Month: June 2021

– Today, we continue our journey (geographical and spiritual) in Mark’s Gospel. If the beginning of Chapter 4 was dedicated to Jesus’s teaching, the end of the chapter and chapter 5 are focused on Jesus’ miracles: Jesus calming the storm (last week), Jesus casting out demons (beginning of Chapter 5, we don’t have this passage in our lectionary) and today Jesus’s acts of healing that will actually result in a Resurrection. After displaying his power in his teaching, Jesus displays his power over nature, demons, and – as of today – power over disease and even over death.

The structure of the passage we have is very typical of Mark’s Gospel, with a story inside another story. Maybe Mark wrote this way to sort of insist on a point, or maybe, as we mentioned previously, the action in Mark’s Gospel is so fast paced that Jesus had do two things at the same time. Or maybe a story sheds light or another story, they explain and complement each other.

If you look at our characters today, it is certainly interesting to notice how they balance each other. Jairus and the bleeding woman seem to be complete opposite. Jairus, as a leader of the synagogue is certainly a well established man, well known and respected, learned and religious, surrounded by family and friends. On the other way around, we read that the bleeding woman has spent all her money. What the story does not say, but Jesus’s audience would know, is that the woman was considered impure, nobody could touch her without making themselves impure as well, and so she was probably very lonely – unable to have children, probably divorced, and she had no access to most of the religious activities of her people – which could also explain her religiosity that almost falls in the category of superstition: “If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well” so she thinks.

And yet. There is something common to the leader of the synagogue and to the bleeding woman: They are both at their wits’ end. They have exhausted all their resources. It is said plainly about the woman, as for Jairus, as a leader of the synagogue, if he asks a wandering preacher most his peers are suspicious about, it indicates clearly that he does not know whom to turn to. And maybe saying that the two characters are at their wits’ end is putting it mildly: They’re desperate.

And so today, both of them fall at Jesus’s feet.

– First thing I would like to notice with you is that according to Mark, both Jairus and the bleeding woman need Jesus, in the same way – no more, no less. And it’s interesting because we sometimes think that Jesus was only interested in helping the poor and the outcast – and he was certainly interested in helping them – but it’s more than that: Jesus is interested in helping all those who can’t help themselves, which means: absolutely everybody, the rich and the poor, the educated and the uneducated, the religious and the non religious. The only requirement is that they would acknowledge their need, or rather, that they would open their door, their heart to Jesus. And it wouldn’t have been easy for both of our characters.

It wasn’t easy for Jairus because he had to acknowledge that all his knowledge about God, his wisdom, his rites and his prayers couldn’t save his own daughter. It wouldn’t have been easy for the woman because she couldn’t acknowledge her disease in front of the crowd and in front of the Master. She was considered impure, and she was probably ashamed too. Even today there is still a taboo around menstruation – you know don’t tell people about that, and especially not men – so I can’t imagine how it was at the time. There is a simple reason why the woman does not ask Jesus to heal her, and rather tries to catch his cloak instead. She couldn’t ask in front of everybody. She was ashamed of her body – or she knew people would make her feel this way.

So, I have two questions for us today about the story.

– My first question is: Do we acknowledge that all of us and all around us need Christ, and are we ready to make room for them and to help them have this faith encounter? Remember, in this section of the Gospel, Jesus is training his disciples, teaching them who is his and showing them what to do to be his witnesses. Jesus didn’t heal to make a statement but he was making statement all right. And the statement is that still need him, because in the end, no matter our social status, our wealth, our relationships, we still have times in our lives when we feel broken, because we are at our wits’ end when serious disease and death strike. Remember, Jesus does not prove himself only to be a healer, rather he acts as a savior. We notice that last week: Jesus did not just calm the storm on the boat, what he did was rescuing his friends from a certain death.

How do we make it possible for others to get to know their savior? Well, that’s a question we could ask ourselves as individuals and as a church. I am excited that at St Margaret’s we are going to launch a program fro newcomers and all those who want to start afresh in the Christian faith. Like the bleeding woman, I am sure we often have visitors in our pews we are trying to “touch Jesus’s cloak”, have a glimpse of him, people who don’t feel they are so worthy but still are looking for a word of comfort, for meaning in their lives, for friendship and acceptance, ad we should be ready to welcome them. I love it that Jesus does not just let the woman go away with her gift, he wants to engage with her, to let her know she is noticed, loved and that she belongs. He calls her “daughter”. She is a daughter to him with the same love that the little girl is Jairus’ daughter. He takes time with her although he is own his way to an important man’s place. But everybody is as important in Jesus’s eyes.

