Wherever Jesus went. the people sought him. It asks questions of us: do we seek Jesus where he is? Or do we expect Jesus come to where we are? Of course, we would claim that we attempt the former, but, if you are like me, it’s more like that we prefer the idea of Jesus being with us where we are, where we feel comfortable.

The place where I feel comfortable is in the sort of church described by poet John Betjeman who wrote the following lines in aid of a public subscription for Saint Katherine’s Church at Chiselhampton in Oxfordshire:

Across the wet November night
The church is bright with candlelight
And waiting Evensong.
A single bell with plaintive strokes
Pleads louder than the stirring oaks
The leafless lanes along.

It calls the choirboys from their tea
And villagers, the two or three,
Damp down the kitchen fire,
Let out the cat, and up the lane
Go paddling through the gentle rain
Of misty Oxfordshire.

The pictures that Betjeman brings to mind are of a world that is constant, a world where the old certainties remain, a world where the country priest celebrates the liturgy in honour of an unchanging God.

This is the world of Evensong and picture postcard villages and a stable society where there is no crime and no fear and where no-one locks their door and where you play skittles at the village pub and where you buy jam and chutney at the church fete. I’m sure you could add lots of details to the picture.

Like John Betjeman, I am very fond of Evensong. The words of Thomas Cranmer’s 1549 service sung by a boys’ choir create a sense of the God who is the same yesterday, today and forever. If I had to name my favourite service, it would be the 16th Century service of Evening Prayer.When I ask myself why I have that preference, it is not so comforting.

It is essentially a retreat from the world around, an attempt to escape from the realties that are not so pleasant. Evensong makes no demands upon me.In many places, the choir sings everything, so there is no need to really participate. At the end of the service, it is easy to slip away and avoid engaging even in passing pleasantries with anyone else.

It is not meant to be like that. If you read the words of the service, it is quite clear that Cranmer meant it to be a service that challenged individuals, but it is possible to go to Evensong and be undisturbed. Everything is nice and pleasant and reassuring; nothing grates, nothing annoys, there are no irritations; often there is not even a sermon.

Isn’t there a danger of expecting Jesus to meet us where we are, instead of us being like people in the Gospel reading who seek Jesus where he is? Is worship meant to be an experience of being gently reassured? Is it not also meant to disturb us?

When we are confronted with the greatness and wonder and glory of God, when we think of the reality of God, is not there an impulse not to be just gently reassured, but to actually go to seek out this God, in the way that the people sought out Jesus?

Jesus confronts people with disturbing realities about themselves. He comes into Galilee in the opening chapter of Saint Mark’s Gospel proclaiming the Good News and bringing disturbance into the lives of those whom he meets.

The life and the drive of the Church in its early years came from the fact that it was radically new and different. People were touched by their experience of God and allowed themselves to be so disturbed in their old way of life that they gave up their former ways and began to follow Jesus.

I love the world of John Betjeman’s poetry. I love medieval churches built in mellow sandstone. I love cream teas in white marquees. I love the sound of willow against leather on summer afternoons. I love stripy deck chairs and brass bands and village pubs. The problem is that God demands a great deal more from us than just preserving the things we like.

To be God’s people, we must be disturbed.The Christian life is not about staying still or staying in the past; it s a pilgrim life, it is about moving on.

If we are not disturbed, then the church will die. John Betjeman wrote those lines about an Oxfordshire church in 1952. Even then, only two or three went to the evening service. The church is now redundant and in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust – like many other churches, a monument to a past age that future generations will probably fail to understand.

It is not nice being disturbed, but like the people who sought out Jesus in the lonely places, we are challenged to find Jesus where he is – not where we would like him to be.

Erwin Schroedinger, the Nobel Prize winning physicist, is buried in the little Austrian village of Alpbach; there is nothing to mark it as different from others except a mathematical formula and an inscription on his memorial that seemed to be from a piece of scientific writing. Visiting his grave three years ago, an Englishman came and stood beside us.

The Englishman was a policeman, but by qualification, he was a physicist. Our previous knowledge of Schroedinger did not extend beyond the fact that he had lived in Dublin for fifteen years, had won the Nobel prize for physics in 1933, and was a friend of Albert Einstein. Our physicist companion tried to explain Schroedinger’s theories and then said that the world as we know it arose from the work of Schroedinger and his colleagues—that the digital technology, our computers, our televisions, our phones, and so on, the things we all take for granted, had its roots in their work.

I stood and agreed with him, my Grade 1 in Certificate of Secondary Education General Science did not cover understanding the work of Nobel prize winners.

“I’m a priest”, I laughed, “I have enough trouble trying to understand the purpose of things without understanding how they work”.

“You need to look at something called the anthropic principle”, he said, “it suggests that the universe works in such a way that we are the outcome”.

I think he was saying that there is scientific thought that suggests that there is purpose in the universe, that it is not just all random and meaningless. I did look up the anthropic principle, but, without someone to explain, I’m not sure I really understood what it was saying.

I think he was probably a deeply spiritual man, not necessarily religious, but someone prepared to think about big questions; someone open to the possibility of there being unimagined answers to our questions; someone prepared to accept that there are mysteries that simply cannot be explained by human science.

I wondered about the huge gap between where scientists are in their thinking and where the church is. What meaning have church doctrines in a universe that is 13.5 billion years old? Do they apply to the whole universe? What about the universes that may be beyond this one? It was too much to think about.

