Sunday 26th January 2025 – Family Service led by Martyn Macphee
Martyn’s Theme for the day was about not mixing preaching with meddling. And it looked like someone had meddled with his choice of hymns – something that surprised but did not faze him.
The New Testament reading from Luke 4 had Jesus preaching in the synagogue at Nazareth. We got to the point where Jesus told them that the passage of scripture he’d read had come true. We didn’t get to the point where the congregation tried to throw him off a cliff, but it was a good example, Martyn felt, of “shooting the messenger”. And he hoped he’d not suffer that fate with us.
He told us about the experience of a friend of his who had been preaching in his local church about the 3rd Chapter of Paul’s letter to the Galatians. Everything had been going along smoothly with what he was saying until he listed three areas of conflict that he was experiencing in the church, saying how uncanny it was how Paul’s words spoke with such relevance to them in their own days. A member of the congregation had then stood up and started with a sermon of his own – a rant.
Later in the week, his friend had visited the impromptu preacher and asked him what happened, and he’d said, “I’ll tell you exactly what happened, preacher. You went from preaching to meddling”.
Martyn had often wondered where you drew the line. When did preaching, talking to the Gospel, become meddling in the personal affairs of those in the congregation.
Luke 4 was a well-known lesson for us he felt, and a classic example of what he’d been talking about – how Jesus had gone from preaching to meddling, and it almost cost him his life.
Jesus had grown up in Nazareth, the son of Joseph and Mary. When he was about 30 years old, he had gone down to the Jordan River and been baptized by John. He’d then been out into the wilderness for 40 days where he had been tempted by Satan. He’d prayed, and after the 40 days in the wilderness he’d come back to Galilee and begun teaching in the local synagogues. He had been an immediate success.
It was only a matter of time before he went back to Nazareth and the folks in Nazareth had every reason to be proud. He was one of their own. So Jesus had come to the synagogue on the Sabbath and it had been a moment of high drama. The clerk had handed him the book of Isaiah (it would, of course, have been a scroll, not a book). Jesus had taken the scroll, unfolded it to the 61st chapter of Isaiah. Not contentious stuff. When Jesus had finished reading from the prophet Isaiah, he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. Then he said, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing”. Luke said that all wondered at the gracious words which proceeded out of his mouth. Had Jesus stopped there and accepted the praise of his elders, the story would have had a happy ending. But Jesus had not stopped there. Martyn supposed he’d thought to himself, I’ll show them!
He’d sat down and taught them two stories, two examples of God’s love as it is poured out in ways we don’t appreciate. The first was the story of the widow of Zarephath, the other was of Naaman, the Syrian king. Both stories were found in the Old Testament, and both would have been very familiar to those listening to him. The problem was, the Jews hated those stories. The widow was a poor, helpless nobody who lived in the land of Sidon, a mostly Gentile area north of Galilee, and she was almost certainly a Gentile. Why should God favour her over proper Jewish widows in Judea. And then there was Naaman, a Syrian military officer, and on top of that a leper. There were plenty of lepers among the Jewish people in need of healing. Why would God show His mercy to a Gentile?
Jesus used those examples to show just how undiscriminating God can be. And the upshot shot of it all was that if God could be so gracious and quick to attend the needs of poor helpless widow in Sidon, and come to the mercy of an undeserving Gentile in Syria, what gave self-righteous Jewish Elders the privilege of saying, who belonged in the kingdom, and who didn’t? Jesus was meddling in their political affairs, and it nearly cost him his life.
And Martyn gave us a litany of people who’d gone from preaching to meddling and the fates they had suffered. They had all been guilty of that same flaw.
In drawing the line between the two, Martyn thought you had to make the difference between preaching that was abstract and preaching that was concrete. Preaching turned to meddling when it got specific, concrete, and exposed our blind spots. Topics of conversation that we couldn’t discuss rationally – blind spots in our lives where we were in some form of denial, where we found ourselves getting defensive and unable to talk about something objectively.
So Martyn thought that preaching turned to meddling when the Gospel hit home and touched us. The preacher would never know when that happened, or what he/she might have said to trigger it. All that was important was that when it happened, we turned our discomfort over to God and let God use it to lead us to deeper faith and a better understanding of ourselves.
He gave us the example of Donna, faced one Sunday with a lesson entitled, “Who’s Pulling your strings?”. It had to do with how our lives were often governed by external forces and not the Spirit of God within us. She’d gone home absolutely livid, but over time that one lesson had changed her life. She still listened to what other people had to say, but from that day on no one was pulling her strings.
So Martyn thought that preaching turned to meddling when the Gospel hit home. He’d encourage us to be bolder about speaking the truth in love – to do a little meddling ourselves. And when the shoe was on the other foot, when a sermon, a lesson, or something someone said, hit a hot button in us, he hoped we’d be willing to take the message to heart and not kill the messenger.
Potters Bar United Reformed Church 