I started my sermon last Sunday, by speaking about the differences between the Roman Catholic and Church of England calendars; about why at St Mark’s we were keeping the 2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, whilst at St Gabriel’s we were keeping the 2nd Sunday of Epiphany. Today I’m going to start by mentioning one of the problems that can cause, perhaps especially for the clergy when they’re looking for a theme for a sermon! The problem is, because we use different calendars in the two churches in this benefice, we can sometimes have different readings in the two churches on a Sunday, and today is one of those Sundays. So whilst our readings at St Mark’s today, the readings for the 3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, are concerned with answering the Lord’s call and with repentance, the readings at St Gabriel’s, the readings for the 3rd Sunday of Epiphany, are still concerned with revelation and with signs pointing to the true identity of Jesus. Nevertheless, even though these readings do seem quite different on the surface, there is, I think, still a common thread in these readings, and it’s one that I’ve also spoken about recently, the need to be willing and able to change, to do things differently so that we can follow the Lord and proclaim the Gospel.
Our readings at St Mark’s today start with Jonah. I’m sure we all know the story of Jonah, how God chose him to go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim God’s word to the inhabitants there. And the word was to change your ways, repent and desist from evil behaviour. We also know that Jonah didn’t want to go, and he tried to run away to Tarshish. We don’t know where exactly Tarshish was. All we know is that it seems to have been associated with the sea to the west of Israel, and with great wealth, especially in metals. So when God asked Jonah to leave what he was doing and go to Nineveh, Jonah’s response was to run as fast and far as he could in the opposite direction, Nineveh being far to the east of Israel. But of course, we can’t run away from God no matter where we go nor how fast we go there and in the end, Jonah did end up in Nineveh, doing what God had asked him to do.
That theme of leaving what we’re doing in order to proclaim God’s word runs through this morning’s Gospel reading at St Mark’s too. At this point in St Mark’s Gospel, Jesus had started his public ministry and was beginning to call disciples, people to follow him and help him to proclaim the Good News. And the first people he calls are two sets of brothers, Simon and Andrew, and James and John. The Gospel tells us that they were all fishermen, and when Jesus found them, they were all busy at their work. Simon and Andrew were fishing, and James and John were mending their nets. But when Jesus called them, they left what they were doing and followed him. They didn’t try to run away as Jonah had done, they didn’t say they were too busy, they didn’t get together for a chat about whether they should follow Jesus or not, they didn’t even ask Jesus why they should leave what they were doing and follow him. They didn’t ask what was going to happen to their boats and nets, or how they were going to make a living if they left these things behind, they just followed Jesus’ call.
So these readings are about people who were asked to stop what they were doing and do something else instead. To stop doing what they were used to doing and do something for God. And they responded in different ways. Jonah tried to run away. Simon, Andrew, James and John, simply stopped what they were doing and followed Jesus. We could look at these two Bible stories as stories about how people respond to change, how adaptable they are and how willing they are to change their ways for God. And when we look at these stories in that way, they become stories that are very much applicable to people in the Church; to us.
As I’ve said many times, including recently, we can’t stay the same for ever because the world we live in doesn’t stay the same for ever. If we want to be able to proclaim the Good News to the world we live in, we have to adaptable and willing to change. And we can see this in the reading from 1 Corinthians, which is the second reading at St Mark’s today. In that reading St Paul urges the Corinthians to change their ways, to behave in a different way than they had been doing, and the reason St Paul gives for this is,
‘…because the world as we know it is passing away.’
What St Paul meant by that is that Jesus would return in the near future and the world, as we know it, was going to come to an end. We know that didn’t happen, but nevertheless, those words are applicable to us because the world as we know it is always passing away. It must be because the world is in a constant state of change. Things today are not the same as they were in the past and so, if we want to proclaim the Good News to today’s world, we have to adapt to today’s world. And I’ll give you an example of what I mean.
Many years before I was ordained, I was once involved in a conversation between a priest and a woman, a lapsed Catholic as I recall, about why so many people don’t go to church these days, as those days were then. The lady was saying that, in her opinion, the reason many people didn’t go to church was because it was so old fashioned and boring and that, these days, people want something a bit more lively and up to date. The priest said that we were talking about going to church, not going to a pop concert and that people shouldn’t be going to church to be entertained, but because it’s their duty to worship God. To which the woman said,
“People don’t think like that anymore though.”
