5 Feb 12

Psalm 147; 1-11, 20c / I Corinthians 9:16-23

Mark 1: 29-39

The balancing act: Give until you can give no more?

            Once again we are struck with the lecture notes of Mark’s gospel.  In just ten verses we see Jesus visiting in a home, and healing another, a woman.  We see how his ministry provokes ministry and we meet Jesus for the first time cast in the role of the care receiver.

Then Jesus finds himself facing hundreds of needy sick people, “facing the whole city,” where he heals again and again.

After a short night, we see Jesus withdrawing to be alone.  Notice that it was his disciples seeking him out and not the other way around.  Jesus then announces that he has to get out town if he is to ever preach effectively again.

These are ten verses about demands of needy people that will never quit.  These are ten verses about a man who intentionally looks out for himself..

            This is a story that tells us how important is balance.  This is the story of even the son of God protecting himself with balance and boundaries.  He did not want to end up as needy as those he was healing, and unfulfilled, if not useless to anyone.

            We get glimpses of the need for balance in our own lives through the early work of this man from Nazareth.  We see he has needs and he takes steps to see his needs met.  He does not deny his own life at this point on the alter of unending ministry of healing all the sick in Capernaum.  Now that is not to say we are called to serve the needs of others, but are we normally called to serve up ourselves to our own detriment?

Self-care shows up here 3 times.  One: Jesus calls or and receives personal help.  The verb used to describe the ministry to Jesus from Peter’s mother in law, and from the angels later in Mark is translated as “service” “diakonia”

            This is more than a host just serving a plate of food.  No it more like the pampering one would get from a spa.  It is care, it is recognition, it is not pity, or obligation.  It is word that used to describe personal caressing of the emotions, or embracing and holding the soul.

            And this is what Jesus received from a woman.  Not only that, this was the response of the woman who had just received healing from the hands of Jesus.  It is as if the same Holy Spirit that healed the woman is now present in her healing touch.  Jesus is not alone, and like each of us, we do not have to be alone; there is the presence of God in the Holy Spirit wrapping wings of grace around us and him in our fatigue.  This shows us what Paul taught in a letter: “bear one another’s burdens” he wrote.  This teaches us about mutual support and stepping up to cover for each other.  It teaches us to advocate balance so much so we do burn ourselves out and can give no more.

            The second indication of how Jesus kept his work sharp, lies with his choices to get away from everything, likely to reflect, or maybe to pray, or maybe to catch his breath, or maybe to re-consider his ministry the day before when he had faced the whole city and gave and gave and gave.  So he balances himself before he got to a point where he gave until he could give no more.

            “Is this all that I am to do?  Heal heal heal?  Give give give?  Or is there more? Am I to teach? Am I to show a new relationship with God?  How do I get out of this single minded role? There is more I am to do!

            I gotta get out of my home town, if I am to teach as well as heal.  The whole city has cast me in this one role and I know I have more to do than this.  I am called to teach people how to find the path of their spiritual health.”

            There are two signals about our personal responsibility to protect maintain our own healthy balanced identities are woven into these 10 verses.

             One Jesus becomes a recipient of ministry; two he gets away from it all, and then there is the third:

            He chooses to leave Capernaum with these words: “I came out”.  Here Mark is really really clever.  The words he used have two meanings:  He says in one meaning that he came out of heaven to preach a new God talk, a new theology, a new relationship with God, to wit: that God gives us another change to grow in his love, to be all that we are created to be, again and again.  This is the Good News of salvation by faith.  In the second meaning he says that he came out of Capernaum  “I came out before I am trapped.”  The good news again is that I can get out from under, by the grace of God.

            Now we have three:  Jesus shows us three ways he maintained his spiritual health and balance: 1. He accepted without equivocation the ministry to himself.  2.  He withdraws in reflection and prayer, 3. He takes the necessary steps to change his ministry, and feels secure enough in Gods faith to do so successfully.

