Dalavich and
Muckairn
Parish of Taynuilt linked with the Parish of Kilchrenan and Dalavich
Murdoch MacKenzie
14th October 2012
Lectionary Readings Hebrews 4:12-16 Mark 10:17-31
Mark 10:17 ‘And as he was setting out on his journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, ‘Good Teacher what must I do to inherit eternal life?’
This man is known as the rich young ruler. There is a similar account in Matthew’s Gospel and in Luke’s Gospel. Also in Luke there is another account, the account of a lawyer who asked Jesus the same question: ‘Teacher what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ to which Jesus replied with the summary of the law: ‘to love God and to love your neighbour as you love yourself.’ The lawyer asked: ‘But who is my neighbour?’ and Jesus told him the parable of the Good Samaritan.
When I was about 16, for the very first time I was asked to read the Bible lesson in church and I was extremely nervous. The other lesson was read by Patricia Routledge who was not at all nervous and who of course later became very famous. The passage I had to read was in Luke’s Gospel chapter 18 verses 18-30 which is the equivalent passage to our reading today in Mark……and because it was the very first time I read the Bible in church I have never forgotten it … especially the words about it being easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. And I always remember the other words which Jesus said in response to their astonishment when they asked; ‘Then who can be saved?’ And Jesus looked at them and said; ‘With men (and presumably with women) it is impossible, but not with God; for all things are possible with God.’
Eternal life? What do you think about it? Is it about going to heaven? Is it something that’s going to last for ever? Is it what happens when we’re dead? Is it something that we lie awake at night thinking about or worrying about? If I was to say to you: ‘What is eternal life?’ What would you say? For the rich young ruler, for the lawyer and for Jesus it was obviously something which they took for granted, which they wanted to achieve, something they sought after but what was it and what did they have to do to find it or rather to experience it?
Jesus answer was astonishingly clear. It was about keeping the commandments – about not killing people, not committing adultery, about not stealing, about not bearing false witness – telling lies about other people – not defrauding anyone and about honouring your father and mother. And both the rich young ruler and the lawyer said that they had observed all these things from their youth. So was that OK then? But no, it wasn’t. It wasn’t good enough just to observe the letter of the law. What mattered was the spirit in which you did it. Real life was to be lived in spirit and in truth not just by keeping on the right side of the law, not just by keeping up appearances and pretending to be good. The rich young ruler began by saying: ‘Good Teacher…what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ Jesus replied: ‘Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone!’
It’s like people one meets who know that you’re a minister or that you go to church and who say: ‘Well I don’t go to church. But I live a good life. I help my neighbours. Go shopping for Jessie who’s housebound. I never did anybody any harm. I keep myself to myself. I’m a good person. So what more do you want me to do?’ The answer is that no-one is a good person, no-one is good but God alone.
And Jesus doesn’t say: ‘O well – go to church – or say your prayers – or confess the sins which you think you do not have ……’ what he says is: ‘There is one thing that you lack; go sell what you do have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven and come, follow me.’ Now, that’s a conversation stopper isn’t it?’ It’s as if I said to you and to me: ‘Right, next Sunday just bring your bank statements along and we’ll have a look at them and decide what we can do for the poor. What we can really do for our neighbour.’ But who is our neighbour? Is it just Jessie next door or some unsuspecting person, perhaps a foreigner whom we don’t like who lives in Glasgow or Oban and who’s been beaten up and robbed by some hooligans? The parable of the Good Samaritan – the Catholic priest takes no notice goes by on the other side, the minister takes no notice, folk who rig the kirk take no notice, but along comes a Muslim from – Edinburgh or Damascus, takes the person who’s been assaulted to the A&E department of the hospital and then to the Caledonian hotel, pays the bill for two or three nights and says; ‘Here’s my phone number. Just give me a ring if you want some more.’ Now that would be what’s called: ‘Going the second mile’ would it not? But are we up for that? Is it not more likely that like the rich young ruler our face might fall and we would go away sorrowful for we have great possessions?
