Sunday, January 28, 2018
Sermon Audio
Full Service Audio
 
“We all worship, but we have a choice as to what we worship.” Spot-on words from David Foster Wallace.  Whether they know it or not, every human being worships something, but precisely what we worship is a matter of choice.  We all worship something.  Recently, Southern Illinois University’s Department of Medicine coined the phrase: “the worship of celebrity syndrome”.  It is where people become obsessed with celebrities to the point that they worship them.  While I am not sure that everyone has that clinical problem, and it is a clinical problem, I do think that as a society we become obsessed with celebrities.  Many find themselves living vicariously through the life of celebrities, following their every move, looking for some anomaly or scandal, some moment where they reach the highest, or they go to the depths.  You only need to line up in a grocery store to see people thumbing through magazines, which are the “Gospel of the Worship of Celebrities”.  People do it all the time!  
 
They also turn to celebrities for advice.  People are looking for advice, guidance, something to make straight the path of life’s crooked ways.  And so, celebrities are often the go-to when it comes to receiving advice on everything from relationships to diet to what kind of perfume to wear.  Then, there is common interests, that sense that perhaps a celebrity does care for me, the tweet received or the letter from their publicist, makes one feel a little bit better. There are many lonely people searching. This phenomenon is not new.  It is exacerbated by media and television, the Internet, Twitter and Facebook.  It is certainly made all the more poignant by the fact that celebrities rise to positions of power and influence much faster than they did in previous generations, and we often look to celebrities to solve our problems for us.  They are elevated in our consciousness more than they were a hundred or so years ago.  Nevertheless, human beings have always turned to people who are extraordinary, who manifest particular gifts and charisma, and sometimes we obsess about them, turning them into objects of worship.
 
Today’s passage from the Gospel of Mark shows that this was even a biblical phenomenon.  At the very beginning of the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth people wanted to turn him into a celebrity.  They wanted to honour him, and almost worshipped and revered him beyond what he wanted.  It is what some theologians have called “the Galilean Spring” when Jesus burst on to the scene around his home-town of Nazareth.  In surrounding towns, like Capernaum, in this Galilean region, he was becoming a star, and rising in the consciousness of people.  He was driving out demons, healing people, and the crowds were following him. So-much-so that Mark tells us they were “amazed by him”.  They were twittering to themselves, “Who is this?  What is this? What power does this man have?  What exousia does he have?” Word was on the street, “Our Jesus of Nazareth is here doing miraculous things.  You need to come out and have a look at this.  This is the big news!  Galilee is on fire with this man!”  
 
The disciples were also caught up in it.  Isn’t it interesting that at the beginning of the Gospel of Mark, after very few stories, we already find the disciples clamouring to get a piece of Jesus.  Simon Peter, who had a sick mother-in-law in Capernaum, goes to Jesus and asks him to heal her of her fever, and Jesus comes to the house of Simon Peter and meets the mother-in-law and probably Simon Peter’s brother, Andrew, performs the healing, and he does many more.  People, we are told, were standing at the door – a little hyperbole on Mark’s part – “the whole town was at the door wanting to see what was going on.”  They had a celebrity!  They had a star!  This was an amazing moment, and the disciples of course, you can imagine their cockiness in all of this.  “Oh yes, this is Jesus of Nazareth, the star of Galilee, and look who his close friends are!”  How many times have we all loved to do that with some celebrity we know? We name-drop that maybe we had dinner with them, or we sat next to them on the bus, or had some correspondence from them.  All of us have our fifteen seconds of fame by being attached to someone of notoriety!  Well, the disciples were attaching themselves to Jesus, and they were overwhelmed and excited by what he was doing. 
 
Jesus’ response to all of this was telling.  It causes us to ask, I think, three very powerful questions.  The first question is, “Was this out of control?”  Jesus’ response to this adulation was not to embrace it.  On the contrary, he told everyone to be quiet about it.  Even the evil powers, the demons, Jesus silenced.  Those were praising him and giving him adulation and glory, he asked that they tell nobody else, and so Jesus leaves the scene.  Jesus is interested in concealing what he is doing as much as he is in revealing what he is doing.  He knows that this is powerful, he knows that as the Son of God he has the power to heal, but Jesus did not want to be as a celebrity.  So Jesus, we are told, goes to a remote place, to solitude.  And what does he do?  He prays.  As he is praying in solitude, the disciples follow him, and prod him.  They say, “Don’t you know that the crowds want you?”  In other words, “Come on Jesus, get back to town!  Play your part being the celebrity, being the star.  After all, we are your friends, and it looks good on us.  Come on, let’s go!” 
 