– Now my second question is for us, more personally. As we noticed before, we see that, in spite of all their differences, what’s common to our two characters is that they are being willing to open themselves to Jesus. To ask for help, as Jairus, or as the woman, to “tell the truth”. To me, it is very interesting to notice that when Jesus praises the woman’s faith, we often assume that he praises the fact that she touched her cloak to seek for healing. I don’t think this is what it’s about. Jesus is not praising magic or superstition. Jesus praises the woman’s faith after Mark tells us that although the woman is all fearful and trembling, she steps out of the crowd, “fell down before [Jesus] and told him the whole truth”. She could have run away…but she chose to make herself known, and this is what faith is about.

We talked about faith last week – Jesus taught his disciples to have faith in the storm and we said that faith was a “good mix of trust, humility and boldness”. What the Gospel teaches us this week is that faith takes also vulnerability. And so my question for us today is: Do we have this vulnerability? Do we engage in faith as a man of the synagogue, who basically could live through faith as an occupation, a center of interest or a way to have a social status, do we engage faith as a woman of the street, with bit of superstition, a taste for magic and a bit of drama, or are we ready to be transformed in the faith of Jairus and the faith of the bleeding woman, looking for a faith that that will invite Jesus to really transform our lives? Are we ready to tell the whole truth about ourselves, to show Jesus who we are inside, our hurts, our sins, our powerlessness over our own destinies?

– And that leads us to the last point of the story: We need to take Jesus seriously. When Jesus arrives at Jairus’ house, he promises healing and Resurrection to all and the friends and family laugh at him! And so Jesus turn away from them, they don’t get to witness the miracle. I don’t think Jesus is trying to punish them by pushing them out of the room – it is said in other places in the Gospel that sometimes Jesus couldn’t do any miracle because of people’s lack of faith – so he had to turn away. In the same way, Jesus cannot help us if we don’t take him seriously by being plenty honest, vulnerable and trusting and ready to let him do what he needs to do for us? Jesus turned away from those who didn’t take him seriously, but he never turned away those who came to him with their whole heart. Maybe that’s all the faith we’re required to put in him.

If you remember from last week, we talked about Jesus’s role as a teacher in Mark’s Gospel. In contrast with the three other Gospels, in Matthew, Luke and John, Jesus’s teachings are somewhat limited in Mark. Instead, as we noticed last week, in Mark’s, Jesus is presented as a man of action, always on the move, spending most of his time with people, performing healing and exorcisms – and traveling quite a bit.

We have noticed that the Gospel we heard last Sunday, about the different parables of the seed, was kind of the pause in the narrative – we saw Jesus sitting with the crowds to give them images to ponder about what the kingdom of God could look like – This Sunday we are back for more action…and it’s quite dramatic to say the least. We find ourselves on the very evening of that day where Jesus gave us a pause and took time for teaching, and as he and his disciples move forward to another place, they encounter this powerful storm that threatens to overturn their boat.

One mistake we should avoid doing is to believe that we have nothing to learn from this episode and that Jesus has nothing to teach through this event. Mark did not pack his Gospel with action so people wouldn’t get bored, it’s not a blockbuster movie, rather everything in his Gospel are an occasion for learning and we discover that if Jesus taught a lot through parables, he also taught a lot through experiences. The story we have heard today is, if you will, an “acted parable”. Jesus uses the opportunity of this rather dramatic incident to show something to his disciples – and there is still today a lot we can learn from it.

In the first part of our reflection today, I would like to notice is what we may learn about ourselves in this story:

– First thing we could notice is that Jesus calls his disciples to trust. We may be tempted to say that the disciples weren’t very trusting people, but we shouldn’t blame the disciples for getting very anxious in the situation they are in. Mark doesn’t tell us that they were in some kind of “turbulence” during their crossing, rather Mark says that it was a “great storm” – not just adverse winds.

And so, instead of feeling bad when it’s difficult to trust in our own storms, I think it should help us accept our feelings – since we see that the disciples found themselves in the same place. Moreover, we can see that Jesus, although physically present in the storm, didn’t seem to offer any kind of help before they asked him. For us, in the same way, we may have moments when we feel in danger and quite forsaken. Rather than blaming ourselves for lacking trust – or blaming others or God for failing to rescue us – we need to learn to take the next step. Trust is not so much about what we feel, but how we decide we should act on our feelings.