            What he has done for us is remind us that at the end of the day in our free will, you and I are responsible for maintaining our balance.  In a society as liberal and freedom loving as ours is, at the end of the day, personal responsibility really matters.  And one of those responsibilities is to seek to maintain or if need be regain balance, harmony, and peace.

            Jesus is reminding us not only to accept we have needs that should be met, but we are also responsible to take the initiative to seek help as need be.

            If we are suffering from imbalances, disharmony, anxiety, fears, loneliness, or anything else, what are we doing about it?  In Mark, Jesus offers three solutions:

One: get help, 2.  Take a break, and 3. Change lifestyle.  In Mark Jesus shows us in these ten verses the balances he determined were critical to his own capability to keep up his own work of preaching and healing.

            The other thing that I really like about this passage is that it challenges our wish to make Jesus this preacher into a superman.  We believe that Jesus is fully God and fully human.  Here we see this man not so much the super hero, but more like someone whose nature is like ourselves.

When we are taught as children about the people of the bible, generally we learned that these people were strong and stalwart folk who persevered in the face of great oppression.  We were urged, even intimated, into making them our models.  We were pushed to strive to imitate their virtues.  We were carefully instructed to succeed, to avoid failure of whatever sort at all costs.  And never to admit any proclivity that might threaten our public image.

Indeed we may have tried to gloss over this lesson in Mark because it is our nature to like our role models to be perfect, to have unlimited capacities etc.  We like to avoid or deny or rationalize away those proclivities that show weakness of any kind.  We dare not admit we anything but stoic and stalwart.  We prefer to create perfect images of ourselves especially in public places and try so hard to live up to them: those images that we are strong, autonomous, healthy, smart, perfect, even tempered, available, self-sustaining, energetic, and willing to sacrifice ourselves to the point we can give no more.

            Yet in these ten verses this preference is challenged.  We learned these preferences when we were very young.  We sucked them down deep.  And yet life has a way of giving us new views about our human nature and the nature of the people of the Bible.  Life has a way of taking us to our limits then inviting us to change to grow, to learn, to heal, to be healed, to retreat and so on. While we may not know what is ahead, we sense that refusing the invitation might mean that something new, creative, struggling to be born, might never be.

            And there it is: the issue to take to our friends, family, spouse, colleagues and to ourselves.  Take time today and ask yourself: is it my time to receive care?  Is it my time to get away and reflect on my life?  Is there something else I need to do and what do I change in order to do it?  If we do that regularly, as much as we need to do so, we can maintain, if not restore balance, harmony and calmness in ourselves, our families, our friends and colleagues.  What a gift Mark has given us today! Mark has shown us three paths that our teacher followed to restore and maintain harmony.

Let us pray…

            Alone on the pathways of our lives, Oh God, we can so easily lose our way.  The demands of living can easily disrupt our harmony and know of off balance.  And yet you have shown to us a way, a path, tools that we can use to restore or to maintain balance in the storms of life.  We thank you and praise you through Him who is our teacher. Amen

Deuteronomy 18: 15-20, Psalm 111

Mark 1:1-28
 

            As we’ve discovered, Mark was written like a set of lecture notes, leaving us the reader to fill in the pieces.  The gospel bursts forth with the story of Jesus resplendent with vivid scenes:  the baptism, the calling of the disciples, and then the first ministry act of Jesus of Nazareth: wham bam: Jesus drives out the evil spirits.

            Jesus, God with us, is all about healing.  This miracle story explodes into our lives with lots of noisy expletive words: a voice cries out, Jesus explodes up out of the River Jordan, the heavens are ripped open.  The next thing we experience is the image of the violence of the sickness, the demon, or the enemy of God.

     We could really come to love these powerful words as they point to the real power of God in the New Testament.  Remember we already know that this is a God who is limited by compassion, a God who responds to the cries of genuine distress of creation, a God who calls us to become all that we are created to become, and a God who can be sensed in everywhere.