Now, we may not think that we have great possessions but compared to most people in the world most of us do. I have spent a lot of my life as a minister in housing estates and inner cities amidst very poor people in Britain discussing things like Credit Unions and LETS Schemes- Local Exchange Trading Schemes – which are local community-based mutual aid networks in which people exchange all kinds of goods and services with one another, without the need for money. I remember one such conversation when people were offering to do repair work and painting and such things free of cost for each other and then they asked me what I could do and all I could come up with was a free funeral but they weren’t too keen on that! But these are serious matters for people of whom there are at least 15 million in the UK who are living below the poverty line. I also worked for 12 years in India where two of my first churches were actually mud huts built on the city rubbish dump and as I broke the bread and poured out the wine each Sunday I could see just outside, the midden-rakers poking among the rubbish to see what they could find. I used to think it was possibly the most appropriate place on earth in which to celebrate communion and to say the words: ‘This is my body, broken for you’ because that is where Jesus was crucified, at Golgotha, outside the city wall on a rubbish tip.
As George MacLeod used to remind us: ‘Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral on an altar between two candlesticks but on a rubbish tip between two thieves.” If you have worked for 12 years in India amongst the poorest of the poor you realise sitting in the affluence of Connel just how well-off you are. Jesus, on the other hand, had virtually nothing. He said: ‘Foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.’ In the end he did have somewhere to lay his head and that was on a cross outside the walls of Jerusalem, whilst on the ground below the Roman soldiers gambled for the only piece of property he had on earth and that was his cloak, the seamless robe supposedly woven by his mother.
As his followers today we sing the great hymns of the church; ‘When I survey the wondrous cross on which the Prince of glory died, my richest gain I count but loss and pour contempt on all my pride.’ But do we? Do we really, really, really mean it? At the end of Isaac Watts’ famous hymn we join our voices together with great fervour and sing the words: ‘Were the whole real of nature mine, that were an offering far too small; love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.’ ‘Well then’ says Jesus, ‘There is one thing that you lack; go sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven and come, follow me.’ ‘Love God and love your neighbour as you love yourself.’ If I was to do that, or you were to do that or we were all to do that, there would be a revolution. People would be again heard to say with Tertullianof old: ‘My how these Christians love one another!’ But not only one another. What about our neighbour. But who is our neighbour? And Jesus replies with the parable of the Good Samaritan and at the end he asks the lawyer: ’Which of these three do you think proved neighbour to the man who fell among thieves?’ And the lawyer said: ‘The one who showed mercy on him’ and Jesus said: ‘Go and do likewise’.
So this was Jesus’ answer to the question: ‘What must I do to inherit eternal life?’ But what does this mean? Does it mean heaven? Does it mean entering the kingdom of God? Does it mean being good and keeping the rules or does it mean selling what you have and giving to the poor? This answer was not what the rich young ruler expected. And when we pray as we do: ‘Our Father in heaven hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven…….’ What do we think we’re asking for? Surely not selling all that we have and giving to the poor and having treasure in heaven? We may think this is a hard ask but if we remember nothing else from this morning let us remember this that in a similar situation the disciples were exceedingly astonished and said to Jesus: ‘Who then will go to heaven? … who then can be saved?’ And Jesus looked at them just as he looks at us this morning and said: ‘With men, and with women, this is impossible, but all things are possible with God.’
So let’s get out of here now, not to flagellate ourselves but rather to put our trust in God, to think again…..about our lives and the way we live and how we might do a little bit more to love our neighbours as we love ourselves and remembering that in our own strength this is impossible but that all things are possible with God. And this is what we must do to inherit eternal life. To God’s name be the praise and the glory. Amen.
Prayers of Approach Confession Forgiveness Lord’s Prayer
Praise to the Lord! O let all that is in us adore him!
Adore him for the beauty around us, the mountains and the glens, the tang of seaweed, the song of the mountain stream, the song of the birds, the beauty of Argyll and of Scotland and of the whole wide earth.
