I am Thomas

Good morning, my name is Thomas. You might have heard of me. I was one of Jesus’ disciples, been with him from when he first started going around the Jewish countryside, teaching, telling stories, healing people. Most people call me doubting Thomas because of something that happened to me at the end of Jesus’ time on earth. But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. I do want to tell you the story of that day, but I’d like to build up to it, it that’s OK with you. Fill in some of the background. It might help to make a bit more sense of it for you.

I’d like to take you back to a few months before the end of Jesus’ time on earth, to a remote wilderness on the other side of the river Jordan from Jerusalem. Jesus had got it into his head that he ought to go back to Bethany, just down the road from Jerusalem. To be fair, we had just had some really bad news. Word had reached us that our mate, Lazarus, was really ill. What was really odd though was that when the message reached us Jesus didn’t seem to be in any hurry at all. We hung around for a couple of days and then, just as we were finishing breakfast on the third day Jesus announces that we ought to go and visit Lazarus.

This went down like a lead balloon. Last time we had been to the area, we had barely escaped with our lives, because the religious leaders had been plotting to kill Jesus. The others tried to talk Jesus out of it, but he was determined. Then, it all got even more bizarre. Jesus said that Lazarus was dead, but how he knew this was a complete mystery, it wasn’t like we’d had any more messages. We maybe could have understood it if he had wanted to go and see Lazarus when we was sick. We’d seen him heal plenty of people, he could have healed Lazarus as well, but no, he waited until Lazarus was dead, and then was in a big hurry to walk into danger. Really bizarre.

In the end I said to the others, “Let’s go with him, at least we can all die together”. But, as we were to find out later, death wasn’t where this story would end.

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Welcome, Travel, Message

I don't know if you have noticed but we have had a special visitor to the UK during the last week. In fact there have been lots of special visitors. The leaders of the G20 nations, the 20 richest, most influential countries on earth have been in London, with their ministers and advisors. But the one that everybody talked about most was the new President of the United States, Barack Obama.

Everybody wanted to welcome this man who has been hailed as a breath of fresh air, a new hope for the western world.

Even Radio Stoke got in on the act. Stuart George on the Breakfast Show yesterday said this about him, “Everybody loves him and he's going to solve the world's ills.” Now, I think that his tongue was in his cheek, but there is that kind of slant to a lot of the coverage of Barack Obama, expectations of what he can achieve are very high. Anyway, in order to mark the occasion of his visit to the UK, Radio Stoke are planning to send him a hamper of things to let him know about Staffordshire and South Cheshire, because he never really made it out of London. They invited people to ring and text in with suggestions of what could go in this hamper. They decided that they couldn't send food because that wouldn't get through customs. But in the end this was the list of things that they decided to send: a recipe for Oatcakes, a piece of pottery, a calendar with views of the Staffs moorlands, postcards showing views of the area, a model train, and two t-shirts for his daughters with a Staffordshire knot design on them. That is the list of things that it was decided represent this region and would be our welcome to Barack Obama to mark his first visit to the UK as President.

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Bending the Knee

I was at the Potteries Museum on Saturday with the rest of the family. Tabitha has been learning about the Tudors in histroy at school, and they had a Tudor day at the museum, so we all headed along to see what was going on. Well, there were a dozen or so people in Tudor costume, talking with lots of thees and thous, and generally being Tudorish. Including, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn.

They had some Tudor musical instruments, they had a drum, and some pipes and they might even have had a trigon, but I'm not sure what one of those is, so I couldn't swear to it. Having played the gathered company a couple of tunes, they asked for volunteers to teach a Tudor dance to. As part of this, the victims / eager volunteers where taught the correct way to bow and curtsy. The dancing master insisted that gathered crowd ought to learn as well because we all needed to bow to the King. So he showed us all how to do this, and then instructed us to reverence the King. Which about half of us did, the rest being distracted or bored or just indifferent. At which point the King barked, “Those who do not bend to the King will break”. We had another go, and far more people made some attempt at the correct bow.

Nebuchadnezzar did more than bark a pointed comment, he threatened execution, and quickly to Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. If they didn't get down on their knees, and pronto they would be toast.

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Disciplined Worship

I wonder if you have house rules? And if you do, I wonder how they came to be decided. Let me give you some examples. In our house it's my job to load the dishwasher and put it on before I go to bed. We didn't need this rule before we had a dishwasher, and after we got one it soon became clear that it was going to be my job, because when Liz did it, I get cross about it not being loaded correctly, and I was informed in no uncertain terms that if it mattered that much, then I could do it. So I do.

We also have house rules about bedtime for the kids, and I expect that as they get older, we will have to negotiate curfew times that we expect them to be home by. I guess the first set of house rules we ever had as a family were the ones that Liz and I agreed to when we got married. The love, honour, cherish, be faithful vows that underpin our marriage and which sum up the values that form the basis for our whole family life together.