     So it should be no surprise that when God stepped into human affairs it was and indeed still is to heal all that is broken, crushed, destroyed, sordid, and sick in the world.  Jesus Christ is all about healing.  In this Gospel, God rips away the veil between human and divine, God crushes spirits that divide people from people, and invites ordinary people, workers, the servants, the little guy, the least powerful to join together with Jesus in his work promoting wholesome sustainable, stable, optimistic, solution-focused, healthy organisms.

     As a story, this healing miracle episode in the synagogue is profoundly unsatisfying. Jesus is teaching with uncommon authority when suddenly Mark introduces the story a man with an unclean violent spirit. This unclean spirit even seems to know more about Jesus than those witnessing this mystical moment.  And if that were not enough to knock us off balance, suddenly we are exposed to the astounding action of the Son of God shushing the spirit and ordering it to vacate the premises.

     The witnesses, then respond as if they had heard nothing of what the spirit said, and Jesus walks away, apparently oblivious to their questions.

     We have heard their questions, and indeed we should be asking the same questions: “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?" “What is this new teaching—what power is this?" we should be wondering.

     But you know the last couple thousand years has mellowed us out.  Over that time, we have gotten so used to this story we have simply called it a Jesus miracle, tamed it, toned it down, and lost sight of its urgency and novelty; bored with it even.

    And yet we do that at the great risk of failing to hear our own creative internal authentic selves, crying out like this man because we have our own internal demons.  We risk missing the good news of God’s authority over the most demonic of forces and overlook the great news for us in this very sanctuary.

     Demons we call today at the individual level: addictions, compulsions, greed, me-isms, and disharmonious.  These are those anxious, unhappy internal fragmented parts of our-selves.  Demons we know as maybe our inability to deal with stress, or our state of loneliness, or our failures to be satisfied with our jobs, our marital status, our waistlines, our fitness levels, our income level, and so on.

     Demons we know too emerge we end up in horrible conflicts with each other, or we unable to find harmony with each other or more importantly when we feel uncomfortable in our own skins.

     Collectively, the demons we face today include religious persecution in certain countries, divisions due to oppressive power structures, corruption, stupidity, anti-intellectualism, and greed.  These demons occupy whole communities and use religious differences to justify death squads.  Demons that occupy heads of certain states, people who fear the power of the mass movements so much they point armed trained soldiers at their own citizens.  Demons as hunger, refugee-ism, arrest without due process, intimidation, and this week we saw the frightening demon of violence in the Straits of Hormuz.

     Where do these demons come from we might ask and lots of people do ask?  Historians, sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, Biblicists, theologians, and so on have written libraries of theory, speculation, and evidence based both good science and bad science in trying to understand these demons.  These are important and vital studies.

     And yet for all that, sometimes all we need to get through the night is to remember Mark’s Jesus did not wonder about the origin of the demons, rather he focused on solutions and healing the infected soul.  This passage is the in-coming presence of God to clean out that which is unclean, destructive, and dangerous.  It is His Word opposing all that God gives by way of freedom, honesty, openness, transparency, and fairness.

     Put into that context does not the message that God is all about healing mean more now than ever before?  So then what can we do here in this little part of God’s Kingdom to promote healing in the midst of our most pressing demons?

            What can we do with our worship services so that our friends, neighbors, and colleague will see the power of God’s word in restoration of the spirit, renewal of spiritual strength and the healing of brokenness?

            What can we do with our internal amazing mutual supportive programs to promote healing in a society that has delegated religious communities to the dustbins of their lives?

            What can we do with our external missions such as out of the cold or Christmas Hamper program to promote that we are an active attractive agent of healing in Ottawa and beyond?

            This is the compelling call from God through Jesus of Nazareth to us.  It is as if the Holy Spirit has gathered us together to make known in this neighborhood, to our families, and to our friends that God is all about healing that which is broken.  It is a call for prayerful optimism, hope, being solution-focused and creative.