The church simply does not engage with people where they are; even kids at school are now asking me whether the stuff I tell them has any truth for anyone outside of the church. If we can’t talk to the world that has been shaped Schroedinger and Einstein, then we will find we gradually have fewer and fewer people left to listen.

The church still talks about medieval questions—ninety odd years after Countess Markievicz was elected to the first Dail, we still argue about whether women can have the same ministry as men. Five hundred years after the Reformation, the church is still arguing about who can say Jesus’ words over the bread and wine and what the bread and wine become when the words have been said.

Very few people have the faintest interest in the questions that so exercise church leaders. We want to know that our homes are secure, that we have jobs to go to, that we have money to pay our bills; we want to know that our children are well and happy and that there is a good future for them; and, at the end of it all, we want to know that our lives mean something. I don’t hear the church answering the questions that people are asking.

Perhaps it wasn’t so different in the days of Jesus. The disciples are looking for Jesus and “When they found him, they said to him, ‘Everyone is searching for you.’”

Why is everyone searching for him? Why does an itinerant preacher from Galilee suddenly command so much attention—because people have turned their back on the church of their day.

The religious leaders believed they possessed all knowledge; they had life worked out a series of rules and regulations; they were sincere in their belief they were right; they would even execute people for breaking the rules, honestly believing this was what God wanted. But they don’t answer the questions.

Maybe people in Jesus’ time didn’t have questions about science, but they had all the other questions that we might have. They would have wondered what life was about; they would have wondered why they worked hard all their lives and often received little reward; they would have wondered why members of their family should have died; they would have looked up at one of those clear night skies and wondered whether there was any sense in it all.

‘Everyone is searching for you.’ Jesus is told because for the first time they have found someone who makes sense. But, let’s be clear, Jesus is troublesome, he doesn’t fit into the old laws: what does he go on to say he is like? Sewing a new patch onto an old garment or pouring bubbly new wine into dry and cracked old wineskins. Trying to fit Jesus into the old religion would be like trying to fit Einstein and Schroedinger into the old teaching of the church—it doesn’t work.

‘Everyone is searching for you,’ say the disciples. Searching because they believe that in this man there is an answer to their questions.

If he is God, Jesus must be able to answer the questions of the class in school; he must be able to answer the questions of Einstein and Schroedinger, he must be able to respond to those who believe there is no God. If he is God, then this Jesus must be someone present in the universe through 13.5 billion years; present in the chaos before the beginning of the world; present before the beginning of time and space.

‘Everyone is searching for you,’ Searching for him, may we find him.

It is a feature of the Gospels that the writers tell us little about themselves; it is the message that matters, not the messenger.

When we look at Saint Mark’s Gospel, we cannot be certain about the identity of the author. There has been a tradition in the church of identifying the writer of the Gospel with John Mark, who appears in Acts Chapter 12 and Acts Chapter 13 but ‘On the Seventy Apostles’, a work attributed to a Roman Christian called Hippolytus, who lived 170-235 AD, suggests that there are three different Marks identified in the New Testament. There is John Mark; Mark the cousin of Barnabas, who appears in Colossians Chapter 4 Verse 10 and Philemon 24; and Mark the Evangelist, who is mentioned in 2 Timothy Chapter 4 Verse 11. Marcus, the Latin form of the name, was one of the commonest names in the Roman Empire so we cannot just assume that the occurrences of a name would necessarily all refer to the same person. None of the traditions can be conclusively proven from either the New Testament or from the writings of the early church.

Papias, who is said to have lived from before 70 AD until around 155 AD, quotes from an elder who told him about Mark,

“This also the presbyter said: Mark, having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately, though not in order, whatsoever he remembered of the things said or done by Christ. For he neither heard the Lord nor followed him, but afterward, as I said, he followed Peter, who adapted his teaching to the needs of his hearers, but with no intention of giving a connected account of the Lord’s discourses, so that Mark committed no error while he thus wrote some things as he remembered them. For he was careful of one thing, not to omit any of the things which he had heard, and not to state any of them falsely.”

Papias’ words help us in our understanding of what Mark intended; Mark is writing a Gospel, he is not writing a biography of Jesus. If we read Saint Mark Chapter 1 Verse 1, it says, ‘The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God’. He has no intention of telling Jesus’ life story; he does not tell of Jesus’ birth or childhood or of the years before Jesus began his ministry, he begins with John the Baptist.
Scholars believe that the Gospel was written after the death of saint Peter in 64 AD and before the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD. Although it appears as the second of the Gospels, it is believed that it was written first, and that Saint Matthew uses the writing of Saint Mark for much of the material in his own Gospel. Mark’s Greek is not as fluent as that of other New Testament writers and his Gospel is by far the shortest.

The biblical commentator D.E. Nineham suggests Saint Mark had a number of main concerns as he put together the Gospel:

(i) How was Jesus the Messiah? The faithful who would have heard Mark’s words read would have taken it for granted that Jesus was the Messiah, but how could this be reconciled with the Cross? How could what happened to Jesus be made to fit with all they had expected from the Messiah? What sort of Messiah ends up being crucified?