The thing that all these house rules have in common is that they all, in some way, are in place to enable us to live together happily and in a way which allows our our relationships within the household to flourish. Not all of them were there to start with, and some of the ones that we will need in the future are not yet in place. As family life goes on, the details of our house rules might change, but the underlying principles of love, faithfulness, and integrity will remain.

In our reading from Exodus, God is laying out some house rules for the family of the people of God God has sent Moses to Egypt, to rescue the people of God from captivity, and they are now three months out from Egypt, and they have reached the base of the mountain of God, Mount Sinai. Previously God had spoken to the ancestors of the people of God, people like Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel, and made promises that their children would become a nation.

Now God has bought those children to the place in which God will start to forge them into a nation. That nation needed some house rules to enable the people that were part of it to live together with flourishing relationships, with each other and with God.

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The Top of the Hill

During the summer Tabitha and I went on an expedition. We set out at around 9:30 in the morning and caught two buses from the place we were staying to reach the place where we would start walking. The cloud base was quite low and we started walking in the cloud, with grey all around, and droplets of water forming on our clothes. After about half an hour the cloud lifted a bit, and we could see the path, and some of the surrounding scenery, but we still couldn't see where we were going to end up. We continued to climb, back up into the cloud, and the visibility worsened again.

Finally we got onto the home straight, heading to our destination. We still couldn't see where we wanted to get to, but we had met the railway track and knew that that would lead us there. We didn't actually see where we had been heading all that time until we were about 50 yards away, and there it was, the top of .... any guesses.....Snowdon. Even at the top, we couldn't see much, so we sat down and had our lunch and headed home again. Even though we hadn't been able to see it, reaching the peak of Snowdon had been the reason for everything that we had done since we left home, it had overshadowed our climbing, even though it wasn't visible to us.

Jesus and his disciples had been on a three year expedition around Judea. Throughout that expedition, there was also a destination, one thing that overshadowed all that Jesus did, and said. He was also going to the top of a hill, but he was going to the cross on the top of the hill. For most of the journey the disciples didn't know that this was where Jesus was headed, but lately he had begun to tell them, to let them know. Clear glimpses of the destination were breaking through the cloud. In this passage, for the first time, Jesus tells his disciples that he is to be crucified. For the first time on the journey the exact destination is made crystal clear to the disciples. The cross on the top of the hill.

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Fasting

Jesus was sent by the Holy Spirit into the desert for forty days.

Jesus is right at the beginning of his public ministry. He had just had one of the most awesome spiritual experiences that anybody could ever have: he had been baptised, the Holy Spirit had descended into him to empower and equip him for the work ahead, and his Father had reaffirmed, in front of everybody, how much he was loved. Surely it's time to crack on, to get out there, he's on a high, time to start flying.

No. Jesus was sent by the Holy Spirit into the desert for forty days.

There were a few things that happened in the desert. We know that Jesus was tempted, that he experienced attacks by Satan that aimed to stop him starting his ministry. Now I'm not planning to talk about these temptations particularly this morning, but I want to ask where Jesus got his strength from whilst he was going through this difficult time? Now, it's a bit of a puzzle because we're not told by Mark directly, and neither are we told by the other writers of the accounts of Jesus' life.

Well, it might help if we think about the places where we might look for strength. We might look to friends or family. But Jesus was in a desert, so he didn't get his strength from there. We might look for strength in favourite books or pieces of music – like the castaways on Desert Island discs. But Jesus didn't have those things either, so he didn't get his strength from there. On a physical level we might think that the best way to keep our strength up is by eating healthy food. But Jesus didn't eat, he fasted. So he didn't get his strength from food.

In fact, we could go on like this all morning, but we would run out of ideas before we hit the truth if we stick to looking for physical answers. In one of the toughest times of his life, Jesus strength came direct from God by the Holy Spirit. And it seems to me that it is no coincidence that Jesus was sent by the Holy Spirit into the desert for these forty days. It seems to me that it is when we are in the place where the worldly things we sometimes look to for strength aren't there, that we can experience the strengthening power of the Holy Spirit most.

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What's the choice?

I don't have any choice. You don't have a choice. He doesn't have a choice. These are some of the hardest words that can be spoken or heard in today's culture. In our country it's all about choice. Having the right to choose. The right to choose where our kids go to school, the ability to choose where we live, were we work, who we are friends with, who are doctor is, which hospital to go to. The power of people choosing to buy some things and not others is what drives free market economies around the world.

So, how do we feel when we are told that we can't choose. That we have to continue to live in that house because we can't sell it. That our kids can't go to that school because it is full. It seems to me that more and more people are coming to believe that they have a right to choose in every aspect of their lives, and that if they can't choose then something is badly wrong.

And they'd be right. There is something badly wrong. Actually I think that there are three things that restrict our choice: Illusions, Barriers, and Compulsions.

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