            Mark’s Jesus has the power to lead us against the demons of our time.  This leader speaks with an authority that compels the unclean first to fight, and then quit.  This leader commands the demon “shut your mouth and get out”.

            Even in outline Mark gives us, we see something that we have all experienced:  The demon fights back.  The demon struggles to hold on, screaming, and resisting.  Addicts hangs on drugs, despots hang on to power.  The thieves hang on their money, the liars hang onto their delusions and so on.  The betrayers hang onto their justifications.  And they often do it with more skills than you and I have.

     And yet also, in this account, we meet the One God of all, the God of even the demonic.  We see that the demons are dangerous, but we also see that they are not above God's authority.  We meet the authority of Jesus, calmly waiting, calmly persisting, calmly expecting the demon to give in, and so it happens and the man is healed. 

            This story is all about healing.  Easter is all about healing.  Our church community is all about healing.  God, limited by compassion, respondent to our cries, who is sensed in every-thing is all about fixing the brokenness of ourselves, our communities and our planet.  We, here, at ‘the saints” are called in our worship, teaching, internal programs, external missions and in good leadership to be God’s body healing the broken lives of ourselves, our friends, families, neighbors, and beyond.

            The take up home thought is this:  Jesus commands the demons of our time to be quiet and to get out.  How are we His voice?  How are we His voice?

Let us pray…

            Jesus, lover of my soul; raise the fallen, cheer the faint, heal the sick, and lead the blind.  Just and Holy is your name so let your Word burst into all that is broken, distorted, fragmented, unclean, dangerous, and destructive.  Amen

RR: Jonah 2: 6b-10; Mark 1: 14-20

Jonah 3: 1 -10

            So, last week we looked at the first part of Jonah struggle with his own authentic call.  We can all understand Jonah’s struggle, because we have all been there.  This is every person’s internal struggle, that goes on throughout our lives.  We have all struggled to understand who in the eyes of our maker we really are and what it is we really want, in the midst of competing demands and interests and circumstances.

            Our hearts in God call us to one thing and often that flies in contradiction to what is the most reasonable.  We negotiate all the time between what is reasonable and what we sense in our most private authentic self.  We think, we reflect, we struggle, we compromise and we take decisions and do something or chose to do nothing.

            This is a constant process that shows up in our relationships with our families and our friends.  We know the most reasonable way to deal with someone or something, and yet we decide to do something else.  This job or that job we ask?  This house or that house we ask?  This education or that education we ask?  This advice or that advice, we wonder.  This retirement plan or that retirement plan we ask?  This treatment plan or that treatment plan, we ponder?  Do nothing here or do something there?  Pay for this or pay for that?  Buy now or buy later?  Give up this or give up that?

            This is the constant struggle between our ever emerging and changing authentic identity, and the desire that that identity be accepted by ourselves, our loved ones, and by God.

            This is the struggle known as the call of God.  This is not the call to obedience to some outside agency or all powerful judge, it is the call to be all that God has created to become and to be recognized for it.

            Jesus calls his disciples in Mark.  Mark reports that they without equivocation or doubt or push back or internal discussion accepted the call from God.  The trouble with Mark is that these are like lecture notes, and there is often no detail provided, forcing the reader to imagine what it must have been like when this amazing man waltzed into the lives of the brothers Simon and Andrew, and then brothers James and John, all devoted fishermen serving one vocation fishing.

         Mark has them immediately walking away from their lives and their families.  Well either they had no identities of their own, which I cannot believe, or they went through what people go through when called to authenticity.  And so we turn to Jonah’s struggle.  The advantage of that struggle is that in chapters 1, 3 and 4 we see the action, but in chapter 2 we see inside to his most private thinking.  It is beautiful, rare, and a privilege to have both.

