Sunday 2nd February 2025 – Communion Service led by Tony Corfe
Although Janet sometimes forgets that she has to light the candles after doing the notices she will be tickled that it needed both Tony and David Ramsay to light the candles today (How many men……?). We must hope that David doesn’t have the same problem with the 80 candles he has to light on Wednesday. He conducted us as we sang Happy Birthday to him.
“What makes you scared and want to hide”, Tony asked us. And despite a lot of encouragement, nobody was prepared to talk about the things that made us so scared that we wanted to run away and hide. Spiders? (Margaret Hillyard – sotto voce – only if they are big enough, like the Huntsman spiders in Australia) .
In the Old Testament reading the Psalmist wanted God’s protection because of being scared (perhaps because there was a lot of smiting going on in those days?). The Psalmist had written, “Be my rock of safety, where I can always hide”.
We could talk to God about those things that scared us. God wanted us to talk to him. The Psalmist called God a rock. And Tony and Barbara had given each of us a small rock to put in our pockets or set by our beds to remind us that we can always talk to God about things that scared us, because God cared for all of us.
The New Testament reading from Luke 4 followed on from the previous week’s passage – and a dangerously familiar story! Tony talked to us about uneasy preaching moments. For some it was that fearful time when they stepped into the pulpit for the very first time. For many the good news was being asked to go back and preach a sermon to their home congregations. Luke’s account set Jesus’ preaching in Nazareth in the early days of Jesus’ ministry and the theological connections were clear. In the wilderness Jesus had faced great temptation and adversity in conflict with the devil. He then retreated back to Nazareth, his hometown, where one would naturally assume that he would be welcomed with open arms. He had gathered with family and friends in the synagogue and had read familiar words from Isaiah. Then he’d spoken of God’s fulfilment, so powerfully realized, and those present had been astonished at the power and authority that Jesus had possessed.
But they also knew Jesus, knew his family, had seen him work in Joseph’s shadow in the carpenter’s shop. He was one of their own and they listened to him with great pride (though Matthew and Mark recount the difficulty they had in reconciling what he had become with the simple carpenter they knew). Little would they have known that the sermon was not over, and the tone of his message would begin to shift. Jesus’mission was not to massage the status quo: it was to obliterate it. He told them that no prophet was accepted in his own country.
They were about to hear a different message altogether, and there had been a strong prophetic image in his words – the prophet speaks not what we want to hear! Rather the prophet speaks words of conviction, words that challenge, and words from God. Jesus’ words had been personally dangerous for him and dangerous to the Hebrew ear. He’d recalled the ministry of Elijah and Elisha and reminded his listeners that they had provided ministry to those outside the ranks of Judaism – dangerous words that had been understood by the audience as a shift in emphasis away from an exclusively Jewish audience to a universal one.
The people had closed their minds and their hearts, and utterly refused to listen to the radical idea that God just might want to include all people in His redemptive plan. They not only disavowed his words, but also actively attempted to kill him, just as in a few years the crowds would lead him to another hill where a cross and a death awaited him.
Tony told us that Luke wanted us to catch the moment. Jesus had just returned from the wilderness and his temptation, and now the home folk treated him as cruelly and as disrespectfully as did the devil. The devil took Jesus to a cliff and offered him all that was before him. The crowds had taken him to a cliff and offered him a headlong trip over the edge.
And then Jesus had walked away from the familiar faces of the home folk and into the anonymous uncertainty of the world. They had wanted no part of a kingdom where the traditional rules of engagement were no longer operative.
(And then the sting in the tail of his address) If we were not careful when the poser of the Gospel leant our way, if our spirits matched that of the people of Nazareth, Jesus would walk away.
He just might do it again.
Potters Bar United Reformed Church 