In whose strength 2012
I was reading recently a book I have got, called ‘Gumpisms’. It’s a book of sayings from Forrest Gump. For those who don’t know, Forrest was a young man considered a little backward by most people, but who managed to make a tremendous success of everything that he tried. In this book Forrest is quoted as saying, ‘Some people like me are born idiots, but many more become stupider as they go along’.
I was thinking about this statement and I think there may well be an element of truth in it ! Many of us for example end up doing things or failing to do things which we may have done in the past even though those things were actually a reasonable enough thing to do !
Children, for example, will often say and do things which we would love to say, very honest things, but we sometimes wouldn’t say them out of politeness. Sometimes of course this is very wise, but there are times when our failure to say things leads to a bigger problem, times when a bit of straight honesty might actually be helpful.
For frank and brutal honesty, I can usually rely on Helen, but even more, I can always rely on my mother – she’s the one who’ll tell me if she thinks I look scruffy, which she very often does. She’s the one who’ll still tell me about manners, and about keeping the house clean, or my shoes shined ! But, though they don’t always seem it, those things really are good.
It is often the people closest to us that tell us the things we should hear, but perhaps don’t want to hear. In the case of Jesus, this was equally true. In Mark’s gospel we are told of occasions when Jesus’ family told him what they thought was a harsh truth that he had to hear. Fresh from a stint of preaching to his newly chosen disciples (3:21), Jesus returns to his family, and they, joining in with the shouts of others suggest that he has gone out of his mind.
And now (6:1-13), a little bit later on, after having received the adulation of many people, he returned to his home town Nazareth. He began to teach in the Synagogue and people listened. But what they heard was not the wise prophetic words of God amongst them, but the words of a carpenter, the son of Mary, with brothers and sisters living right there amongst them.
They saw Jesus the man, not Jesus the Son of God, and they didn’t listen to him. They described him as the son of Mary, an insult at the time, as normally they would describe someone as the son of their father, not their mother. And the result was that Jesus was unable to work amongst them as effectively as he would have hoped. Despite healing some people who were sick, he knew that this would not be the place where his ministry would be effective.
There’s a story about a bishop who was interviewing someone ready to finish college and go out to serve in ministry. As the discussion progressed about where the bishop would send this man, the man said, "bishop, send me anywhere but New Canaan." "Why not there," the bishop asked. "You know," the man answered, "that's my hometown, and we all know that a prophet cannot be honoured in his homeland." The bishop ended the meeting by remarking, "Don't worry my friend, nobody is ever going to confuse you with a prophet !"
Well, the people of Nazareth were not about to confuse Jesus with anyone but the carpenter. And the importance of this passage is that it shows our need to be open to the message of Jesus, and to the message of all who might actually be sharing some of God’s wisdom with us. Actually every one of us is called to be a prophet, proclaiming the life transforming message of Jesus through our words and actions, and fighting for the success of the gospel values of love, peace, tolerance, compassion, hope and so on…
We must be open to his promptings, to the opportunities that fall before us each day, as God directs our path. Just as those from Nazareth were not ready to recognise the message or person of Jesus, sometimes we’re not either – sometimes we like to create our own path, with our own values and our own plan – God’s plan is fine just so long as it works in line with ours!
And someone that we can seek for inspiration in this journey of humility and vision is the apostle Paul. In the 2nd letter to the Corinthians (12:2-10) today we heard him describe how he would boast only in the message of Jesus – now this was a man who prior to his conversion was rich and successful in his work.
Following his conversion his life changed, but now he had gone about setting up Churches in many places, he had spoken to loads of people, helped with the conversion of many, and must have been pretty famous wherever he went.
With fame comes often the temptation for arrogance, for thinking that we’ve made it, and maybe even thinking we were responsible ourselves for making it. But Paul was aware of the trap – he wrote not of his success, not of his power, but of his willingness to submit to the will and strength of God. In weakness he would find strength.
And this is true for us all. There are times when in order to be strong we have to adopt a position of weakness. Someone once wrote, ‘there is strength in weakness, for when we are weak, then we are more aware of God’s all powerful grace.’