         We enjoy the beauty of this pearl in the Old Testament when we grasp that this little book shows us the Jonah’s foibles, before and after his near death experiences.  This is not a story that tries to drag us into an experience of fantasy as reality.  It is a story that shows us old and erroneous God thoughts.  It points towards a new experience of God and what it means to be called by God.  It shows us how hard it was for Jonah and for us to truly grasp God’s call.

            So let us go back to Jonah’s theology.  Last week we learned things about God.  We learned that God is affected by prayer.  Jonah changes his tune, from the depths of no man’s land, a place where no man belongs, the belly of a fish he prays for deliverance and there he cries out in rejoicing at his rescue.  “you brought my life up from the pit”  I with a song of thanksgiving and promise knows salvation comes from God.

            Jonah now pays attention to the authentic voice of his call, reaches out to the city of Nineveh, and so fulfills his true calling.  The people of the city are repentant and we see God’s limits.  God chooses compassion over rigidity of decision and destruction.  God is affected by people's prayers, regardless of who offers the prayers.

            And then the most interesting thing happens.  Jonah’s old tired theology resurfaces as if he never had a near death experience.   You would expect Jonah to be happy for the citizens of this city, but instead he is mad at God for being affected by prayers.  Jonah, Jonah, Jonah

        "You don’t; get it, even after your near death experience, you don’t get it.  The call from God is not so much a call to obedience as much a call what the magnificent creature God has created in Jonah: true and authentic.  Jonah does not get it that God is limited by compassion, mercy, and hope, and so is his creation."

     Jonah kept thinking that his call by God is a call of obedience, which is old theology, contradicted by the living incarnation of Jesus the God on earth.  Jonah still lives by a theology of fragmentations, revenge, violence, hopelessness, and destruction.  Jonah is every person, and thus in our own way we too have fragments, anger, despair, and atrophy.  Pieces of the old peak out from beneath our best layers even after the most profound experiences such as near death, or Easter Sunday.

     The true call by God is a call for each of his creatures, you and I to become our own authentic selves created and whole in the image of God: optimistic, solution focused, cooperative, creative, positive, healthy and constructive.

        We meet again meet God who can be experienced through everything.  Jonah's own decisions, the sailors, the vine, and even the worm are tied to Jonah’s understanding of God.

        In this short story we see what we already know in our hearts: there are four things to take home here:

One:  We are called to be all that we are created to become.

Two:  God is affected by the prayers of everyone regardless of faith

Three: God is limited by compassion and sensitivity

Four: God can be sensed in everything, good or bad, that we experience.

        When the first disciples set out on to follow their hearts as God’s call, they did so like Jonah, struggling, trying to grasp the ungraspable.

        When we set out to follow our hearts as God’s call we too will do so like Jonah, struggling trying to grasp the ungraspable.  As we journey in His grace, we will see more clearly these four lessons:  we are called to be what God has created us to be, God is affected by our prayers, God is limited by compassion, and God can be sensed in everything.

        We will see this more clearly than Jonah, more clearly than Simon, Andrew, James and John because we have seen the cross filled and we have entered the empty tomb.

        The session of the saints in thought, prayer, and real struggle have heard what they think is the call from God for this corner of his kingdom.  Grounded in our faith in the God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, we have been inherited, as gifts, five great pillars of success:  worship, education, internal community, external mission, and good governance.

        Before us lies the challenges placed before this community of our time and place, and they are not minor challenges.   We know we are called to be Christ’s body in this neighborhood to our families, friends, colleagues, and neighbors.  We know we have rare and amazing gifts to offer.

        So the question for us to take home and ponder is this.  Are we going to end up like Jonah, hearing God lecture us about the spiritual needs of thousands, un willing to understand God is limited by compassion, patience and sensitivity, or,  are we willing to hear His voice with the benefit of having known Jesus of Nazareth?  In one case we might just sit down and glower at God, in the other case, we might want to be active instruments, doing what we can with our call to be all that God has created us to become.