People had expected a warrior king, someone who would restore the kingdom to Israel, the Messiah, as David’s descendant, would bring back the glory days. Look at the Palm Sunday story and we see the crowds really expecting something dramatic, something history-changing is going to happen

Mark has two approaches. He takes a historical approach to what happened, he explains the crucifixion as a consequence of the opposition to Jesus. If we look at Mark Chapters 2 and 12, we see question after question, challenge after challenge from Jesus’ opponents. Jesus confounds the efforts of his opponents to catch him out with their questions and they turn viciously against him. He also takes a theological approach, showing God’s way of producing surprise results from unpromising beginnings, remember Jesus with the children in Mark Chapter 10 Verse 15, ’Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it’.

Things are reversed with Jesus, the usual order of things is turned upside down. Jesus’ way of being the Messiah is different from anything they might have expected.

(ii) The second concern Mark seeks to address is that if Jesus was the Messiah, why did he not claim the title earlier and openly? Why didn’t he just stand up and tell everyone that he was the one for whom they had been waiting?

We see Jesus on repeated occasions in Saint Mark’s Gospel telling people whom he has healed not to tell anyone what has happened; it seems a strange way to behave? Aren’t the miracles meant to be signs of God’s presence? Mark sees what biblical scholars call ‘the Messianic secret’ as having a twofold reason: to silence the demonic powers that recognized him, in Mark Chapter 3 Verse 12, Jesus ‘gave them strict orders not to tell others about him’; and because of the obtuseness of the people, ‘He looked around at them in anger and, deeply distressed at their stubborn hearts’, says Mark in Chapter 3 Verse 5.

There is a purpose in the secrecy, Jesus is looking for faith among his followers, not for people who are swayed by the spirits or who can only be moved on from their stubbornness by something spectacular happening. Read Saint Mark and we see how he stresses this secrecy, this concern on the part of Jesus that people who recognize him should do so through the eyes of faith.

(iii) Thirdly, Mark needs to explain the persecution his community was suffering. We see in Saint Mark’s Gospel the point being made that Jesus had warned three times that he was going to suffer, in Chapter 8 Verse 31, Chapter 9 Verse 31, and Chapter 10 Verse 33 and that those warnings had come true.

Jesus warned his followers to expect to suffer for themselves, but promised that God would reward those who endured suffering, Chapter 10 Verse 29-30 says, ‘Truly I tell you,” Jesus replied, “no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age: homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields—along with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life’.

When we realize that Saint Mark was writing for specific purposes it is easier for us to see how his Gospel can read strangely at times, how there can seem to be things left out, how there can be great attention paid to some things and little paid to others.

Even the ending of Saint Mark’s Gospel raises questions, the earliest manuscripts end at Chapter 16 Verse 8, ‘Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid’. English Bibles have verses 9-20 added, usually with a note that the earliest and most reliable manuscripts did not include the final twelve verses.

It is an odd place to end, but if he was writing down Peter’s teaching, perhaps it makes sense. The Gospel tells the story up to the women finding the empty tomb, Mark and all the other members of the early church tell the story from that point onwards.

It always seems reassuring that there are rough edges in Scripture, they are a mark of honesty. If you were going to make a story up, you would tend to make sure all the pieces fitted smoothly together. It is human nature to believe those things where everything is consistent and nothing is contradictory. The fact that there are parts of the New Testament that might not be consistent with others, that might even contradict others, is a sign that people tried to set down honestly what they had received and what they believed.

Mark’s purpose was not to write a biography, a life story, and certainly was not to write a history, he writes to tell people ‘the good news about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God’.

One of my best friends is a member of the Plymouth Brethren. We have known each other for over twenty years, and we get along well, well enough to exchange banter about each other’s churches. He never ceases to remind me of the ways the Church of Ireland seem exceedingly strange to outsiders.

The pattern of worship at a Brethren assembly is intended to resemble the worship of found New Testament times. There is no formal structure. As in the days Jesus in the synagogue, every man is entitled to stand up and read the Scriptures and to speak to the meeting.

When the assembly goes well it goes very well. There’s a genuine priesthood of all believers and people share with enthusiasm what God is saying to them through the Scriptures. But, as my friend, would admit, there are some times when the worship falls far short of what it should be.

He used to belong to a country assembly. They were conservative to the point that they would not allow a piano to be used in the building. One preacher used to refer to the piano at another hall as ‘our wooden friend in the corner’.

The problem with the assembly was not just that they refused modern innovations like the piano, the problem was that it was a small assembly and the same men stood up and said the same things every Sunday. The Brethren have no lectionary for their Sunday readings. They have no church year in the way that we go from Advent to Pentecost, and they have no order of service to move things along when you have heard enough. So there was nothing to stop particular people pursuing their particular hobby horses every Sunday. My friend left the assembly because he felt he could no longer find God in what was happening. People were just repeating the same things every time they gathered.

I think my friend’s experience with that assembly was probably similar to experience of the people of Capernaum in their synagogue that we heard about in the gospel reading this morning. People were tired of hearing the same things every week. Much of the teaching in the synagogue wasn’t even the men’s own thoughts – it was often simple repetition of the teachings of the famous rabbis.

Then Jesus comes along and the contrast is astonishing. ‘This man teaches with authority’, they say. They weren’t used to such as speaker. The synagogue in Capernaum was a bit like that country hall. It was a bit out of the way. It wasn’t the sort of place you’d expect to hear a leading speaker.

Jesus was a huge contrast with the men they listened to week by week. He spoke as one who had authority. Why did Jesus teaching have the authority?

Firstly, because it is new. The people acknowledge this. They have had their teachers going over old ground every Sabbath. They must have groaned inwardly when certain men stood up to speak.  You can almost hear them saying, ‘Oh no, not old Isaac again’.

