The Way Ahead - Week 4 - Talking about Faith (Part1)

Dear friends,

Just before we begin, a quick note to everyone to let you know that at the prayer and planning meeting on Monday morning we decided to split week 4 into two parts. This will allow two of the groups to catch up, and for more time to be spent on the wealth of material available for week 4 - any part of which could easily fill a session or a blog.

God Bless,

Ian

There is an old maxim that goes: You should never ask a question if you cannot handle the answer. Many years ago the Youth Group that Karen and I used to lead led a service at Kenton Methodist Church. It included, and please don’t ask me to remember why, a time of getting members of the congregation up to the front and then talking to them about conversations they wished they could have. We said to them that if they could have any conversation with anyone what would it be. The first few were what you would expect, many talking to Biblical characters about what they really meant when they said X or Y. Then we came to Janet Ford, a long standing member of the church, she took a big breath and announced to everyone, “I would talk to the burglar who broke into our house the other evening and ask him why he went through my underwear!!!”. This changed the mood of the worship somewhat and suddenly we were dealing with all sorts of pastoral issues, and real questions that needed to be addressed – what a difference one honest answer can make in the middle of an act of worship.

Jesus seems to have delighted in people who gave him honest answers to his questions, and to people who asked him their real questions. Think of how often we get stories in our Gospels about Jesus having a conversation with someone and it ends up going somewhere exciting. The woman at the well, Nicodemus who comes to Jesus by night, unnamed scribes who are just desperate for someone to talk to and to explore their faith with, the rich young ruler, the lawyer who wants to know who his neighbour is, the list goes on and on. Jesus seemed to love talking with people, listening to their real life concerns and sharing the Good News with them, even if they sometimes did not want to hear his answers.

One of the privileges that I get as the minister is that I get to have BIG conversations with people at key moments in their lives. To listen to people ask the BIG questions such as “Why me?”, and “Why did my partner die?”, and sometimes the one people feel that they shouldn’t ask “Where is God in all of this?” is a huge privilege, but it can also feel overwhelming, especially when people push you for a particular answer that I just don’t feel able to give. That said, it does beg the question, that when we sit with Jesus face-to-face to ask all our questions, what are the things that you will ask him first, and what are the answers that you want and/or expect.

In our material this week there are many examples of conversations that Jesus shared with people, who clearly he did not know too well;

1. in Mark 12 we read of the scribe who simply heard a conversation going on and came up to ask Jesus "Which commandment is the first of all?" (verse 28), only to get the amazing answers "The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these." (verses 29 – 30). But now step back and look at the wider story here, these questions came at a time that some Sadducees were asking him dumb questions that were designed to trick him, and so it is that at the end of his conversation we get the verse “After that no one dared to ask him any question” (verse 34) – not referring to the real questions, but instead to the fatuous questions that the Sadducees were asking.

Questions: 1. In what ways do you feel you are able to love God with your mind?  2. Are there questions about faith that you really want answered, but are afraid to ask?

2. in Mark 7 Jesus has a conversation with a Syro-Phoenician woman who seems to persuade him to change his mind, In Luke 7 we have the story of the Roman Centurion whose faith amazes Jesus so much that he heals his servant – which is a story that can be understood in many different ways. In both of these we read of Jesus engaging with people from beyond his own culture who take him by surprise. Jesus seems to delight in how Gentile people seem prepared to both ask awkward questions and trust him on issues that many of his own disciples would not

Question: Have you ever felt like challenging God in prayer? What happened?

3. in Mark 5 we read about Jarius’ daughter and the woman with bleeding. These were people who did not want to talk with Jesus but where through his actions, a conversation became possible that would not have been possible before

Questions: 1. Can you think of an example in your own life when being asked to talk openly about something vulnerable was helpful?
2. What does this story have to say to those who have to deal with chronic ill-health or impairment and are not healed?

So if I was going to ask you a question this week, the question that I would like to ask is what do you think that God has to say about Harwood Methodist Church? I am a fervent believer that God is with us on our journey, and that he causes us to speed up or slow down as we are ready to face the next hurdle, or need more time to sort something out. I also believe that he wants to talk to us as we undertake this journey.

I think that so often we can forget that the Christian faith is much more about the journey than the destination. A classic example of this is the way that we have so often painted a picture of how the point of life is death. Do we really think that God intends us to simply spend our lives getting ready for this life to end – it all seems a bit negative if that was his plan. That is why I would argue that God is much more interested in engaging with us in the journey, and that this journey does not end when our earthly life does. I think God wants to be talking with us and to us as we journey along, he wants us to ask him the difficult questions, he wants us to turn to him when bad things happen and to scream and shout at him when things hurt or don’t make sense – like Janet asking about why her house was burgled and why her most intimate spaces have been violated. You can call it prayer, or reflection, or whatever, but I just believe that God wants to talk to us as we journey on, and I believe that he will do what is required to enable that to happen – right down to sending his son to die on a cross so that we could be in a right relationship with him.

So, as we talk to each other about sometimes trivial things, how about talking with each other about the things that matter relating to our faith and maybe then, like the disciples on the Emmaus Road, we might find that there is someone else sharing in our conversation and making sense of the things that we don’t understand.