Let us pray…

            O God we have heard you calling us to become all that you have created us to be: positive, solution focused, reasoned, reasonable, compassionate, patient and sensitive.  Help us turn our authentic selves, wholesome and good into actions that others will see at levels that will attract them to be all they are called to be.  Through Jesus Christ our Lord,  Amen

15 Jan 2012

RR: Jonah 2: 2-6a; John 1: 43-51

Jonah 3: 1 -7, 10, 4: 1, 5-10

Called?  Part one of two

            Last week I said we would be exploring our Lord and master through the eyes of the gospel writer of Mark.   After the baptism comes recruitment and then, after recruitment, the writer gives us the first miracles and signs.              Recruitment: calling the disciples, reaching out for help, support, students, workers, volunteers, it’s pretty much all the same thing.  Mark’s gospel as we will see next week has the first disciples answering the call without hesitation.  We get no sense of the thoughts or feelings, discernment or challenges, no sense of who these people were or what they went through when encountering this Jesus.   Next week we will look more closely at the first disciples according to Mark, but to get there, I want to first consider how difficult it is to take decisions like that.

To appreciate best this call from Jesus to the disciples, I turn to the great story of Jonah called to preach by God.   Jonah’s story is really a two part story and so this sermon is the first installment of two episodes.

The first story is a great wondrous story of freedom and resistance.  It is not a realistic story, it is over-simplistic, and was meant as a story to teach children about the three fundamental things common to all God fearing faithful:

1.      God comes from outside everything

2.      God is right here, and

3.      we are not God

In the first episode Jonah exercises his will to refuse God’s call.  We know that this was a deliberate act, there was no ambiguity in Jonah’s mind about God’s will:  go warn the people of the city of Nineveh as they are about to destroy themselves.  Be the voice of urgency calling them to repentance, for otherwise their end is near.

Jonah runs away from God’s true creation, which is another way of saying Jonah runs away from his own true authentic self, and he does so fully aware he has done so, even boasts about his defiance.  This is who God wanted me to be, this is my true self, and look at me rebelling against my true self: God is my Creator and look what I can do anyways!  Woo-hoo and LOL!

He runs towards another great city Tar-shish a city promising freedom from his own understanding of his own nature and vocation.  A city in the farthest ends of the world, where he can escape everything he knew and knows him and live in a city known for its free unfettered capitalism, lawlessness, and the freedoms given for people to make lots of money.   A city of where precious metals were traded and refined, where there was more work than people, and the products they manufacture are in demand all over. 

Jonah had a choice:  work in service to the people of one city or try his skills with unfettered capitalism in another city.  Jonah declares he is free, even from himself, and choses Tar-shish despite his knowledge that God has in mind a different path.  There is nothing in these opening scenes that says choosing Tar-shish and its promise of entrepreneurship is wrong, but it does say that it was the wrong path for Jonah, and that he knew that he was created to be something else.  He had heard a different call.  However, resisting his own calling he exercised his natural free will.  Regardless of this known will of God, he boards a Tar-shish bound ship.  There, in the midst of a terrifying storm at sea, he crawls into his rack and sleeps like a baby.

But God’s Holy Loving Spirit is a stubborn spirit, it stays with us, try as we might to ignore it.  In this story the mysterious will of God is there in the form of a horrific wind that God hurls at the ship.  It is as if everything we experience are experiences of the instruments co-operating with God.  So far in this story Jonah feels the experience of God’s spirit in the wind and then suddenly in his own ship mates.

These sailors, like sailors everywhere, were no nonsense practical people and they make an unequivocal practical intervention.

Really Jonah, who are you?  What kind of man are you?  How can you ignore the horrific storm about to destroy your life while you sleep? Why are you here?  What is going on that such storms rage around you, storms that not only threaten your life, but the lives of those sailing life with you.  What do you believe? What higher principle do you follow?  What and who do you value?  What does your life mean?  What do you truly want to do?  What is your true authentic fragmented self?

