Christian Pathway

So, my daughter has a very good friend who was totally uninterested in sports; she had never played or watched any. She lived about a 10-minute’ walk from here, and all she was interested in was boys. Then the school took her whole class to Basildon sports centre one day, and she “forgot” shall we say her sports kit.

The teacher noticed her doing nothing asked where her kit was, got very annoyed, and then told her she either runs in her school uniform and shoes or sat on the coach with no phone!
She decided to run, and in her school uniform and shoes broke the under 15’s record for the 400m. She has since spent a lot of time in Florida running 400m on a scholarship and got engaged to a young man out their who turned out to be the son of some lord who owns a fair chunk of somerset.

she’s also going with Lauren to Nashville and Chicago in a few weeks.

I can still recall them both with about 7-8 dollies in my front garden. Always good kids both of them.

That story, however remarkable, is believable because we know things like that can happen. Local girl makes good, the beatles lived in council houses, the Stones were rebellious young lads from Dagenham and so on. We can measure the speed at which she runs at (Lauren tells me she runs like the wind). And track record sales.
Jesus was a local boy, son of a carpenter, and was a devout Jew, well read from an early age, but mary and joseph were typical devout Jews .The synagogue will have known this devout jewish family forever.

So when stood up in his local place of worship and announced himself the Messiah correctly choosing the quote from Isaiah, they were left with the same two choices we have today. As C.s Lewis said about Jesus.

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

We can see from his first recorded words in his own back garden that he never meant to leave that open to us either.
It’s the same for us today, when we hear them, we have the same choice “because like them when he said 21, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’. Jesus is either the son of God or a madman like the person on the tube who thinks he is Napoleon, or he is God.

Take your pick and don’t fudge it, because our Lord made it a bipolar choice. He never left the option to get a little bit pregnant. There is no compromise in todays words. You decide he is Lord, or you don’t.

This choice presented a lot of political problems to Jews who heard it.

Why

Being the Messiah made him a rival leader and a rival to Caesar, who was also seen as a God. Being seen as a god made the empire manageable. This meant a rival God cannot be tolerated. The Romans did not work with people who didn’t see Rome as the sole source of power.

Two, a messiah will be king of the Jews and mess up the nice exclusion pact they had with the Romans, who let them carry on with their own faith as long as they didn’t rival Caesar. A Jewish King would break this pact and cause no end of problems with a roman power base who wont accept a new king above Caesar .

So when the local boy stood up, he presented them with a total headache that would end in tears . They either had to agree or just kick him out and hope he goes away.

They kicked him out and hoped he went away. They really didn’t want him challenging the words of the leader of the world of their day.

Today, we are proof that when you are chosen by him , he doesn’t go away, and he asks us to choose him as our Lord

Let me make this point clear. When Jesus means Lord, he doesn’t refer to the lord of bath or some distant lord. He means Lord as in the Boss, the leader, or head honcho.

When I explained this point to my wife this morning, she got it when I said you are the lord of this house, the boss!

Then, like any Lord or boss he asks us to do as he asks.

This is hard, because what he asks isn’t always easy, he asks us to act in love and mercy, even when its not easy

Like this week like when The Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, that spoke to trump and tried to do what he asks and speak about mercy

She began: “Let me make one final plea, Mr President. Millions have put their trust in you.
“In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.
In America, she is not having a nice time, and her church is thankfully working hard to defend her. This shows that even today, Jesus’s message becomes political as soon as the world makes mercy a political commodity.
Alas I think speaking mercy will soon become a political act here too.

so right now here today where that leaves us today is in having to make two choices.

One in making the choice to call him Lord in a world that doesn’t believe him,

and

Two, once you call him Lord, decide to do as he asks. Act in love and mercy in a world that doesn’t always want to hear about love and mercy.

Because make no bones

That’s never easy. It’s our turn to speak about mercy in a world that doesn’t want to hear it. It has always been this way

As Frodo said in Lord of the rings when they realised standing up for goodness was about to become hard

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
Its here now and what we have to decide is whether we do as our lord Bids, speak and act mercifully or whether we don’t speak up,

I think its our generations turn to stand up and be counted

That’s the question I leave you with . What are you going to do with the time you have been given.
Are you going to call him Lord
Are you going to do what our Lord asks and speak mercy?

Amen