Jesus offers something completely new and radically different. The people would have listened with close attention because Jesus was such a break with what had gone before.

Jesus taught what was new, but it was more than new teaching that gave him the authority. The second reason why people were amazed was that he spoke with complete integrity – what he said was what he was. We live in times when we are very cynical about people in the public eye. The same person who was talking about the state of the country one week might be in newspapers for a scandal the next week. There seems a lack of integrity in public life, power at all costs seems the priority. Jesus does not seek power, he has infinitely greater power than the leaders. Jesus seeks the truth. The power of evil is confronted by the truth and it shouts out, ‘I know who you are – the Holy One of God’.

Jesus teaches things that are new and startling. Jesus teaches with the voice of integrity and Jesus teaches with the power of God. It is this third element that gives Jesus’ teaching real authority. Jesus could have offered new teaching, Jesus could have spoken with integrity, and still have been an ordinary human being. If that was the case then Jesus teaching would be no more than opinion. A much respected opinion, but, nevertheless, if he was not speaking with the voice of God, he’s expressing one opinion in a world without anywhere there are many opinions.

Our world is one where belief in the absolute has almost disappeared. Jesus’ listeners have no doubt that he was speaking with absolute authority. We have to ask ourselves whether we have that same confidence? Does Jesus hold the absolute truth for us?

The story of Jesus in the synagogue is a story that asks questions of you and me. The people listen and they say this man speaks with authority.

The questions we have to answer are about the authority we are prepared to give Jesus. If we feel that he speaks with the authority of a prophet, of great teacher, but no more than that, then the church is pointless. There are many great prophets and teachers down through history, and we don’t give them special attention.

If we feel he speaks with the authority of God then we really need to ask ourselves about the response. This is not a man like the men in the country hall who rambled on in the same way every Sunday – this man is new, he speaks with integrity, and he speaks with divine power.

Looking at our response to him – couldn’t we do better?

Week by week, we read the Gospel story and rarely stop to think about the writers, those who wrote down the story of Jesus. If they had not set down in writing what they saw and were told, would our faith and our church ever have reached us?

Matthew the writer of the first Gospel is accepted by the church to be Matthew the tax collector from Capernaum who was called by Jesus in Matthew 9:9 to be one of the Twelve. He is named as one of the apostles, in Mark 3:18, Luke 6:15 and Acts 1:13. It is widely accepted that Matthew is referred to by the name of Levi, son of Alphaeus, in Mark 2:14 and Luke 5:27.

Matthew came from the province of Galilee, which, unlike the province of Judea, was not administered directly by the Romans, but by a puppet ruler Herod Antipas. We are told that Jesus comes to Capernaum and having healed a paralyzed man, he meets Matthew at the roadside.

Matthew is a tax collector in times when they were every bit as ingenious at finding sources of tax revenue as authorities are today. Tax collectors were despised by their fellow Jews, partly because of corrupt practices and partly because they were seen as collaborators with the occupying Roman imperial power.

Taxes at the time included a poll tax on every male over fourteen and every female over twelve; an early for of vehicle taxation on carts according to their wheels and axles; taxes on the use of roads; and taxes on goods being taken to market. Matthew has his toll booth at the roadside because the people who pass are those from whom he derives his revenue.

Scripture is not against taxation—Romans 13 says clearly that taxes must be paid to whom they are due—but Scripture is against corruption and racketeering, and is quite clear that the tax collectors were guilty of such practices. In Luke 3:13, in the account of John the Baptist baptizing people in the Jordan, we are told, “Even tax collectors came to be baptized.
“Teacher,” they asked, “what should we do?”

“Don’t collect any more than you are required to,” he told them.
Tax collecting was a racket. People like Matthew would decide themselves how much they would charge, passing on the official amounts to the authorities and putting the balance into their own pockets. Matthew would have been a prosperous man. In order to carry out his duties hew would also have been fluent in Aramaic (the everyday language of the Jewish people) and Greek (the common language around the Mediterranean and the language in which the New Testament was written). He would also have known Hebrew from attending the synagogue and perhaps some Latin through dealing with the Romans.

To understand how much Matthew was despised we need to think in terms of how we would see someone running a protection racket today—pay them what they ask or they wreck our property. Matthew had to be paid whatever he demanded, or he could destroy someone’s livelihood.

Matthew’s conversion is one of the most dramatic in the New Testament because to leave his life of corruption and the wealth he had accumulated demanded a change of thinking far more dramatic than that asked of the fishermen, or even of Saint Paul. Matthew has an easy and a comfortable life. Money opens many doors and Matthew would have used it to make sure he had the right friends in the right places.

Did we ever think about what sort of person Matthew must have been? You could not have lived as Matthew did and have been a kind or a fair person; he was a hard hearted man, he was a hard man. He was a man used to curses and threats, and he was probably also a man who lived in fear that those threats might one day be carried out. It’s not hard to imagine the sort of company Matthew would have kept—men as hard as himself.

Matthew simply leaves all of this behind and becomes part of the inner group of Jesus’ followers. He becomes a witness to all that took place and one of the four whose writings we accept as accounts of the life and ministry of Jesus.

