Who to Choose - Sunday 16th July 2017

Imagine yourself in a familiar place where there are a number of other people as well as yourself. Then imagine that Jesus walked into that place. Who would he go to first? Who would Jesus sit with, or stand with, or talk with?
The general practice of Christian worship is that people sit in rows while the leader addresses everyone at once, so the scenario above doesn’t come quickly to mind when we think about Jesus. But we know from the Gospels that he did a lot of his ministering on a one to one basis, often ignoring the larger gathering to focus on an individual.
So, in your imagined situation, who would Jesus go to?
A year or so into Jesus’ public ministry, John the Baptist was having second thoughts. It seems that Jesus wasn’t being the kind of Messiah that John was expecting. So he sent some of his disciples to Jesus to double check. Was Jesus the one whose arrival John had been proclaiming, or should he look out for someone else?
Jesus drew the visitors’ attention to the rag-tag assortment of humanity that surrounded him. "Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news brought to them.”
The emphasis here is not on the miracle cures, but on the people themselves: those who are blind, or lame, or disfigured, or deaf, or dying, or poor - the disenfranchised people who begged a living on the suspicion-clouded fringes of ordinary society. These people - as Jesus saw it - were the shining stars of God’s kingdom. And the fact that they were being loved and helped, was the best available proof that God’s anointed one had indeed arrived.
When Jesus walked into a place, he looked out for the person who most needed his love - be that a blind beggar, or a staggeringly wealthy but guilt-ridden and lonely tax collector. As we seek to continue his work in our daily lives, we need to do the same.

The Blessed - Sunday 21st February 2016

What do you want for your life, or for your children’s lives? Few people would disagree with a desire for health and happiness, with enough to eat and a secure home to live in. These are fundamentals we all aspire to.
Armed with these aspirations, we think of those who have enough to eat, and plenty to laugh about as people who are blessed. And we think of those who fall short of that standard as people who have either failed in life, or been failed by life.
In religious cultures God gets woven into these assumptions. Those whose needs are amply provided for have been blessed by God. Those who fall short of society’s basic standard are assumed to have incurred God’s displeasure.
Jesus turned that thinking on its head. “Blessed are you who are poor, or hungry, or grieving, or excluded; the Kingdom of God is yours.” Then comes the uncomfortable bit: “But woe to you who are rich, or well fed, or happy, or popular, for you have already received your consolation.” (Luke 6:20-26)
Jesus sees this world very differently from us. God is primarily at work among the very people who are routinely dismissed by polite society. If you want to see God at work, look among those who are poor, hungry, sad and excluded; they are the soil where the seeds of God’s Kingdom flourish.