When we listen to the music of Handel's Messiah, we usually assume it was surely written by a man at the pinnacle of his success, but that is not the case. In fact, it was written after he had suffered a stroke. It was written while Handel lived in poverty amid bleak surroundings. He had suffered through a particularly deep night of gloom and despair over his failure as a musician, and the next morning he unleashed his creative genius in a musical score that continues to thrill and inspire so many people generations later. In weakness Handel found strength.
And this is true for so many of us – when put in a corner, seemingly without hope, we have had to rely on the last port of call, and for many of us, that is what Jesus is !
But how much better it would be if we could submit ourselves to his will each day, or perhaps put another way, if we could allow his love to penetrate our hearts and minds always.
Anne Frank, the young girl in Amsterdam, hiding away from the Germans during the war, whose diaries have been immortalised, wrote, ‘How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.’
From the darkness that was her life at the time, she could still dream of light, of a better world, and she was determined to play a part in bringing that to reality.
And that is our job as Christian people today – we have a world with so much hurt, so much misery, anger, hate, mistrust, intolerance and so on, but we have a God who is perfectly capable of taking the load of the world on his shoulders, and transforming everyone everywhere!
Of course there will be times when it doesn’t seem to be working, when it doesn’t seem that anyone is really listening or caring, but God cares all the time. Every moment of every day !
The people from Nazareth failed to hear Jesus because they failed to see beyond the carpenter – they didn’t believe that God could be seen in the every day things of life…
But that is actually is just where Jesus is – in the mundane, in the routine things of the day, in the places where we wouldn’t expect him to be… He is all around us waiting to be involved, waiting to play a bigger part in all that we do.
In our lives we will undoubtedly have trials, times when things just seem to be going wrong, but like speed bumps in the road, though they may slow us down, if we have God on our side, then we will keep moving forward !
In all that we do, the ultimate test is not how strong or self sufficient we are, but whether we know on whom and on what we, in our ultimate weakness, can ultimately depend. If it is Jesus, and the knowledge of his mercy and love, and all sufficient power, then we need worry about nothing…
To finish I’ll return to Forrest Gump who said, ‘If you don’t know where you are going, you probably won’t wind up there !’ Trusting in Jesus, may we always seek his guidance to find the way in our lives, and to point the way to others. AMEN
I was thinking about this statement and I think there may well be an element of truth in it ! Many of us for example end up doing things or failing to do things which we may have done in the past even though those things were actually a reasonable enough thing to do !
Children, for example, will often say and do things which we would love to say, very honest things, but we sometimes wouldn’t say them out of politeness. Sometimes of course this is very wise, but there are times when our failure to say things leads to a bigger problem, times when a bit of straight honesty might actually be helpful.
For frank and brutal honesty, I can usually rely on Helen, but even more, I can always rely on my mother – she’s the one who’ll tell me if she thinks I look scruffy, which she very often does. She’s the one who’ll still tell me about manners, and about keeping the house clean, or my shoes shined ! But, though they don’t always seem it, those things really are good.
It is often the people closest to us that tell us the things we should hear, but perhaps don’t want to hear. In the case of Jesus, this was equally true. In Mark’s gospel we are told of occasions when Jesus’ family told him what they thought was a harsh truth that he had to hear. Fresh from a stint of preaching to his newly chosen disciples (3:21), Jesus returns to his family, and they, joining in with the shouts of others suggest that he has gone out of his mind.
And now (6:1-13), a little bit later on, after having received the adulation of many people, he returned to his home town Nazareth. He began to teach in the Synagogue and people listened. But what they heard was not the wise prophetic words of God amongst them, but the words of a carpenter, the son of Mary, with brothers and sisters living right there amongst them.
They saw Jesus the man, not Jesus the Son of God, and they didn’t listen to him. They described him as the son of Mary, an insult at the time, as normally they would describe someone as the son of their father, not their mother. And the result was that Jesus was unable to work amongst them as effectively as he would have hoped. Despite healing some people who were sick, he knew that this would not be the place where his ministry would be effective.
