By theirs and our fruits...

I hope this isn’t one of them but I am sure that all of us must have, at some time or another, gone to a Church service which we really haven’t enjoyed – perhaps the music was too loud, too quiet, too modern, too old, the preaching was too long or too short, perhaps boring as well, or the building was cold and the people at the service were just as bad !

When we leave a service like that we sometimes have a tendency to moan ! But what one person moans about, another may well treasure, and both would be being completely honest… There can be things we do wrong in our worship certainly, but some things simply come down to taste….

And in our gospel reading today (Mark 9:38-50) we have a reminder that there really is no right and wrong when people are honestly serving Jesus and seeking to share his message. In the reading John brings it to the attention of Jesus that someone is going around casting out demons and using the name of Jesus to do it.. As he is not part of the established group of Jesus’ followers the disciples try to stop the man, but Jesus says ‘No!’.

If the man is going around doing good work in the name of Jesus then he is fighting the battle to share the message of Jesus. Tom Wright, the theologian and former Bishop of Durham, tells the story of one of the Canons of Westminster Abbey during the Second World War. During heavy bombing his house received a direct hit and burst into flames destroying everything – the clothes he was standing in were all that he had left.

The following day he travelled to Oxford to stay with a friend, and went into a shop – the shopkeeper was surprised at the amount of things he was ordering not knowing what had happened, and she said to him, ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on ?’

Of course, he was well aware of the war and its consequences… In this reading Jesus could be asking the same question to his disciples though – faced with a world that was turning against God, and was rejecting a Saviour, Jesus knew that in the fight for salvation of the world, all hands would be needed. He knew the consequences of their words and actions but they hadn’t quite understood…

This man may not have been part of the established official group of Jesus’ followers, but he was doing his work for God’s glory. And today this is a passage which I think should send alarm bells ringing for all of us within the so-called established Church, because we often can look down on people who worship differently, and who seek to share the gospel in ways that we don’t like, or perhaps more often, wouldn’t feel comfortable doing ourselves.

In the church, and perhaps in our lives in general, we can have a tendency to demonise people who do things differently, but this reading us that it is not a question of whether people do things the same as us or not, but whether people do things with the right heart and motivation that we should be concerned about.

The Archbishop has said that evangelism is our core business as a church – in other words sharing and being good news…. How we do that will change from place to place and person to person but if it’s done for God’s glory and to share his love, then it’s being done right and sometimes it will be in a way that appeals to us and sometimes it won’t, but if evangelism is being done properly then it’s not about pleasing us anyway – it’s about sharing good news in a way that others may have their interest aroused and be drawn to come closer and see what God is all about….

Someone once said that the greatest differences in the world are never between people who believe different things, but between people who believe in the same things and differ in their interpretation.

As we look at the Christian Church throughout the world today we see all kinds of different denominations – I tried to look up on the internet to see if anyone had tried to work out how many there are, but there were no answers – it’s an impossible question. The Church in the broadest sense of the word includes Christians everywhere. However, being human, people have always disagreed amongst themselves about exactly what it means to be a Christian or how this should best be expressed. Some points of disagreements are minor, others are more substantial while others are accidents of history.

The result is that different denominations have been set up within the Church of Christ, who take different approaches to the form of organisation and worship within their traditions. As an extreme example, we can compare the emphasis on mysticism in the Eastern Orthodox Churches with the Calvinist preaching tradition, or the ceremony of a Roman Catholic mass with the intimacy of a Quaker meeting. There are lots of denominations and there are lots of what are called non denomination Churches, forming, in a way, separate denominations !

But what is often seen as weakness, and what is undoubtedly a product of our human failures, can also be seen as a strength, giving breadth and being a reflection of the infinite number of ways in which God may be experienced.

That is not to say that 'anything goes' and there are some peculiar sects around calling themselves Christian… Jesus is very clear in the gospels and he is clear in this gospel reading today that ‘Whoever is not against us is for us’, and this means that if people are honestly following the message of Jesus, preaching a gospel of peace and love, a gospel of resurrection and hope, based on the life of Jesus himself, then, however they express themselves they are doing his work.

And though there is an element of interpretation for us all, ultimately we are told in the Bible that we will know a Christian when we see them – the Bible says, ‘By their fruits you shall know them’…

People will do things differently to us, they will do things in ways we don’t like, but if it is furthering the message of Jesus then there is no wrong way – someone once approached the evangelist Dwight Moody and said, ‘I don’t much like the way you do evangelism’ to which Moody replied ‘well may I ask how you do it then ?’ and she replied, ‘I don’t’. Moody then said, ‘Well I like my way of doing it better than your way of not doing it’…

As the Archbishop lays down a challenge to us to focus on evangelism, it’s time to recognise that it is the calling of us all as Christians to share and be good news – to share and show love…

Perhaps most importantly what Jesus is telling his disciples in this reading, and I think he is telling us today, is not to be concerned with what others are doing or how they’re doing it,but to be concerned with ourselves and what we’re doing and how we are living out in our lives and in our churches, Jesus’ message of love and invitation and challenge and hope and peace, through our words and our actions. AMEN