Matthew writes particularly for a Jewish readership, he particularly recalls the teachings of Jesus that would have addressed the thoughts and the concerns of Jewish listeners. The Sermon on the Mount, the teaching of Jesus that Matthew quotes at length, is a summary of the Law and the Prophets. To Gentile readers at a later time, there would not be a comparable concern with the Jewish law, but to Matthew’s readers, it was important to see that there was a continuity, that Jesus was the fulfilment of their ancient hopes.

Once we move beyond the pages of the New Testament, we know little about Matthew with any degree of certainty. Tradition says that Matthew preached the Gospel amongst Jewish communities for fifteen years, including writing his Gospel account in Hebrew, before he went further afield with the Good News. He is said to have travelled as far west as Macedonia and as far west as Persia. It has been a tradition of the church that he died as a Martyr, but there is disagreement amongst ancient writers on this and also on where he died.

Matthew, who was profoundly interested in the ethical and spiritual teachings of Jesus, would not have been too worried about biographical details, his concern was with the message, not with himself as the messenger.

Matthew is a challenging figure in our own times, when wealth has become the sole goal in many lives. Matthew wasn’t attracted by any material thing that Jesus might have to offer. To start with Jesus had no material wealth to offer anyone, but Matthew wasn’t interested in such things anyway, he had tried money and wealth and he had found they had left his life empty.

What Jesus offered people was not wealth or success, nor was it religion, there was plenty of that around and Matthew had rejected it; what Jesus offered was a life with meaning, a life with a purpose, a life that was going somewhere.

Matthew throws over his former life because he believes that in Jesus he has found true life. He believes that, no matter what might happen to him, there can be nothing in the world more important than following this man from Galilee.

The simplest of decisions, to realize that no matter how much he accumulates, in the end it counts for nothing, in the end his wealth and his power are worthless. The simplest of decisions and also the hardest of decisions. Wealth and success wheedle their way into our affections, they make us believe that they are the most important, that we cannot be happy without them. Matthew realized he had been deceived, money had not bought happiness or love.

We live in a society full of people like Matthew, looking for meaning and purpose, and like Matthew they too often look at the church and see not followers of Jesus, but people who more often resemble the Pharisees with rules and regulations and a suspicion of anyone who does not conform. When it comes to the crunch point in life, rules and regulations are of no more use than money and power. At the sharp moments, the painful moments, the moments when life seems utterly barren and devoid of meaning, the only one who offers anything is the man from Nazareth.

Saint Paul writes that we possess nothing, yet if we have Jesus we have everything. Matthew would have been the most hard-·hearted of men and yet he realized all that he had nothing, so he threw aside his wealth and power in order to have everything.

When I was a curate, there were around 1,000 households on our parish list. Fifty or sixty of those would have been people who were frail or housebound and we would visit them on a regular basis. There was one lady who lived in a terrace near the middle of the town who fascinated me. She lived a hermit-like existence in her house, that opened directly onto the street at the front and that had a yard at the back. She rose at six every morning, summer and winter and made her fire and cleaned and tidied the house.She had neither television nor radio and took no newspapers; her only reading matter was a large black leather-bound Bible. She rarely ventured further than a shop down the street. Occasionally a friend or neighbour would call.

I asked her once what she did all day and she said she did her housework and read her Bible and said her prayers. She was a lady who possessed complete tranquility and was one of those people who made you feel better about life.

The lady was one of the most devout people I had ever met, her life would have matched that of a monastery or a convent, but had I asked her if she was a “Christian, I suspect strongly that she would have said ‘no’. To be a Christian in our town meant that you had to belong to one of the conservative evangelical or fundamentalist churches. To be a “Christian”  in the town in the 1980s meant having a particular view of the world that ruled out such activities as going to the pub; going to the cinema or the theatre; reading a Sunday newspaper; having friends who didn’t share your thinking; watching most television programmes; and a list of other misdemeanours, the most minor of which could lead to a split between church members and people leaving to go somewhere else, or even starting another church, to add to the twenty-three that were already in the town. Being a “Christian” did not rule out bigotry, prejudice, racism, malicious gossip, self-righteousness, and a spiritual arrogance that would have made the most Pharisee of the Pharisees look modest and humble.

The experiences of those days made me often reflect on “what is a Christian?” If being a “Christian” meant something different than being sectarian, then what did it mean?

It needed to have some sort of definition. Most people in England say they are “Christian”. I once asked two friends in England, who are not in the slightest bit religious, what did it mean when people said they were “Christian”? It means, they said, not Muslim. “Christian” seemed, in that case, to mean to people something to do with their ethnic and national identity, it didn’t mean that they had particular religious beliefs.

“Christian” can be defined in a way so narrow and sectarian that even Jesus would have problems being counted in; or it can be defined in a way so broad and so vague that Jesus would be hard pressed to recognise it as having anything to do with him.

Being a good Anglican, I, of course, think that we find Jesus in the middle ground. Being a Christian is not about being a member of a tight little sect; there were plenty of those around in Jesus’ time, groups like the Zealots appealed to very narrow and very extreme thinking, and Jesus would have nothing to do with them. Nor is being a Christian about some vague idea of the country or the community; if it was then Jesus could have regarded the whole Jewish people as followers and none of what happened need have taken place.

Words from the opening chapter of Saint Mark’s Gospel, I think, give us a benchmark for what being a Christian is about. “At once they left their nets and followed him. ““At once they left their nets”, tells us that being a Christian is about commitment; “and followed him”, tells us that being a Christian is about discipleship, about copying Jesus’ example in our daily lives.