– The disciples decide to ask Jesus for help. When Jesus rebukes them, making comments about their lack of faith, I don’t think he is upset about being woken up, but rather about being accused of letting them “perish” (Him, the author of life!). We need to trust that Jesus does not want to let us perish (which in the Gospel, is a little different than dying – perishing is dying in sin, or without having accomplished any purpose), but that we can turn to him. This is I think the heart of trust. It’s really hard to get rid of anxious feelings, but maybe we can choose to trust that there is a something, or someone!, greater than our fear.

It’s interesting to read the Gospel in Greek because the word “fear” is used both for what the disciples experience when they face the storm, but then it says as well that they experience “a great fear” when they see Jesus calming the storm (and not “awe”, as in our translation today). To me, this is this sense they have that there is much more power in Jesus than in all the other things they could be afraid of – and I think Jesus asks us to trust that. It’s not about not being afraid, not being anxious, but trusting that he is there beyond our fears and our anxieties. Rather than obsessing on getting rid of our feelings, we can just turn to him.

– Now, and this is my third remark about the disciples, I think the teaching moment is not only about learning to trust and to ask for help. More deeply, I gather from the story that Jesus helps the disciples face their own powerlessness. You know, they must have started to feel pretty confident about themselves following the Master. And yet, they still had to realize their own mortality and that they had no power over their own lives. This is probably the root of all fears, that we cannot save ourselves, that we cannot give life to ourselves. Jesus reminds the disciples that he has this power but moreover, that this is his will for them, that they will live (physically for a while, but mainly spiritually).

The disciples have to learn humility to be able to let God act through them, that they are at their core powerless. Yet, the story also tells us that the disciples shouldn’t be complacent about their powerlessness either. Maybe some of us feel overly confident and they need to learn humility, but I guess some of us, or at certain times of their lives, just give up on themselves or on anything they can do. The story reminds us that even if we are in a situation where there is nothing we can do, we still have prayer, we can still ask God to intervene in our crisis.

And so – as a conclusion about the disciples and what we can learn for ourselves – I would say that the story shows us what faith looks like, as a good mix of trust, humility but also boldness. But maybe, there is more to that in the story – I would like to touch briefly on that in a second part of our reflection today.

The story you see is not really about the disciples – the story is about Jesus – and it’s actually the main thread in Mark’s Gospel. Throughout the Gospel, Mark wants to answer this question: “Who is Jesus?” and it’s exactly on that note that our passage concludes today: ‘Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?’

– Who is Jesus? Well, as we have just discussed, we see that Jesus is a teacher (It’s after all the way the disciples call him when they wake him up) and we see that this story in many aspects is a teaching moment. Yet if you think about it, it’s rather rough for a teaching! More than just a teaching moment, it is a saving moment. Jesus displays his power as a savior, not just as a teacher or a healer or even an exorcist, there were a lot of teachers and healers and exorcists at the time – and probably still today. But there is only one savior – and not one that just helps in difficult situations, but one who saves our life – not our physical life but out eternal life!

In the Episcopal Church, we don’t talk much about Jesus as our savior, so I invite you this week to think a little more about that. That we are invited to trust that Jesus save our eternal beings in the same way he saved his disciples from death on that day.

– Now the second thing to notice about that Jesus that is really important, is that Jesus acts like God. Notice that Jesus does not pray to ask for a miracle, rather he uses his own authority to call out on the wind and the sea, and this is really what manifests the power of God through the Bible on very important occasions: When the world is created, or when the sea is parted before the Hebrews when fleeing Egypt. Jesus is not the incarnation of God the creator, but authority (and it’s really a display of authority we have here!) authority has been given to Jesus over the created world. And so this passage is what we call a “theophany”, a manifestation of God.

What Marks asks us to trust here is that Jesus really embodies who God is, and manifest to us the character of God. A God, again, who creates life and save us from death, even in the chaos of a natural world we don’t understand and cannot control – and this is the source of the trust we need to put in God. That there is no situation, problem crisis that is beyond this power.

– And so lastly, we see that Jesus’s power is to bring peace and order – not as a cop using coercion, but Jesus brings peace and order in the same way that God brought peace and order when God created the world, by calling each to their own being, and where it is supposed to be. We noticed a few weeks ago that the work of the Devil in Mark is to create division – the work of the Devil in Mark is also to create confusion and chaos. Jesus accomplishes the work of God by putting back the world in the order intended by God, a creative and life giving order. And this is of course the way we are supposed to live too.