Dear Lord and Father of mankind forgive our foolish ways, for the ways in which we complain about your soft refreshing rain which waters the earth with your goodness, for the ways we forget that it’s not my brother nor my sister but it’s me, O Lord standing in the need of prayer, for the ways in which like Peter we are so often silent when we could stand up, stand up for Jesus and challenge the iniquities in the world around us.
And so we ask you to forgive our foolish ways as we pray together and say: ‘Our Father….’
Prayers of Intercession
‘Amazing grace! How sweet the sound That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now am found
Was blind, but now I see.’
Let us pray
Living God help us to see. Open our eyes, quicken our consciences, disturb our minds, melt our hearts, invade our bank balances, that we may allow your amazing grace to save a wretch like me, that we may know that when we’ve been there ten thousand years bright shining as the sun, we’ve no less days to sing your praise than when we first began. Which means that today we can begin again to see the face of Christ in the faces of all those who are in bondage, asylum seekers, refugees, the old men with the worn-out shoes on the streets of London or of Oban, the 6 million children around the world who die each year under the age of five as a direct result of hunger and all those whom we have thought about in our sermon this morning. Give us the zeal of a Wilberforce, the conviction of John Newton, the inspiration of St Paul to realise that for freedom Christ has set us free, that here there cannot be slave and free man, rich and poor, male or female, catholic or protestant because Christ is all and in all. Release us, O God, from the bondage of our prejudices, our doctrines, our inhibitions and fears and give us the courage to love our neighbours in the global village as we love ourselves, and the imagination to love the poor and the marginalized with the love with which you in Christ love us. May we be touched in the eye of the storm to give and give and give again what you have given us so that at the end of the day we may rest in peace. And all of this we ask for Christ’s sake.
And we also remember in a time of silence all those known to us who really need the touch of your hand in their lives this morning………….
And finally we remember those whom you have given us specially to love and who have gone before us into your nearer presence. If it be your holy will tell them how much we love them, how much we miss them how much we long for the day when we will be with them again. And to your Name be the praise and the glory.
Amen.
Murdoch MacKenzie
Parish of Taynuilt linked with the Parish of Kilchrenan and Dalavich
Murdoch MacKenzie
14th October 2012
Lectionary Readings Hebrews 4:12-16 Mark 10:17-31
Mark 10:17 ‘And as he was setting out on his journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, ‘Good Teacher what must I do to inherit eternal life?’
This man is known as the rich young ruler. There is a similar account in Matthew’s Gospel and in Luke’s Gospel. Also in Luke there is another account, the account of a lawyer who asked Jesus the same question: ‘Teacher what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ to which Jesus replied with the summary of the law: ‘to love God and to love your neighbour as you love yourself.’ The lawyer asked: ‘But who is my neighbour?’ and Jesus told him the parable of the Good Samaritan.
When I was about 16, for the very first time I was asked to read the Bible lesson in church and I was extremely nervous. The other lesson was read by Patricia Routledge who was not at all nervous and who of course later became very famous. The passage I had to read was in Luke’s Gospel chapter 18 verses 18-30 which is the equivalent passage to our reading today in Mark……and because it was the very first time I read the Bible in church I have never forgotten it … especially the words about it being easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. And I always remember the other words which Jesus said in response to their astonishment when they asked; ‘Then who can be saved?’ And Jesus looked at them and said; ‘With men (and presumably with women) it is impossible, but not with God; for all things are possible with God.’
Eternal life? What do you think about it? Is it about going to heaven? Is it something that’s going to last for ever? Is it what happens when we’re dead? Is it something that we lie awake at night thinking about or worrying about? If I was to say to you: ‘What is eternal life?’ What would you say? For the rich young ruler, for the lawyer and for Jesus it was obviously something which they took for granted, which they wanted to achieve, something they sought after but what was it and what did they have to do to find it or rather to experience it?