Being a Christian is about heart and hand; it’s about thoughts and actions. Was the lady I used to visit a Christian? Of course, she was.There was a commitment in her heart to Jesus and there was a discipleship in the routine of her daily life.

Were the members of the various churches who called themselves “Christian” actually Christian at all? I’m not sure. I really didn’t see any sign of commitment in them, they might go to church and to the weeknight meeting, but there wasn’t much sign that their hearts were changed. As for discipleship, as for action, there was no sign at all; they felt they were saved by what they believed, they saw no need whatsoever of living lives that reflected the teachings of Jesus.

“At once they left their nets and followed him.” The call of those first disciples, asks questions of us. We need constantly to look at our own commitment. “At once” Simon and Andrew left what they were doing; how readily do we respond when we know that God is calling us to something? How easy it is to make excuses, and each time we make an excuse we slip that much further away from God. They “followed him” and we must ask about how much the way we live our life is shaped by Jesus’ example; if we’re not following him, then we’re going our own way and the gap between where we are and where we should be is getting bigger and bigger.

“At once they left their nets and followed him. ” Do we match up to that definition of Christian?

One of my favourite books of all time is one that is translated from Italian and which appeared in a weekly column in Candido, an Italian newspaper, in the late 1940s, “The Little World of Don Camillo” by Giovanni Guareschi. Don Camillo is the parish priest of a little Italian village in the years after World War II and is in continual conflict with Peppone, the Communist mayor of the village. The stories are filled with humour, but the thing I most like about the stories is the conversations Don Camillo has with God. Don Camillo will go into the church to pray and will tell God all about what has happened and God answers him. In the Don Camillo books and in the television and radio dramatisations of the stories there are wonderful conversations between the priest and the Lord. In one story Don Camillo has been given money for a church bell, but decides it would be better spent on a summer camp for the children of the village. He has a huge quarrel about this and in the evening tells the Lord all about it.

“What happened?” Christ asked. “You seem upset.”

“Naturally,” replied Don Camillo, “when an unhappy priest has had to argue for two hours with a Communist Mayor in order to make him understand the necessity for founding a seaside camp and for another two hours with a miserly woman capitalist to get her to fork out the money for that same camp, he’s entitled to feel a bit gloomy.”

“I understand.”

Don Camillo hesitated. “Lord,” he said at last, “You must forgive me if I even dragged You into this business of the money.”

“Me?”

“Yes, Lord. In order to compel that usurer to part with her cash, I had to tell her that I saw You in a dream last night and that You told me that You would rather her money went for a work of charity than for the buying of the new bell.”

“Don Camillo! And after that you have the courage to look Me in the eye?”

“Yes,” replied Don Camillo calmly.

“The end justifies the means.”

“Machiavelli doesn’t strike me as sacred Scripture,” Christ exclaimed.

“Lord,” replied Don Camillo, “it may be blasphemy to say so, but even he can sometimes have his uses.”

“And that is true enough,” agreed Christ.

Ten days later when a procession of singing children passed by the church on their way to camp, Don Camillo hurried out to say good-bye. . . . . . That night he dreamed that the Lord appeared to him and said that He would sooner the Signora Carolina’s money were used for charity than for the purchase of a bell. “It is already done,” murmured Don Camillo in his sleep.

I think the Don Camillo stories are wonderful; there are times when I would disagree with Don Camillo and times when I would disagree with the words that Giovanni Guareschi puts into the mouth of the Lord, but there is a great sense of the spiritual in the stories. I would love to hear the voice of the Lord as Don Camillo hears it, (I think life and parish ministry would be a whole lot easier!) but in our times the voice of the Lord is hard to hear.

We can understand the words from the first book of Samuel that we read as the Old Testament Lesson this morning, “In those days the word of the LORD was rare; there were not many visions. ”

Perhaps the problem is that we don’t listen. Samuel didn’t expect to hear the Lord speaking– he thinks it must be Eli who is calling him; he doesn’t expect to hear the voice of God.

Only when Samuel is prepared to hear God does the Lord speak. Only when Samuel says, ‘speak to me Lord, because I’m prepared to listen to what you’re saying to me’, does the Lord speak.

Perhaps the problem is not that God no longer speaks, but that we no longer listen. Even in the life of the church, how often do we ever sit down and be silent and wait to hear what God might be saying to us? We’re always watching the clock, waiting to get things over so we can get on and do whatever else is next on our list for the day.

Miss Rabbage, my primary school teacher, who taught me most of the things I know, used to have an acrostic for what prayer was about. PATCH, P-A-T-C-H. The letters of the word stood for praise, ask, thank, confess and hear. By the time I went to theological college we were much more sophisticated in our acrostics; prayer was summed up in the word ACTS, A-C-T-S, adoration, confession, thanksgiving and supplication.

Only recently did I think about it, Miss Rabbage’s emphasis on hearing God had disappeared by college days. We don’t have time for listening and hearing in church, our services are filled with activity and sound and when we try to have occasions for quietness and contemplation, being honest, hardly anyone comes.

Maybe we do make time in our daily lives to be still and to listen, I don’t know. Sometimes I think that God might be shouting to us at the top of his voice, “Will you sit down and shut up for a minute?” We wouldn’t hear if he was.

We read that story from Samuel and we think that our own times are similar, visions are rare and the voice of God is hard to hear, but maybe it is our own fault. In the week ahead let’s try taking ten minutes at some point, and sitting down and turning everything off and saying like Samuel, ‘speak Lord, your servant is listening’.