Why are you pretending there is nothing wrong when this ship is being pommeled into oblivion?  What is the matter with you?

Jonah writes about this intervention as the moment of some insight, story where he feels guilt, unworthy, unlovable, and only deserving punishment.  From one extreme to another, he thinks he is being punished for disobedience to God, but as we will see next week, he has not yet got the essence of God’s calling.  Still fragmented, miserable, filled with dread and guilt, he sees himself as a living lie, filled with nothing good.  He sees God now as his judge and executioner.  He attributes both perceptions to his disobedience and to the true nature God had created in him.  Jonah is now painfully struggling with his decision to ignore what he thinks was God’s will alone and his authentic calling or vocation.  He sees through the God’s instrument of this storm and the interventions of his ship mates that he is paying a horrible price for his choice, and he filled with dread.  His mind fills with unworthiness punishment, and suicide ideas prevail.

He begs the sailors to save themselves by throwing him over the side to a certain death.   Initially repelled by the idea, they then comply and hurl him (same word) into the sea becoming as it were instruments of God.  The ship is saved and Jonah, well Jonah finds himself in no man’s land for three days and three nights, numbers we Christians recognize, in a fish.  Even the fish becomes part of the experience of God for Jonah, as if it were a cooperative partner.

Having seen into his own false fragmented self, having suddenly accepted there is something disingenuous; un healthy and dangerous in him Jonah seeks to change.  From this no man’s land, literally in the belly of fish, where no man should be, he embraces his folly, his disobedience he thinks to God and says Oh God I am not God.  I was wrong, God come back to me he cries.

Now near death, Jonah's looks at God in a brand new way. The meaning of death is suddenly shifts from the relatively minor issues of mere physical death to one far more devastating and long lasting, spiritual death.  Jonah experiences the absence of God, spiritual death, as being much worse than physical death.

And he prays.  Now the prayers give us something new.  They give us a God who is not rigid hard hearted, unsympathetic or dispassionate.  The prayers in Jonah show us the good news, this is a God limited by compassion and sensitivity to authentic pleas for a second chance.  The prayers of the non-Jewish sailors resulted in their deliverance from the storm.  God changes direction.  We heard Jonah's prayer to God and we meet a God changing his or her mind.  God is affected by prayer.

Now next week we will see the rest of the story.  We will see again the persistence of God’s spirit in urging wholeness of self, living true to one-self, and knowing one’s heart.  We will see again the struggle we make to hear our own true voice as an authentic voice of God’s living amongst us close to our hearts.  We will see that even the most experienced of people in God can still miss things, and yet God continues to come aboard, patiently calling, coaxing teaching us, even after one or two insights that led to deeper and deeper awareness of our authentic selves in relationship to God and our world.

We will go there as we consider the disciples of Jesus through the gospel of Mark.  In the meantime, I suggest you read the first chapter of Mark with your hearts,  You might be astounded at how this will impact your worship experience next Sunday.

This is how you can do a mid week meditation:  First of all find a place of quiet where you won’t be distracted.

     Read Mark 1 slowly and clearly, letting some words resonate and others just slide away.

     Then read the passage again, noting which words stand out and seem to be speaking to you personally.   Say out loud the words you have noted. Ponder them.

     Finally, read the passage for the third time, noticing what words or phrases are challenging or comforting. Sit back and rest in God’s Word. Enjoy being in that presence of God.

Next week we will reflect on the second part Jonah’s call, knowing the call of God was not only experienced by the first disciples as in Mark, but also be very aware that we ourselves have not escaped God’s call.

Let us pray…

            You have taken us into a renewed awareness that you want for us to become all you have created us to be.  Like the first disciples, Jesus is calling for us to do something as students of all that is good and decent and compassionate in the world.  Help us struggle with the call so much so we will see our authentic selves responding to your love.  Amen