Conclusion: Jesus manifests who God is through his teaching about the kingdom of God, but more deeply, Jesus manifests who God is through his own action and character: A God who saves, creates and restores. And this is about this power that we will learn more next week.

This Sunday we continue our cycle of readings in Mark’s Gospel and it’s interesting because most of the time in his Gospel, Mark presents Jesus as a man of action. As you may already know, Mark’s Gospel is the shortest of all the Gospels and it is a narrative that is very fast paced: Jesus is always on the move from one place to another, manifesting God’s kingdom in performing many miracles, healing and exorcisms.

And yet, I am saying that it’s interesting because this week we have come to a sort of a pause, or if you prefer, a kind of a parenthesis. Most of the fourth Chapter of Mark’s we have just read from is dedicated to Jesus’s teachings, and to the specific and sort of unique way Jesus taught: by using parables, or stories, images. We actually find three parables in this very chapter, and all of them are about planting and growing seeds as an illustration for what the Kingdom of God looks like.

And before we go any further, I would like to notice that it’s very nice, kind of touching, to hear those stories (at least two of them) on this joyful day when we gather to celebrate a baptism, because those stories are of course full of promise. They talk about the unexpected growth of a seed, that happens we don’t know how, in a way we cannot control and giving fruit beyond expectations. It connects with something very deep within ourselves, as it certainly did for the people who listened to Jesus: Simply put, it’s about the miracle of life, this amazement we may have when we farm or when we garden, and we get to observe the coming forth of fruit and flowers, or, to our even greater amazement, when a human being is born and we watch them beginning to grow into their own person to fulfill their own destiny. It’s a joy and a mystery that is beyond our comprehension – although it happens all around us and to us, constantly and consistently: Life is there and keeps bringing novelty, changes and transformation.

As Christians, it says even more to us. We know that in those parables, Jesus does not talk only about the miracle of life, but with that and beyond that, Jesus talks about the Kingdom of God. For Jesus – and it’s a beautiful thing to be reminded of on the day of a baptism – the Kingdom of God is given to us. We do nothing to earn it and we certainly cannot control it, but it’s pure grace – it only has to be received – and, again, this is what we do on the day of our baptism. Baptizing a young child (rather than an adult) makes us even more aware of the gift: You don’t need to have done great or even good things, you don’t need to know all the right things, you just have to come to God to be adopted as God’s child. On the day of baptism, we plant this little seed that is the grace of God and we trust God to do the work in the hearts of our children. If we are invited to be companions on the way, as parents, godparents, grandparents and also as a Christian community, there is certainly nothing we can do to control what God will do in the hearts of those we bring to God. It’s all about trust and letting go and waiting on God to do the work.

And I don’t know what you think but to me this is very interesting that in Mark’s Gospel where Jesus is a man of action, always on the move, always busy, yet Jesus teaches us to rest in God and to trust that God will do the work! We have seen last week that we are in this moment in the Gospel when Jesus is sending out his disciples to preach the kingdom of God and I can’t help thinking, well, what a strange thing to say when you’re hiring people that whatever they do, it will happen anyway! But it’s in this deep trust in the power of God that Jesus found his strength and energy to do all the things God called him to do – as so we are invited to the same trust to be Jesus’s true disciples.

Now there is more we need to notice about this passage of Mark’s Gospel. As I’ve said earlier, it’s kind of a pause, a parenthesis, a snapshot of Jesus’s teaching – and as we get ready to follow Jesus (in baptism) or as we re-examine (during this liturgical season) what it means to be a disciple, it’s important to think about about the heart of Jesus’s teaching – and I think this is what this passage does:

Mark uses this passage to tell us what Jesus taught – the kingdom of God – and how Jesus taught – by using parables, images, stories. And to me, this is what Mark wants to realize:

– The first thing Mark wants us to realize is that Jesus’s teaching wasn’t primarily moralistic. It’s interesting isn’t to listen to these parables because I think that one of the things we often assume about church is that church is here to teach us what to do, what is bad and what is good, but we see today that Jesus’s teaching was far from being moralistic. In Mark’s Gospel, we see that Jesus did not come on earth to tell people what to do, how they should behave, Jesus came to make us known the good news of the Kingdom of God – that God is at work in this world, within ourselves, even when we are still a very young child, or even when we are just a tree, a shrub or a seed. We see that Jesus’s teaching isn’t about right or wrong, bad or good, but Jesus’s teaching make manifest a new reality, a reality that is hidden to our eyes and yet is present in the midst of us.