Who knows what we might hear?

Saint Mark tells us of one of those photogenic moments in the Gospel story – the baptism of Jesus. It is a moment filled with colour and drama and a sense of something special. Jesus ’saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him’, says Saint Mark.

As with much of Scripture, it is easy to read the account as we would read a story in a book and to fail to see what might be its implications for us. ‘I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit’, John the Baptist tells his listeners and we are challenged to move beyond the images of the moment and to think what it is saying to us.

As the days of January pass, how many of our New Year resolutions remain after one week? How much evidence is there of the presence of Jesus in our lives?

If anyone asked me what sort of person I was, I would tell them that I was OK. Maybe not the best, but certainly not the worst, not the greatest of saints, but nor the worst of sinners.

Wouldn’t we all see ourselves in that way? We wouldn’t profess to live perfect holy lives, but we would feel greatly aggrieved if we were accused of being seriously in the wrong. If I came down the church and accused one of you individually of being a miserable sinner, I think you would feel somewhat annoyed.

We don’t feel we are sinful people, yet maybe there is also an awareness that we are not the people we might be. The sins change but the human weakness doesn’t. Saint Paul seems to understand what I’m talking about, he writes in Romans 7:19, ‘For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do – this I keep on doing’.

I think most of us if we sat and reflected for five minutes could probably come up with a list of aspects of our life where we are far from perfect. Maybe there are unresolved wrongs from our past, things for which we never said ‘sorry’, maybe there are things now that we really should do something about, maybe there are things that no-one else even know about that need to be addressed.

The option we don’t have is to do nothing. We cannot pretend to be Christians and simply go on living unchanged lives. If we come to church week in and week out knowing that there are things we should be doing something about, and persisting in doing nothing, then we are making little of God and we are making a mockery of our faith.

Writing to Timothy, Saint Paul writes that the Lord, ‘has saved us and called us to a holy life’. We are called to live lives that are different, different from the life we have lived in the past, different from the lives of people around us who profess no faith. If our lives as Christians are not distinctive, are not different, then we have to ask ourselves, ‘are they Christian?’

The problem we face is the very problem that Saint Paul faced, we mean to do things that are right, but it’s so much easier to do the things that are wrong. It’s easier not to say sorry, the excuses come readily to us, we don’t want to rake over old ground again, let sleeping dogs lie. It’s easier to carry on thinking the way we have always thought; sure, who knows what we’re thinking anyway? It’s easier to carry on doing the things the way we have always, done them, we’re too old to change now or we’re no worse than the next person. It’s very hard to change. Maybe, there is the odd thing that pulls us up and makes us think, but generally we just carry on.

In his baptism, Jesus is identifying with us, saying he realizes what human life is like and that he realizes what we are going to be like, he realises that left to our own choice we will just go our own way, so he says, in Saint John Chapter 14 Verse 16, that the Father will give us a Counsellor to be with us forever – the Holy Spirit.

‘I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit’, says John the Baptist.” Being a Christian is about more than what we do. It is about what God does. The Holy Spirit is God with us, the Holy Spirit is God in us.

What about an extra New Year resolution? Resolve to take five minutes this afternoon, this evening or tomorrow, and reflect on our own life and honestly ask, ‘what needs to change?’ What do I need to do to become the person God wants me to be?

‘He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit’. John the Baptist’s words are as much for us as they were for the crowds on the banks of the Jordan.

The Epiphany story brings memories of children’s nativity plays; young people being dressed in silk gowns with crowns made from shiny paper; or, if not nativity plays, Christmas cards with men of camels, or carols telling the story of kings from the east, or poems about travelling in the dead of winter.

We lose sight of the men and we lose sight of the consequences of their journey.

Just as we recall the traditional picture each year, so we should also try to recall a realistic picture of the men each year. Each year, we need to put away our traditional pictures of the Magi, we need to forget the silken robes and the elegant appearance, because if you were like that you’d get robbed no sooner than you were outside the city walls. Instead, we need to think of men in traditional Arab dress, because it was what was practical when you lived in that region. They were men used to surviving the elements, because to travel any distance in those times meant facing harsh and difficult weather. They would have been men who were wise to the ways of the crooks and the fraudsters and the knifemen who would relieve them of their possessions and leave them with their throats cut down some back alley because these were times before regular government and police forces. They would have been men speaking a string of different languages to make their journey to Bethlehem, because even daily life in Palestine might involve three or four different languages. They would have been hard men, men with skin like leather and hands like sandpaper; men constantly alert, constantly watching, missing nothing, always on guard.

If we recall a realistic picture of the Magi, we need also to be realistic about the consequences of their visit.

Learned men they may have been, but their behaviour seems fat from wise. They arrive and start publicly asking questions, ‘Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.’ Hardly a discreet or cautious way of speaking when a second’s thought would have made them realize that their questioning was likely to set alarm bells ringing. Word very quickly reaches the ears of Herod, the puppet ruler of Judea under the Roman Empire and he calls his own advisers.

Were careless talk not enough, the Magi then meet with in Herod in secret and share what they have learned. What did they think was going to happen? Did they really believe Herod’s claim that he wanted to worship a child born in obscurity? Did it not occur to them that their might be violent consequences? What sort of ‘wise’ men would act with such little thought for what might happen?

