Sermon: Saint Bartholomew

S.MARK 9.30

He did not want anyone to know it.

 What a surprising thing ! Jesus was passing through Galilee with his disciples. There was great scope for preaching and healing. There were many opportunities to make himself better known. But he did not want anyone to know he was there. He was travelling incognito. And if we read the Gospel of Mark carefully, we shall see that this was not the only time. Many books have been written about the secrecy of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark - all those times when he heals someone and then commands them, Do not say a word about this to anybody.

We find this peculiar because it goes right against the advice we are given today, not only in the Church but in all areas of life. Anyone will tell you that if you want to be successful you have to advertise. If you want people to come to the Show or the Festival or to the Summer Fair or the Organ Recitals, you have to produce posters, and try to get your events featured in the newspapers and on radio and television. Yet Jesus did none of that. He avoided all kinds of advertisement. Why ? There are differing views. That is why there have been so many books. But the most likely explanation is, that he thought publicity would misrepresent or falsify the message he came to bring. He thought he would be represented as a revolutionary leader in a worldly sense, a kind of Osama Bin Laden figure, with a message of violence rather than of peace and love. And that was why he insisted on always speaking and acting for himself, person to person, as he met people, rather than relying on his reputation and on a publicity machine.

Then something else peculiar happens. His disciples are arguing among themselves as to which of them is the greatest. Nothing heavy. No fighting, just a friendly argument. But Jesus soon puts a stop to it. God's values are the opposite of human values, he says. Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.

This again is the reverse of what we are always told. When you apply for a job you are asked to provide a statement as to why you deserve the job more than any other applicant does. In other words, why you are the greatest. You have to beef up your CV and then present yourself at the interview bursting with confidence and showing a killer instinct that will see off all your competitors. The days are well over when people were drawn out of obscurity and appointed to positions for which they were too humble even to apply, but they got the job and did it well because someone else had confidence in them. Today you must have total confidence and belief in yourself or you will get nowhere. And Jesus says, Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.

Jesus then does something else which may not seem particularly strange to us but would have been mind blowing to people of his generation. He took notice of a child.  He took a little child and put it among them ; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me. In those days children were of no account at all. Like women, they were reckoned among a man's possessions. Notice how the writer describes the child as "it". We do not even know whether the child was a boy or a girl.

 Women, children, people with any kind of disability too - all of these were considered too low and insignificant to bother with. But Jesus not only took notice of the child, but suggested that the child was like him, like God, so that when they took the trouble to welcome children, and by implication, women, and the disabled, they were welcoming him and honouring God himself.

 We see in these few verses a pattern of what the Church of the future may look like. It need not be a Church which has turned its back on the good things of the past. The Church should be proud of its traditions of service and worship and culture, maintain them and pass them on enhanced to the next generation. In some ways the organ is a parable of what the Church should be. What were our options when the old organ became useless ? We could have struggled on with it and put up with it continually breaking down. We could have replaced it with a brand new electronic instrument. In fact we did neither of these. We purchased a historic organ, retained all that was good in it, and built a new organ around it. And so it is with the Church. We do not need to replace the life and worship of our Church with new forms which are harsh and alien. But we cannot just blunder on pretending that we are still in the 1950's or even the 1850's. There has to be change, there has to be renewal, growing in a healthy way around those venerable traditions which make the Church what it is.

S.Mark has set out for us today what shape that renewal needs to take. There will be less emphasis on publicity, blowing our own trumpet, and more on quietly and generously serving our communities and setting a good example in our personal lives. Less ambition and self promotion, especially among the clergy, and more care for other people, inside and outside the Church. And may there always be a place in the Church for those whom no-one else will take notice of, those no-one will trust, those no-one will employ, because when we welcome them we are welcoming Jesus Christ himself.