It was then that Jesus had instructive words for the disciples.  It must have had an impact, because Mark’s Gospel was written primarily it is believed, through the source of Peter himself.  It is recorded that Jesus said, “I must go on now to nearby towns.  It is for this very purpose that I have come.”  The mission of Jesus was not to be a celebrity in Galilee.  It was not to be a local boy, who stays around and becomes a big name.  Jesus has to go to nearby towns, to move on from Galilee.  Jesus has a mission beyond the boundaries of where he is comfortable, beyond his place of celebrity.  He is going to risk everything by leaving the town where he is comfortable.  It was prayer that made all this possible; it was prayer that defined it.  Were Jesus’ prayers answered, is the second question.  At this point Jesus had reached the pinnacle of his ministry.  He started early and became an enormous success.  Now what?  
 
He was concerned that being a celebrity might actually keep people from him.  He was worried that his celebrity caused a degree of separation from the people that he had come to seek and to save.  He knew that in his ministry, if he was to become a celebrity, ordinary people would not feel that they could come to him.  An example of that was surely with the children.  When the disciples tried to keep the children back, Jesus said, “No, no, no!  Suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.”  It was the same with Zacchaeus, who was frightened and went up a tree for fear of being seen with the star and the crowds down below, and Jesus said, “Zaccchaeus, come on down, I am going to have dinner at your house today.”  To the woman who was bleeding and shunned by the crowd, Jesus reached out to her and brought her into his world.  Jesus knew being a celebrity, the people he had come to seek and to save, the lost from other towns and villages would not have access to him.  “Shhush” says Jesus, “don’t make a lot of noise about what I can do.  Just let me do it.”  
 
It was in those moments that he was revealed, not in his celebrity status, not as one of my friends likes to euphemistically call it, “Touchdown Jesus!”  When you only praise God when something good and glorious is happening.  That is celebrity Christianity!  No, it is in the quiet places, with the people who are in need, with the lost, the possessed.  Those are the ones that Jesus wanted to reach.  He also knew that he needed to do his Father’s will.  He knew he couldn’t do anything without the Father’s will.  Despite being the Son of God, God incarnate, he still needed to stay in touch with the One who had sent him.  Jesus, time and time again throughout his ministry, leaves the scene of great importance and prays.  At Gethsemane, in the darkest moments of his life, he says, “Father” – not my will, but – “thine will be done.”  These are not the words of a celebrity!  He prays and teaches people to pray:  “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”  
 
When Jesus prayed, he prayed to do the Father’s will.  He was not obsessed with himself.  He did not have a marketing plan.  He was not setting out to become a star.  Jesus was a servant first.  This moment at the beginning of his ministry would define the servanthood of Jesus of Nazareth.  It also meant that Jesus did not want to become another itinerant preacher or healer.  He didn’t want to be like everybody else going around with their little cadre of followers.  Jesus knew that his mission was much more, that he was heading to something cataclysmic, that it was going to lead to a Cross and a Resurrection, and he did not want to be distracted on the way by being a celebrity in the eyes of ordinary people.  Jesus was much more than that.  Were his prayers answered?  Yes.  Were they the prayers that we would expect to hear?  I am not sure.  Are his methods of getting away and praying to the Father the message that we should use?  Most definitely!  One great missionary said, “You cannot lead people with the faith unless you have first met God.”  Prayer precedes everything.  Prayer centres us on the things that matter.  When Jesus got away from the crowds he was getting away to pray the prayer that we need to pray each and every day:  that our lives conform to the will of God, that we do not follow or worship false gods, that we do not make celebrities our gods and goddesses, that we conform our lives to the will of God and the purpose of God.
 
Today we have introduced to some of you the song, Days of Elijah, and to those of you who normally come to our 9:15 service, you might have found that the other hymns we sang are new to you.  One might think that one is contemporary and one is traditional, or vice versa, but I remember many years ago doing a funeral for a young girl who had been killed in a car accident.  It was one of the hardest funerals I have ever done.  When I spoke to the family about planning the service, they said, “Dr. Stirling, we have only one request for music, and that is: What a Friend we have in Jesus.”
 
I said, “Hold on a minute now.  This place is going to be filled with teenagers.  An old hymn like What a Friend we have in Jesus might not work.  Can’t we have something a little more contemporary, just a little more upbeat?”
 
They said, “Dr. Stirling, we are having What a Friend we have in Jesus!”  
 
Now, they were Nova Scotians, and you don’t mess with Nova Scotians!  In a packed church, in immense sorrow, hundreds of teenagers got up and sang What a Friend we have in Jesus.  There was not an eye, there was not a moment, there was not a heart that wasn’t tearful and broken and moved when we sang that last verse:
 
Are we weak and heavy laden, 
Cumbered with a load of care?
Christ the Saviour is our refuge – 
Take it to the Lord in prayer.
 
At the end of the hymn, there was silence.  I had nothing to add that hadn’t already been sung.
 
When Jesus left the scene in Capernaum, and everyone wanted to turn him into their god, Jesus withdrew and did what the real God wanted him to do: to be a servant, to reach out beyond the boundaries where he was comfortable, to embrace those for whom the Cross was a gift.  He did it all by taking it to the Lord in prayer.  Oh my friends, in the storms of life, we should do the same! Amen.