By this point the priest, who used to talk quite a lot about ‘duty’, was getting quite annoyed and he said,
“No! Nobody understands anything about duty these days!”
In my opinion, they were both right. A lot of people do find church old fashioned and boring, and they won’t come to church because of that. On the other hand, I also believe too that very few people do have any great sense of duty. But, if people have no sense of duty, you can’t appeal to their sense of duty to encourage them to come to church can you? So you have to find another way, you have to change. That priest did have a great sense of duty, and tradition. That made him a very good parish priest, but it also made him very resistant to change and in the end his congregation was a very small, and quite elderly congregation, and after he retired, that parish church closed.
We have to be adaptable to the changing world that we live in, and we have to be willing and able to change to meet the challenges that changing world presents us with. That doesn’t mean we have to adopt change for change’s sake, and when and where we do change, we have to be very careful we don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. As Jesus put it;
“…every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house, who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”
In other words what’s new isn’t the enemy of what’s old, so long as the new fulfils the old. In the context of the Church, change isn’t about doing away with tradition, and certainly not about changing our purpose, it’s simply about finding new ways to answer God’s call to proclaim the Good News. And sometimes that means we have to let go of our old ways of doing things and think of news ways, even if that means thinking outside the box at times. But if we think about the Gospel reading at St Gabriel’s this morning, the story of Jesus changing water into wine at the Wedding in Cana, isn’t that what happened there?
We’re told that the wine had run out at what we’d call a wedding reception. Can you imagine it, a wedding reception with no booze? But what would we do about that situation? No doubt we’d go, or send someone to buy more, wouldn’t we? Jews can’t marry on the Sabbath, so they could have bought more, so why didn’t they? We could argue that when Mary told Jesus about this, she was implying that he should go and buy more wine. But Jesus and Mary were guests, and there were servants at the wedding to do that sort of thing so, as Jesus said, what did it have to do with him, or her? And when Jesus did decide to do something about it, he didn’t do what might be expected and tell the chief steward or tell the servants to go and but more wine, instead he asked them to fill up some jars with water. I wonder what those servants thought about that. There they were, at a wedding, the wine had run out and instead of being asked to go and buy some more, here’s this guest telling them to get a few hundred gallons of water instead. Surely he wasn’t suggesting people should drink water instead of wine, I mean, what sort of wedding reception would that be? The wedding would have been at the groom’s house, so what would people think of him if the guests had been given water to drink instead of wine? If we think about this story, simply as a story about a wedding, apart from Jesus asking what it had to do with him or his mother, it doesn’t make any sense, nobody does what you’d expect them to do. But of course Jesus used all these upturned expectations, all these changes to what people would have expected to happen and to be done, to proclaim the Good News. He turned the water into wine and, we’re told, it was through this that ‘his disciples believed in him’.
In the second reading at St Mark’s this morning, St Paul reminds us that the world as we know it is passing away, and it always is. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the world is coming to an end, but the world as we know it is passing away because the world is always in a state of change, and we have to be ready, willing and able to respond to the challenges the changing world presents us with. That means that we have to be ready, willing and able to change so that we can continue to proclaim the Good News in a world that is not the same as it once was. So are we going to be Jonah’s and run away from what we have to do? Or are we going to be like Simon and Andrew, James and John and be ready, at a moment’s notice to leave what we’re used to behind so that we can go out into the world and proclaim the Good News? Can we learn from the story of the Wedding at Cana and think outside the box so that we can use new, different and even unexpected ways to bring people to faith?
Amen.
Propers for the 3rd Sunday of Ordinary Time (Epiphany 3) 21st January 2024
Entrance
Sing a new song to the Lord!
Sing to the Lord, all the earth.
Truth and beauty surround him, he lives in holiness and glory.
The Collect
Almighty God,
whose Son revealed in signs and miracles the wonder of your saving presence:
renew your people with your heavenly grace,
and in all our weakness,
sustain us by your mighty power;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
The Readings
Missal (St Mark’s)
Jonah 3:1-5, 10
Psalm 25:4-9
1 Corinthians 7:29-31
Mark 1:14-20
RCL (St Gabriel’s)
Genesis 14:17-20
Psalm 128
Revelation 19:6-10
John 2:1-11
Parish Church of St Mark Chadderton 