Sunday 13th October – Family Service led by Canon Richard Osborn
St Albans got us to St. Alban, a great figure of faith in history, and going further north into Bedfordshire, to another great figure from the Nonconformist tradition – John Bunyan. Born just outside Bedford in 1628 and in his younger days a rather wild, dissolute young man, he served in Oliver Cromwell’s army and between 1644 and 1647 and married a couple of years later. After years of spiritual struggle, he was received into the Baptist church in Bedford and became a deacon, noted for his preaching. In 1660, when the King was restored, he was thrown into prison for 12 years because he didn’t have a license to preach. And there he wrote the Pilgrim’s Progress. And Richard had brought his copy (regarded by some as second only to the Bible as an important work of Christian literature).
The reading from Mark’s Gospel we were shortly to hear was all about commitment, and certainly John Bunyan was committed to the cause. Jesus says that to be true followers of him, we must leave family and possessions everything that we hold dear for his sake – and Bunyan was an example of someone who did this.
Released from prison in 1672, he obtained a license to preach and spent the last years of his life as a wandering preacher. On a journey to London in 1688, he was taken ill, died, and was buried in Bunhill Fields, right opposite Wesley’s Chapel in the City Road.
Commitment was something Richard felt was not always popular in today’s society, noting that commitment to political parties, voluntary groups, charitable organizations and churches was becoming problematic. This was particularly true, amongst younger people – possibly due to the frenetic pace of modern life.
The reading had some difficult sentences. “It’s much harder for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle”, Richard believed, reminded us that you can’t buy your way into heaven with riches.
And then the challenge to leave home, brothers, sisters, mother, father, children and fields for him and for the gospel, with the promise of riches (but also of persecutions) in this world, and eternal life thereafter. Hardly an attractive manifesto for committing yourself to be a Christian, Richard thought.
The Rich Man, Richard felt, had got a bit of a raw deal. Most Jews at the time would have considered that keeping the commandments would have been enough to receive eternal life and would have been brought up on the teaching that worldly wealth – though it involved great responsibility to care for the poor – was a sign of God’s favour and made easier the good works on which salvation depended. But the rich man clearly felt that there was something more to do, something more to man’s relationship with God than simply those negative commandments. What positive action was needed to guarantee salvation? So we could imagine his disappointment and distress when Jesus replied, “You need only one thing. Go and sell all you have and give the money to the poor…..then come and follow me.” This also offered us a real challenge. Possessions, whatever they might be, were a real obstacle to our Christian discipleship, to our commitment.
Jesus had already set out the loyalty he required from his disciples. “You should be willing to take up your cross and follow me, even to the point of death”. Now they were called to abandon everything, even family ties and follow him. Today these demands might seem quite unreasonable (not to say cult-like) but they were a reminder that we didn’t commit to the Christian faith for an easy life.
Should we take away from this reading that wealth and faith and the promise of eternal life did not go together? Did Jesus despise wealth and want us to be materially impoverished, giving away all our possessions? Richard felt that wealth as such was not the issue, it was one of Jesus desiring our complete allegiance, our total commitment – reconsidering our priorities and putting him first.
The question for all of us was where did our treasures lie? Were there things that distracted us from following Jesus wholeheartedly? Status, perhaps money, popularity, respect from friends and colleagues, even personal hopes for children and grandchildren. Were we like the Rich Man, even though our primary ambition was not financial security, for Jesus said that we must leave everything to follow him.
We’d been presented with a hard reading, but occasionally we did need to be shaken, challenged, and changed. We might think that the act of giving our entire lives to follow Jesus was not feasible. Yet Jesus had reminded that everything is possible for God. Did we want to be freed from the things in this life that prevented us from following Jesus completely.
What more could we do? We were already very committed to this church and this community. Maybe we could commit more time to prayer, commit more time to practical help of those in need, keep in touch more regularly with people we knew were frail, housebound or lonely. We might do so already, but maybe we could do it more regularly. Maybe we could put the talents that we have at his service.
All of us needed to examine regularly the quality of our discipleship what we needed to give up and what we needed to take on in the service of Jesus. We might be leading good lives according to God’s laws but could never be complacent. God had made us, and he demanded our total commitment.
Potters Bar United Reformed Church 