Jesus answer was astonishingly clear. It was about keeping the commandments – about not killing people, not committing adultery, about not stealing, about not bearing false witness – telling lies about other people – not defrauding anyone and about honouring your father and mother. And both the rich young ruler and the lawyer said that they had observed all these things from their youth. So was that OK then? But no, it wasn’t. It wasn’t good enough just to observe the letter of the law. What mattered was the spirit in which you did it. Real life was to be lived in spirit and in truth not just by keeping on the right side of the law, not just by keeping up appearances and pretending to be good. The rich young ruler began by saying: ‘Good Teacher…what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ Jesus replied: ‘Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone!’
It’s like people one meets who know that you’re a minister or that you go to church and who say: ‘Well I don’t go to church. But I live a good life. I help my neighbours. Go shopping for Jessie who’s housebound. I never did anybody any harm. I keep myself to myself. I’m a good person. So what more do you want me to do?’ The answer is that no-one is a good person, no-one is good but God alone.
And Jesus doesn’t say: ‘O well – go to church – or say your prayers – or confess the sins which you think you do not have ……’ what he says is: ‘There is one thing that you lack; go sell what you do have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven and come, follow me.’ Now, that’s a conversation stopper isn’t it?’ It’s as if I said to you and to me: ‘Right, next Sunday just bring your bank statements along and we’ll have a look at them and decide what we can do for the poor. What we can really do for our neighbour.’ But who is our neighbour? Is it just Jessie next door or some unsuspecting person, perhaps a foreigner whom we don’t like who lives in Glasgow or Oban and who’s been beaten up and robbed by some hooligans? The parable of the Good Samaritan – the Catholic priest takes no notice goes by on the other side, the minister takes no notice, folk who rig the kirk take no notice, but along comes a Muslim from – Edinburgh or Damascus, takes the person who’s been assaulted to the A&E department of the hospital and then to the Caledonian hotel, pays the bill for two or three nights and says; ‘Here’s my phone number. Just give me a ring if you want some more.’ Now that would be what’s called: ‘Going the second mile’ would it not? But are we up for that? Is it not more likely that like the rich young ruler our face might fall and we would go away sorrowful for we have great possessions?
Now, we may not think that we have great possessions but compared to most people in the world most of us do. I have spent a lot of my life as a minister in housing estates and inner cities amidst very poor people in Britain discussing things like Credit Unions and LETS Schemes- Local Exchange Trading Schemes – which are local community-based mutual aid networks in which people exchange all kinds of goods and services with one another, without the need for money. I remember one such conversation when people were offering to do repair work and painting and such things free of cost for each other and then they asked me what I could do and all I could come up with was a free funeral but they weren’t too keen on that! But these are serious matters for people of whom there are at least 15 million in the UK who are living below the poverty line. I also worked for 12 years in India where two of my first churches were actually mud huts built on the city rubbish dump and as I broke the bread and poured out the wine each Sunday I could see just outside, the midden-rakers poking among the rubbish to see what they could find. I used to think it was possibly the most appropriate place on earth in which to celebrate communion and to say the words: ‘This is my body, broken for you’ because that is where Jesus was crucified, at Golgotha, outside the city wall on a rubbish tip.
As George MacLeod used to remind us: ‘Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral on an altar between two candlesticks but on a rubbish tip between two thieves.” If you have worked for 12 years in India amongst the poorest of the poor you realise sitting in the affluence of Connel just how well-off you are. Jesus, on the other hand, had virtually nothing. He said: ‘Foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.’ In the end he did have somewhere to lay his head and that was on a cross outside the walls of Jerusalem, whilst on the ground below the Roman soldiers gambled for the only piece of property he had on earth and that was his cloak, the seamless robe supposedly woven by his mother.