– The second thing Mark wants us to understand is the way Jesus taught, using parables, images, and why Jesus taught this way. We often see in the Gospel that Jesus didn’t hesitate to tell things as they were to people when he thought they were wrong or when they were bothering him. And so what we need to understand is that when Jesus used images, it wasn’t because he didn’t dare to speak directly, the stories he told weren’t a way for him to sugarcoat something difficult. On the other way around, Jesus’s parables were there to manifest something beautiful. And we know that, right, that Jesus’s parables aren’t about us first, they are about the kingdom of God, that’s actually how they all start, with those words: “The kingdom of God is like…”

Jesus spoke in parables – and through the Gospels is still speaking to us – because that’s the way people could understand a reality beyond their understanding. Mark says that Jesus “spoke the word as [the people] were able to hear it”. We cannot apprehend, or fully apprehend, the kingdom of God with our senses or with our intelligence. So Jesus spoke first to people’s imagination and to their hearts. And so instead of trying to dig under the parable or the image to find the idea, or “what Jesus really meant”, we have to let Jesus’s words find their way inside of us. We cannot read his words to find a key to all our problems in life or to understand everything about God, but as we listen, we are drawn closer to the mystery of God’s revelation and God’s love to us. It takes time, it takes a life time.

– And so to me this is the third thing Mark would like us to realize, it is that it’s only in following Jesus that we can come slowly to an understanding: Mark says that Jesus “explained everything in private to his disciples”. To me, the sense of the parable of the seed is that it’s an image about what the word of God does inside of us. It grows little by little, until it is fully mature. We have to let it rest inside of us, and as the sower who does not know what happens when the seed falls in the ground, the word of God develops inside of us and gives birth to something new – and this something new is us born into God’s reality. As we discover more about the Kingdom of God, our shortcomings and sins are also revealed. The more we know about holiness, the more we realize our brokenness, but yet, again, it’s not so much about good and bad, as it it about transformation. Morality is about doing good things but it does not necessarily bring transformation. We can do good things on surface for different motives. But again, Jesus’s teaching isn’t about a moral life, it is about growing in a spiritual life. Jesus’s teaching is about the transformation of our being, or “conversion”. The revelation of the Kingdom of God always invites a response on our behalf and this response is conversion: Turning to Christ, which is exactly what we do on the day of our baptism and each time we renew our baptismal promises.

So let’s get started.

From this Sunday until the end of July, we will be reading through Marks’s Gospel from chap 3 to 6 – a sermon series I’ve (ambitiously?) called: “”Powerful words, mighty deeds and rising opposition”.

As you may know, Mark’s Gospel is really divided in two parts: Jesus’s ministry in Galilee and then Jesus’s journey to Jerusalem, the turning point being Peter’s confession of faith and the transfiguration Chapter 8-9. At the beginning of his ministry, in Galilee, Jesus draws attention to himself by performing healing, casting demons and proclaiming the coming of the kingdom of God.

As he does so, of course, he attracts a lot of people, but he also gives rise to a growing opposition – an opposition that will eventually lead to his death, but also to his Resurrection as the disciples get to understand what it really means to be the Messiah – “The suffering servant”

But for now, we are in Jesus’s early ministry. Our passage today actually starts after Jesus appoints the twelve – “sends” them. We see that Jesus does not only call disciples, people who will sit at his feet to learn from him, Jesus sends them on the mission as well – the disciples learn by doing. Not only do they take in Jesus’s example, but they are to imitate him and to participate in his work – even at the beginning of their formation.

Now it says something for us, of course. When we follow Jesus in our daily lives, it’s not only about learning about him, we learn from him and we learn from him as we do, as we imitate him, as we strive to love as he loved, as we strive to do God’s will as Jesus’s did God’s will – and it’s actually the topic of our passage today:

Jesus recognizes his disciples as those who do God’s will. Jesus goes even as far as to say that those who do God’s will are to him “Brother, sister and mother” – Not just “students” or “apprentices”, but his own flesh and blood. But we know that don’t we that Jesus wants us to become his very flesh and blood – that’s the reason Jesus gave us the Eucharist. It’s not only about following, it’s about belonging.

But let’s start with the beginning. To me, there are three main things to notice about the passage we have heard today.

