Over the last few weeks I have been extremely busy, too busy in fact. I might be excused then for suffering a brain glitch on Saturday evening when I decided to revisit the Scriptures for the morning service. For some reason I thought that I had chosen the Epistle and the Gospel readings, and not the Old Testament and the Gospel readings... in the light of what I read I pottered around with my sermon and printed off the final order of service...
...to my surprise when I arrived at the Chapel the first reader stood to read from Ezekiel and not 2 Corinthians! And it was through that reading that God spoke, and any sermon preparation I had done was swiftly changed again...
As Ezekiel 2: 1-7 was read the first few verses seemed to shout out for attention;
"He said to me, "Son of man, stand up on your feet and I will speak to you." As he spoke, the Spirit came into me and raised me to my feet, and I heard him speaking to me. "
This passage follows directly on from Ezekiel's' initial vision of God and it is as he is face down on the ground, awed by what he has seen that God speaks and tells him to stand. To me this was significant because I rarely find myself face down in the dirt before a God. Ezekiel had been caught up in a vision, seeing perhaps only a glimpse of God's glory, but it was enough to drive him to his knees. It strikes me that we domesticate God too often, we make him safe and reliable, we don't grasp his might, his power, her radiance or wildness. Perhaps what the Church today needs more than anything else is a sense of the glory and majesty of the God we profess to worship.
The Gospel reading ( Mark 6: 1-13) makes our predicament clear, Jesus friends and family in his home town are finding it difficult to accept him as the Messiah, they have heard his teaching and witnessed miraculous healings, but remain unconvinced. I wonder if we live in a state of being unconvinced, we know the Gospels, but we don't truly know or accept the Christ who longs to move amongst us in power. When he is domesticated and safe and full of a warming love that makes us comfortable we remain largely unchanged.
I wounder what would happen to us if we dared to draw closer to the heat of that love, if we dared to allow it to consume us, in being consumed would we catch a glimpse of his glory and end up on our knees, or better still face down in the dirt....
If we were to remain there for long enough would we hear God's voice, would he command us to stand, and as we did would we find the Spirit speaking clearly to us?
I often find myself in meetings where strategy and finance are discussed, the question always seems to be about the survival of the church; how long can we hold on for....? Too often these meetings are panic driven, too often they are not God centered, and rarely do we seek a real vision, we are too focused on plans and budgets....
...and yet I hear a very real spiritual thirst and hunger voiced not only from the people who frequent our pews week by week, but also by members of the wider community. The desire is for something more and something deeper, something as yet unrealised, but something that they know deep within to be possible. Could it be that the something that folk are longing for is a real encounter with the living God?
I think that it is, and I also believe that it is time that we raised our eyes from our budgets and our plans and cried out to God for a fresh vision. I am not advocating dumping our earthly responsibilities, but I am suggesting that we revisit the sense that HE IS ABLE! He is able to do more than we could ask or imagine, and he is asking us in difficult and challenging times, when congregations are dwindling and budgets are becoming tighter to stand, and to look up, to be filled again by the fire of the Spirit through whose transforming power the church is called to be and to minister.
BUT, first we must seek that vision, and allow it to drive us not only to our knees but lower still, accepting that without him we are nothing.......
