTLE 1 Corinthians 7: 29 – 31
What I mean, my friends, is this: the time we live in will not last long. While it lasts, married men should be as if they had no wives; mourners should be as if they had nothing to grieve them, the joyful as if they did not rejoice; those who buy should be as if they possessed nothing, and those who use the world's wealth as if they did not have full use of it. For the world as we know it is passing away.
GOSPEL Mark 1: 14 – 20
After John had been arrested, Jesus came into Galilee proclaiming the gospel of God: "The time has arrived; the kingdom of God is upon you. Repent, and believe the gospel.' Jesus was walking by the Sea of Galilee when he saw Simon and his brother Andrew at work with casting-nets in the lake; for they were fishermen. Jesus said to them, "Come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” At once they left their nets and followed him. Going a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John in a boat mending their nets. At once he called them; and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men and followed him. They came to Capernaum, and on the Sabbath he went to the synagogue and began to teach.
NOTES ON THE READINGS
Jonah
One of the ways many Christians seem to have of avoiding the real message of Jonah is to assume that this book is about miracles. That business about the fish, in fact the entire story, is not reality, but metaphor. It is about the rather too normal human reaction against evangelism, and in particular against rather too normal human hang-ups. The fish business is just a bit of embroidery on a tale to get the reader in.
Jews were, traditionally, very isolationist. They were God’s Chosen and nobody else really mattered in the Divine scheme of things – or so they thought. In order to shake them out of their lethargy, this (hypothetical) story was told to get the so-and-sos thinking. Jonah, deciding that his call to preach to Nineveh was all a bit too much, fled in the opposite direction to avoid being obedient. However, when Jonah’s hand was forced, and he did that preaching, and his preaching was effective, he spat the dummy big time, as young people would put it these days.
Anyhow. So the story goes, the Ninevites repented, - or to put it in general terms, saw the truth of what was being conveyed to them, and changed their ways. Once again, this epiphany thing came to Ninevites through the ministry of dear old grumpy Jonah. God always works through ordinary humans, sometimes even when they are disobedient!!!!!! And look who had to do a lot of growing up!
Psalm
The more I see and read of the Psalms, the more my understanding of the direction of these musings deepen, not in any esoteric, religious sense, but very much in terms of ordinary living and the best way to operate. On the surface, we seem to have the moanings of an inadequate person who can only survive by leaning on God. While there may be smidgin of truth in this, the force of the observations are rather more down-to-earth.
As the Psalmist looked at life, he was aware, clearly, of the inability or unwillingness of mere humans to operate with any sort of integrity. He has an interesting comment in verse 5 – in a play on words not evident in English. Adam is humanity, and adamah is the environment (the dust) from which adam comes and to which adam goes. And even adam’s breath is given, that spirit (pneuma, ruarch) given by God to humanity. In other words, there is a terrible brevity and impermanence about adam, but that is balanced by the permanency of God. It is that for which the Psalmist is most grateful, because that permanence of God is guarantee of the permanence of the eternal values of justice, integrity and ‘constant goodness.’ It is a gratitude that we of this current age need to recognize, value and uphold.
Epistle
When Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, he, like everyone else, thought that the Parousia, the Second Coming, was really quite imminent. Because of that, there was a sense of urgency in living the life of faith in a world that didn’t. It was a matter of witness to those around that there was a viable alternative to self-centred and self-obsessive living.
While modern Christians (or the greater number of them) understand the Parousia in less immediate terms, the need to live the life of faith is increasingly necessary, especially as the world of (Western culture at least) becomes increasingly self-focussed.
Gospel
There is something of a two-edged sword in this introduction to Mark’s Gospel. While he makes sure the emphasis is on repent, there is also the immediate focus on Jesus’ call to ordinary humans to be involved in this Gospel of changing life and living.
The Kingdom of God is not something mysterious or esoteric. It is simply the situation where the rule or reign of God becomes more visible and tangible where people live in obedience to the Divine will. This is not essentially a religious matter – it is a matter of justice, integrity, compassion and love. The Kingdom is present wherever such attributes are found and expressed, And if you dare to see it, this can be by those who profess unbelief, when they accept the eternal values mentioned above.
NOTES FOR A SERMON
I remember when I first arrived at a new parish many years ago, being in a situation where families had lived for generations, and had kept their little Church going for, then, over a hundred years. However, one of the things that surprised me was that the younger generation of young parents seemed to have no real idea of why they were part of the show. I was really quite surprised at what was really profound ignorance about the Faith, until it became clear that their parents were rather vague about things, too. That was at the time when Church and Faith were seen as quite intangible, and somehow dissociated from real and ordinary life. The Christian’s job was to believe, but no one had apparently told them what to believe. It was all so ephemeral. That is not what any Faith is about. However, that vague and amorphous perception remains. And it may take a long time for that to disappear.
Epiphany: it is reminding us of the need to be lights in a dark place, to be reaching out to those who are unaware of why Church and faith exist, and who are concerned increasingly at ‘the way things are going.’ It is in that direction that we need to be following the paths of the Magi, of getting the clear picture of the faith and of being able to share what we know – growing in understanding God-in-Christ, and growing in the capacity to share this significantly with people around about us. In other words, Epiphany is not just something that we celebrate because it happened ‘back there,’ but to continue the process in our own day and time.
For many, many decades, the Church has not seen the need to share the Faith. Both the Church, and people in it, saw the faith as something very personal and private, very intangible. So much was this so, that any talk about believing was regarded as quite outside the bounds of propriety. Perhaps this is why the Jonah story was reduced to the miraculous. All about the fish. And neither you nor I are capable of miracle. But Jonah was precisely what the Church needed – the challenging tale of a people of God who did all in their power to avoid the Divine challenge to share faith and experience. That old book and its tale must have got up the nose of contented and powerful men in Israel – they must have perceived that it was aimed against them. And no one likes snide attempts as getting them to look and think wider than their comfort zone.
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