Suspicious minds

From Helen

When I looked at the gospel reading (Mark 9:38-50) for this morning a song kept playing around in my mind which I think sums up a lot of what was 

in the reading.  

Some words from the song are:- 

We can't go on together

With suspicious minds 

And we can't build our dreams

On suspicious minds

Does anyone recognise these words ? They are of course from the song Suspicious Minds which was sung by Elvis. These words came to my mind because in the gospel we heard of the disciples telling Jesus about a man who was worrying them. This man was casting out demons in the name of Jesus.  The person wasn’t known to the disciples and so they asked Jesus about the man. 

This may seem understandable to us. It is hard to tell what they were most concerned about was it that if this man wanted to be like Jesus then why wasn’t He following in the same way that they were ? Or were they thinking why was this man doing all this ? Was he trying to get the glory that should have gone to Jesus ? 

It  is as if they had suspicious minds, minds that may have been concerned that there was someone claiming to be like Jesus, with minds that wondered why this was being done.

With suspicious and perhaps protective minds they went to Jesus to check. It makes me wonder about how often we do this in our lives ? 

I know that whenever I hear of a new Church or a new set of people claiming to talk on behalf of my saviour I get a bit suspicious. We have heard about lots of strange religious movements and groups who claim to talk for Jesus and who actually end up encouraging people to kill themselves and so maybe it’s no wonder that we can be a bit suspicious. 

However sometimes when we are suspicious we miss out on what God is doing. The other day I read a tweet from the Bishop of Lancaster Jill Duff who talked about seeing what God was doing on the housing estates in her area and joining in. This is what we are to do, to see what others are doing for God and not to be suspicious but to join in. 

It comes back to the idea of us as a family. We know each other and we have an idea of what each other is like. This is good but it can also make us pre judge each other. So and so will always react like this can be a helpful comment but what if God has changed them and they are going to react differently ? We have suspicious minds and sometimes that is good but other times it means that we do pre judge, 

The disciples were doing this to an extent. They didn’t know this man who was doing things in the name of Jesus and so they judged him as not being on their side. Jesus responded by saying that whoever is not against us is for us. 

This makes sense but sometimes in Church and in our lives in general we can feel that someone else has never been for us. That they have hurt us and those we love, it may have been in the past but it means that we have suspicious minds. We don’t really trust them and sometimes this makes sense for us but it can stop the work that God wants to do in both our lives and in theirs. 

We are the Church in this place and in the words of Elvis and by the way I know that is not what you would expect, we can’t go on together with suspicious minds. We need to trust each other, to work together knowing that we are doing this for God. 

I discovered a term recently which is FOMO this stands for Fear Of Missing Out. I don’t want to miss out on what God can do in my life and in the lives of those around me by being suspicious and not trusting Him. I expect that you don’t want to miss out either.

We need to work past our natural inclination to doubt and we can only do this through the power of God in our lives. 

At the end of the gospel reading Jesus talks about salt. Now we all know that too much salt is bad for you. We also know that salt can flavour something to make it so much better. 

If salt loses its saltiness or gets wet it is just mushy or particularly useless. In the time of Jesus salt was not like our cooking salt or our table salt. It was used as a fertiliser. Salt was manure. Salt helped things to grow. 

Manure helps things to grow it provides nutrients is smells horrible but it has a very important purpose. In the same way salt was used to give plants nutrients so that it could help the plants to grow. 

We are to have salt in ourselves. We are to be like manure, well in terms of helping people to grow in faith providing nutrients and health. Showing people the way to Jesus by the way that we live means that we provide nutrients. We offer the saltiness that is based on God. 

By this I mean that when we live like Jesus then we are offering people a chance to grow in Him. When we reach out to one another then we are offering lives that reflect Jesus. 

This means that by the ways we show Jesus in our lives we will help people to grow in Him and to find Him. 

When we lose our suspicious minds or to put it another way our lack of trust in God and in one another then we are able to, using the words of Elvis go on together and to build our dreams. These dreams for us though are our reality that we are moving forwards with the knowledge that God is always for us so who can be against us. May we go on together without suspicious minds. Amen