The full story of the involvement of the Magi does not end at Saint Matthew Chapter 2 Verse 11, in Chapter 2 Verse 16, Saint Matthew writes, ‘When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi’.

Did the Magi realize what would happen when in Chapter 2 Verse 12 they returned to their own country by another route? Did they ever hear tales of the murders that had happened? Did they hear of the grieving mothers? Did they ever think in the years that followed that they might have gone about things in a different way?

The political consequence of the visit of the Magi was death of the Holy Innocents, the spiritual consequence of their visit, for them and for us, was the message that the new born king was to be a king for all the people – the Magi represent us, ourselves, you and me.

The Bible up to this point has been about God’s relationship with a particular people, with the people of Abraham, the people of Israel, the Jews. Then this child in Bethlehem is born and the whole story is opened up. The Magi are Gentiles, they are foreigners, they are not part of God’s people, they do not share in God’s promises. But now all this changes, Jesus welcomes all who believe in him, whether Jews or Gentiles. We become one of God’s people not by being born as one but by believing in this Jesus.

The Epiphany is the day when we are reminded that we too can be part of God’s plans. The Magi were very far from being God’s people, yet if they are included, then we can be as well. Once meeting with Jesus the Magi were never the same again, the stories that grew up around them presumably came from them telling their story of meeting with Jesus. When we meet with Jesus we are never the same again.

What does a promise mean?

Not very much in our own times.  Look at politicians who promise us great things in their election manifestos and once elected renege on everything they have said.  Look at the advertisements that promise us that if we buy particular products, we will look young or stylish, or attractive, or whatever  it is that we are seeking. Look at our whole consumer culture that promises us that if we accumulate lots of possessions, then we will be happy—it fails to deliver what it promises us, the more we have, the more we want and the more we hide behind high walls and big gates.

Human promises mean little, but what we gather to think about today is not a human promise, but God’s promise, God’s covenant with us. The covenant, the agreement, the promise, begins with God.  It is God’s grace that comes first in our relationship with him.  Saint Paul talks of that grace in Romans 5:8, ‘while we were still sinners, Christ died for us’.  It is not a question of us meeting God halfway to shake hands on our agreement with him, it is that God meets us wherever we are.

Time and again in Scripture, God goes to seek out people. He is pictured as a shepherd in Ezekiel 34 going out to find the lost sheep which, by their own volition, have wandered far from safety.  Jesus talks of himself as the Son of Man who has come to seek and save the lost.

The covenant we consider today is not a contract between two parties, it is us acknowledging  what it is that God has done for us, even though we have done nothing to deserve it.  There is nothing in ourselves that merits the relationship with God that is offered to us, but it is there for us to accept.

When we read the words of the Aaronic blessing in Numbers Chapter 6, we should note that it is a blessing of the whole community, ‘Thus you shall bless the Israelites’ says the Lord in Numbers 6:23.  No questions are asked as to whether each individual is worthy of that blessing; it is there for them, to receive or to reject

At the beginning of this new year, we are like the Israelites blessed by Aaron, God’s blessing is there for us and in our covenant service we acknowledge that blessing and we declare that we are going to receive God’s blessing, God’s presence in our lives,

To acknowledge God’s covenant at the beginning of a new year is to acknowledge that time itself is in God’s hands.  Saint Paul points to God working out his purposes within the space of human time. ‘But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son’, he writes in Galatians 4:4.  He sees time itself as being within God’s purposes.

‘The fullness of time’ conveys to us a sense that there is a right time for things, that there is a waiting for certain moments. To discern any purpose in the way things work out is sometimes impossible, but Paul is saying to us that nevertheless there is a tide, a movement in time bringing things towards a moment of culmination.

Starting 2012, do we have that sense? Do we feel that time is just one year upon another, or do we feel that, even in our own lives, God is working his purpose out? Do we feel that, even when we are not sure about things, the hand of God is there, guiding us?

‘When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son’, says Saint Paul.  We are offered much more than the Israelites blessed by Aaron; we are offered a covenant relationship not with a God who is terrifying, but with a person who walks along with us.  We are offered a friendship with someone who knows exactly what it means to be human, who knows what it means to be facing a new year with all its problems because he has known the worries, and frustrations and hurts and pains of human existence.  ‘You are no longer a slave but a child’ he writes in Galatians 4:7, the promise we are invited to make today is not one between two legal partners, it is a promise between a child and its father.

We make this promise, this covenant, at the heart of the Christmas season, at the heart of the time when God makes himself known to ordinary people. “Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us” , say the shepherds in Saint Luke 2:15.  The Lord makes himself known to us and we are invited to respond as those shepherds did; to set aside the things we are doing and to see what God has to show us.  To make the things of God a priority in this coming year; to make seeing what God might have to show us more important than the 101 tasks we feel we have to do.

The shepherds go from the stable telling everyone about this child and Saint Luke tells us, ‘all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them’.  Do we ever tell of what we have known of God with such conviction that people are amazed at what they hear?

‘Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart’, we are told in Saint Luke 2:19 and there is a challenge to us not only to tell, but to reflect, to take time to be quiet in the busyness of life to allow ourselves the chance to ponder what it is that God might be doing in our own lives.

The covenant we make is God’s covenant, it speaks to us of God’s purposes in time and it speaks to us of our relationship with the one who has shared our life and who walks with us.  May 2012 be a year when we receive God’s blessing and be enabled to speak of amazing things.