As his followers today we sing the great hymns of the church; ‘When I survey the wondrous cross on which the Prince of glory died, my richest gain I count but loss and pour contempt on all my pride.’ But do we? Do we really, really, really mean it? At the end of Isaac Watts’ famous hymn we join our voices together with great fervour and sing the words: ‘Were the whole real of nature mine, that were an offering far too small; love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.’ ‘Well then’ says Jesus, ‘There is one thing that you lack; go sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven and come, follow me.’ ‘Love God and love your neighbour as you love yourself.’ If I was to do that, or you were to do that or we were all to do that, there would be a revolution. People would be again heard to say with Tertullianof old: ‘My how these Christians love one another!’ But not only one another. What about our neighbour. But who is our neighbour? And Jesus replies with the parable of the Good Samaritan and at the end he asks the lawyer: ’Which of these three do you think proved neighbour to the man who fell among thieves?’ And the lawyer said: ‘The one who showed mercy on him’ and Jesus said: ‘Go and do likewise’.
So this was Jesus’ answer to the question: ‘What must I do to inherit eternal life?’ But what does this mean? Does it mean heaven? Does it mean entering the kingdom of God? Does it mean being good and keeping the rules or does it mean selling what you have and giving to the poor? This answer was not what the rich young ruler expected. And when we pray as we do: ‘Our Father in heaven hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven…….’ What do we think we’re asking for? Surely not selling all that we have and giving to the poor and having treasure in heaven? We may think this is a hard ask but if we remember nothing else from this morning let us remember this that in a similar situation the disciples were exceedingly astonished and said to Jesus: ‘Who then will go to heaven? … who then can be saved?’ And Jesus looked at them just as he looks at us this morning and said: ‘With men, and with women, this is impossible, but all things are possible with God.’
So let’s get out of here now, not to flagellate ourselves but rather to put our trust in God, to think again…..about our lives and the way we live and how we might do a little bit more to love our neighbours as we love ourselves and remembering that in our own strength this is impossible but that all things are possible with God. And this is what we must do to inherit eternal life. To God’s name be the praise and the glory. Amen.
Prayers of Approach Confession Forgiveness Lord’s Prayer
Praise to the Lord! O let all that is in us adore him!
Adore him for the beauty around us, the mountains and the glens, the tang of seaweed, the song of the mountain stream, the song of the birds, the beauty of Argyll and of Scotland and of the whole wide earth.
Dear Lord and Father of mankind forgive our foolish ways, for the ways in which we complain about your soft refreshing rain which waters the earth with your goodness, for the ways we forget that it’s not my brother nor my sister but it’s me, O Lord standing in the need of prayer, for the ways in which like Peter we are so often silent when we could stand up, stand up for Jesus and challenge the iniquities in the world around us.
And so we ask you to forgive our foolish ways as we pray together and say: ‘Our Father….’
Prayers of Intercession
‘Amazing grace! How sweet the sound That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now am found
Was blind, but now I see.’
Let us pray
Living God help us to see. Open our eyes, quicken our consciences, disturb our minds, melt our hearts, invade our bank balances, that we may allow your amazing grace to save a wretch like me, that we may know that when we’ve been there ten thousand years bright shining as the sun, we’ve no less days to sing your praise than when we first began. Which means that today we can begin again to see the face of Christ in the faces of all those who are in bondage, asylum seekers, refugees, the old men with the worn-out shoes on the streets of London or of Oban, the 6 million children around the world who die each year under the age of five as a direct result of hunger and all those whom we have thought about in our sermon this morning. Give us the zeal of a Wilberforce, the conviction of John Newton, the inspiration of St Paul to realise that for freedom Christ has set us free, that here there cannot be slave and free man, rich and poor, male or female, catholic or protestant because Christ is all and in all. Release us, O God, from the bondage of our prejudices, our doctrines, our inhibitions and fears and give us the courage to love our neighbours in the global village as we love ourselves, and the imagination to love the poor and the marginalized with the love with which you in Christ love us. May we be touched in the eye of the storm to give and give and give again what you have given us so that at the end of the day we may rest in peace. And all of this we ask for Christ’s sake.
And we also remember in a time of silence all those known to us who really need the touch of your hand in their lives this morning………….
And finally we remember those whom you have given us specially to love and who have gone before us into your nearer presence. If it be your holy will tell them how much we love them, how much we miss them how much we long for the day when we will be with them again. And to your Name be the praise and the glory.
Amen.
Murdoch MacKenzie