There’s a story about a bishop who was interviewing someone ready to finish college and go out to serve in ministry. As the discussion progressed about where the bishop would send this man, the man said, "bishop, send me anywhere but New Canaan." "Why not there," the bishop asked. "You know," the man answered, "that's my hometown, and we all know that a prophet cannot be honoured in his homeland." The bishop ended the meeting by remarking, "Don't worry my friend, nobody is ever going to confuse you with a prophet !"
Well, the people of Nazareth were not about to confuse Jesus with anyone but the carpenter. And the importance of this passage is that it shows our need to be open to the message of Jesus, and to the message of all who might actually be sharing some of God’s wisdom with us. Actually every one of us is called to be a prophet, proclaiming the life transforming message of Jesus through our words and actions, and fighting for the success of the gospel values of love, peace, tolerance, compassion, hope and so on…
We must be open to his promptings, to the opportunities that fall before us each day, as God directs our path. Just as those from Nazareth were not ready to recognise the message or person of Jesus, sometimes we’re not either – sometimes we like to create our own path, with our own values and our own plan – God’s plan is fine just so long as it works in line with ours!
And someone that we can seek for inspiration in this journey of humility and vision is the apostle Paul. In the 2nd letter to the Corinthians (12:2-10) today we heard him describe how he would boast only in the message of Jesus – now this was a man who prior to his conversion was rich and successful in his work.
Following his conversion his life changed, but now he had gone about setting up Churches in many places, he had spoken to loads of people, helped with the conversion of many, and must have been pretty famous wherever he went.
With fame comes often the temptation for arrogance, for thinking that we’ve made it, and maybe even thinking we were responsible ourselves for making it. But Paul was aware of the trap – he wrote not of his success, not of his power, but of his willingness to submit to the will and strength of God. In weakness he would find strength.
And this is true for us all. There are times when in order to be strong we have to adopt a position of weakness. Someone once wrote, ‘there is strength in weakness, for when we are weak, then we are more aware of God’s all powerful grace.’
When we listen to the music of Handel's Messiah, we usually assume it was surely written by a man at the pinnacle of his success, but that is not the case. In fact, it was written after he had suffered a stroke. It was written while Handel lived in poverty amid bleak surroundings. He had suffered through a particularly deep night of gloom and despair over his failure as a musician, and the next morning he unleashed his creative genius in a musical score that continues to thrill and inspire so many people generations later. In weakness Handel found strength.
And this is true for so many of us – when put in a corner, seemingly without hope, we have had to rely on the last port of call, and for many of us, that is what Jesus is !
But how much better it would be if we could submit ourselves to his will each day, or perhaps put another way, if we could allow his love to penetrate our hearts and minds always.
Anne Frank, the young girl in Amsterdam, hiding away from the Germans during the war, whose diaries have been immortalised, wrote, ‘How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.’
From the darkness that was her life at the time, she could still dream of light, of a better world, and she was determined to play a part in bringing that to reality.
And that is our job as Christian people today – we have a world with so much hurt, so much misery, anger, hate, mistrust, intolerance and so on, but we have a God who is perfectly capable of taking the load of the world on his shoulders, and transforming everyone everywhere!
Of course there will be times when it doesn’t seem to be working, when it doesn’t seem that anyone is really listening or caring, but God cares all the time. Every moment of every day !
The people from Nazareth failed to hear Jesus because they failed to see beyond the carpenter – they didn’t believe that God could be seen in the every day things of life…
But that is actually is just where Jesus is – in the mundane, in the routine things of the day, in the places where we wouldn’t expect him to be… He is all around us waiting to be involved, waiting to play a bigger part in all that we do.
In our lives we will undoubtedly have trials, times when things just seem to be going wrong, but like speed bumps in the road, though they may slow us down, if we have God on our side, then we will keep moving forward !
In all that we do, the ultimate test is not how strong or self sufficient we are, but whether we know on whom and on what we, in our ultimate weakness, can ultimately depend. If it is Jesus, and the knowledge of his mercy and love, and all sufficient power, then we need worry about nothing…
To finish I’ll return to Forrest Gump who said, ‘If you don’t know where you are going, you probably won’t wind up there !’ Trusting in Jesus, may we always seek his guidance to find the way in our lives, and to point the way to others. AMEN
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