– The first thing that is important is this re-definition Jesus makes of what it means to be close to him, to be one of his kindred. We see that Jesus does not necessarily feel close to his natural family, the people he was “assigned at birth” if you will. Actually, they are so different from Jesus that they think that Jesus is not “right in his mind” (The translation we’ve heard today say “some people” think that Jesus is out of his mind, but the original Greek links this declaration to Jesus’s own family). But then, if Jesus does not necessarily feel close to his natural family, he does not feel necessarily close to religious authorities either – it’s actually an understatement to say that since some scribes think Jesus is possessed by a demon.

As so we discover that Jesus does not like to be labeled and does not conform to the expectations. As a son, a brother, or even as a good Jew or as a rabbi.

And I think there is something important in that. To me, what Jesus does is not so much that he downplays the importance of family, rather he rejects “familiarity” for another kind of bound. Jesus rejects “domestication”, Jesus does not want to be domesticated – to become who people wants him to be – and he does that well since we see that the people who should be naturally close to him or welcome him as a peer think he is out of his mind or possessed. Jesus is not who they expect him to be.

And to me this is of importance because I wonder, as we examine the way we are to follow Jesus, if belonging to Jesus’s family as Christians does not sometimes turns into “familiarity” and “familiarity” turns into “domestication”. Having been Christians for 10, 30 or 50 years, we end up thinking we know who is Jesus – what Jesus would say, what Jesus would want, or what Jesus would do. And we can still love Jesus very much – certainly his family did love him – and yet we misunderstand him, Jesus becomes who we would like him to be – Most of the time a savior or a god who confirms our expectations instead of challenging them.

And so the challenge for us – but also the joy and the excitement – as we go through this liturgical season is to get to know Jesus again, to remove the labels we have put on Jesus, and as we re-examine who Jesus is, we can reexamine how is it that we should live our Christians lives. I certainly invite you to let yourself be surprised by the Jesus in Mark’s Gospel – who certainly did not come to the people to make them feel better about themselves, but so they can change their hearts and change their ways, and from there, how they can change the world.

– Which takes me to my second point.

Being part of Jesus’s family isn’t about flesh and blood, at least not in a biological sense, and it’s not only about belonging to a religion – the religious leaders who rejected Jesus shared the same Scriptures, the same rites, and the same faith than Jesus – they would worship in the same synagogues and sacrifice to the same Temple. But Jesus identifies those who truly belong with him as those who “do the will of God”. The sin against the Holy Spirit Jesus mentions is this way people can label themselves as godly and religious, when they consistently refuse to amend their behavior and call right and holy what is wrong and unfair. But as the first disciples, we are first called to do God’s will rather than giving ourselves titles or declaring that we are God’s family. What makes us part of the family isn’t our birth right but what we concretely do. And we know what is God’s will in Jesus’s eyes, rather than a set of rules, it means to have compassion and to work for justice.

In concrete circumstances of course, we may not have the same understanding of what is God’s will. But we are certainly called to seek God’s will together, to do the best we can to stick to Jesus’s example: teaching the love of God, denouncing abusive power, condemning lies and hypocrisy, practicing a religion of the heart rather than performing religious rites….

As I mentioned earlier, Jesus wants his disciples to learn by doing. And we also learn by doing, by serving together. In the end, Jesus tells us, this is what makes our unity. Seeking and doing God’s will – that it is actually the source of our unity, and this is my third and last point.

– Jesus notices in this passage that a divided house or kingdom cannot stand. And this is actually the way of the devil. You may know that st its root, the word “devil” means “the one who divides”. And we can certainly witness how much evil comes from division: in nations, in families, in churches, in marriages and even within ourselves. So we are right to seek unity. Yet unity isn’t about proclaiming that we are one big family, again it’s not about sharing a common label “Christians” or “Episcopalians” or in our case the “people worshiping at St Margaret’s”. Our unity – and our belonging with Christ and to Christ – should come from our desire to do God’s will together.

In many churches, a common mistake is to think that we have to get along and agree on everything and then we can seek God’s will. But as he sends his disciples, Jesus shows us that we first need to seek God’s will and then we can be with one another in harmony because we have a common goal, a mission: “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother”.

And so Division is the work of the devil, very likely, but sometimes conflicts also come when we don’t have a clear sense of what we are supposed to accomplish together. We see that in churches, but also in work places, in marriages and so on. Unity comes from what people seek to do together to bless one another and to bless the world. When they see a bigger picture than their own, limited will and desires. We can more easily leave our conflicts aside when we have a sense of purpose.

Well, I think it’s good news, isn’t it? Because in the end, Jesus invites us to live beyond ourselves, in a perpetually expanding family and mission field and all we have to do is to start somewhere – but about that, we’ll talk next week.