10 Jesus called his twelve disciples to him and gave them authority to drive out impure spirits and to heal every disease and illness.
2 These are the names of the twelve apostles: first, Simon (who is called Peter) and his brother Andrew; James son of Zebedee, and his brother John; 3 Philip and Bartholomew; Thomas and Matthew the tax collector; James son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus; 4 Simon the Zealot and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him.
5 These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: ‘Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. 6 Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel. 7 As you go, proclaim this message: “The kingdom of heaven has come near.” 8 Heal those who are ill, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons. Freely you have received; freely give.'
Sermon
As well as to asking God to bless us and guide us, our Civic Service is another chance to celebrate all that's good in our community. And so much of what is good in our community is done by volunteers. Alice has just read a poem praising volunteers who willingly give up their time to serve others. That includes many of you who are here today! So it's great that we have this opportunity to give you recognition and praise, which is so richly deserved.
It is always great to celebrate our community and those who work so hard to create that community, but it is perhaps even more necessary these days. Because we live in world where people are increasingly isolated because their attention is being given to online spaces rather than the people around them. This is not just a young person's phenomenon – all of us, whatever age we are, are susceptible to the addictive nature of online content, delivered to us through the handy, ever-present portal of our mobile phones. Community is breaking down because we care less about our neighbour and more about funny things that cats do.
Another downside of spending too much time in the online sphere is that the algorithms filter our content so that we increasing only see content we like and that we agree with. Therefore we are fooled into thinking that the majority of the world thinks like we do, because the majority of the content we see agrees with us – we operate in what are known as echo-chambers. So, people that disagree with us seem to be in a minority, and are often portrayed as ignorant and even dangerous. We saw this particularly with the response to the assassination of Charlie Kirk: some people's feeds portrayed him as the Messiah, other people's feeds said he was a very naughty boy. He was either a perfect saint or an evil sinner, with no nuance at all. With no grace at all.
Our discussions have increasingly also lacked nuance and grace , and instead of listening to other people's opinions and evaluating them fairly, we simply ignore them and, if possible, cancel them so no-one else can hear them. We may still have community but they are often online, mono-cultural and mono-opinioned communities, where no dissenting views are allowed.
God is a fan of community. God himself is a community of three Persons in one. In Genesis when he created the universe, he created a huge diversity of plants and animals to live in harmony together. And when he created humans, as the pinnacle of his creation, as the only creatures made in his image and likeness, he declared that it was not good for Adam to be alone. And when God the Son became incarnate as Jesus, he gathered around him a community of twelve disciples.
We heard in our reading who those twelve men were, and it is easy to think that that list is insignificant; but on closer inspection this list tells us some important things about what true community is like. Most of the names, like Simon, are Hebrew or of Hebrew origin, but some, like Philip are Greek. Although all of the disciples are Jewish, their names probably reflect varying degrees of contact and comfort with non-Jewish people. We don't know much about their occupations but some were fishermen; some were owners of fishing businesses, and one was a tax collector, so there were varied levels of education and wealth.
But perhaps the most striking feature of this list is that Matthew was a tax collector and Simon was a zealot. As a tax collector, Matthew not only collaborated with the occupying Romans by collecting taxes on their behalf from his fellow countrymen, but he would have also extorted more tax than was due for his own commission: he was a thief and a traitor. Simon, on the other hand, was a zealot, someone who believed that the occupying Romans, and their collaborators, should be driven out of Israel by armed force. Ordinarily, Matthew and Simon would not have spent time together – these days they would have wanted each other cancelled, and denounced each other as holding views which are unacceptable in modern society.
But here they are, together in the community that Jesus brought together. I'm sure there were some animated discussions about how to deal with the Romans, and also what the relationship between the Jews and the non-Jews should be, but they didn't walk away from each other, nor did they expel each other from the group.
As humans we naturally want to spend time with like-minded people, and will often divide ourselves according to any number of factors, both trivial and serious. So what made the disciples stick together? The answer has to be the presence of Jesus.
Jesus didn't just want students who would learn his teachings and then go out to pass them on to others; he wanted to create a community. Their message wasn't just that the kingdom of heaven had come near because God has come to earth as Jesus; but that the kingdom of heaven had come near because Jesus was forming a kingdom community, people living out what it means to belong to the kingdom of God. So the signs of that kingdom were healings and the driving out of evil: the physical healings were signs of the healing of our fallen, sinful nature and also of the healing of divisions between people; the driving out of demons were the sign of the defeat of the causes of those divisions.
And this was all possible only through Jesus: it was by grounding their identity in Jesus that the disciples could rise above the other identities that divided them; it was by working for the higher cause of living the kingdom of God on earth that all other causes became insignificant or found their real fulfilment; it was by Jesus' death that the power of the malevolent forces, and of sin, was broken.
We have gathered to celebrate community, even at a time when communities are being splintered by fear, suspicion and ambition. Well done to all of you who work so hard to build that community by serving others, often voluntarily. But if we want real and lasting community, we need to be praying that God's kingdom would come, that his will be done on earth as it is in heaven. True and lasting community can only be found by gathering together around Jesus: not just around his teachings but by becoming part of the community that he founded, the fellowship of believers, that brings the kingdom of God near, by living that kingdom now.
No comments:
Post a Comment