Patrick and Butterflies

 A talk in two parts at All Age Worship.  Not that anybody there was under 50, but they seem to have enjoyed it and got something from it.

I do apologise for the appalling coughing fit I was struck with at the end of the first part of the sermon!  No idea what got to me, but something did.  I should fast forward past that point, were I you!

Once upon a time, long, long ago, a boy was born in a small town in Scotland. His name was Maewyn Succat. For the first sixteen years of his life he grew up in a happy and stable family, but when he was sixteen, something dreadful happened! Pirates raided his village, and carried Maewin, and probably other boys, too, off into slavery in Ireland.

And for six whole years, Maewin had to belong to someone else, not free to be his own person. He was very lonely, so he turned to God for help, and learnt to love God and to pray pretty much constantly, listening to God and chatting to him.

After six years, though, Maewin was able to escape to France, where he spent many years studying and learning what the great Christian fathers had thought and taught about Jesus. Sometime during those years he was baptised, and took the name we know him by best: Patrick. He was ordained a priest, and then made a Bishop, and then God called him to go back to Ireland – the place where he had been a slave, remember? And he went, and spent the next 30 years or so telling the people of Ireland about God, and about Jesus. He died on 17 March in the year 462, and is buried in the grounds of Down Cathedral. And every year, we celebrate him on 17 March. In America they even dye their rivers green, and their beer! And some of us – me included – like to wear something green, just because.

But there’s more to celebrating St Patrick than that! Patrick trusted God, and wrote a lovely prayer, now turned into a rather long hymn. I quoted four lines right at the start of the service, and here is another verse.

I bind unto myself today
The power of God to hold and lead,
His eye to watch, his might to stay,
His ear to hearken to my need.
The wisdom of my God to teach,
His hand to guide, his shield to ward,
The word of God to give me speech,
His heavenly host to be my guard.

Patrick trusted God, and looked after God’s people in Ireland. We are going to sing a hymn reminding us to look after God’s people wherever we find them. “Brother, sister, let me serve you”. It’s number 611 if you want to use the hymn book.

---oo0oo---

Apart from St Patrick, today is all about butterflies!
First of all, we are going to watch a video,
telling us a story you know very well –
you probably remember it being read to you, or perhaps you read it to younger brothers and sisters, or to your own children.



So the caterpillar became a beautiful butterfly.
But before he became a butterfly, there was an intermediate stage.
He built a cocoon around himself.
He became a pupa.

That isn’t just a matter of hibernating, like a dormouse or bear;
to become a butterfly, caterpillars have to be completely remade. 
While they are in the pupa, all their bits dissolve away,
and are made from scratch, from the material that is there. 
It’s not just a matter of rearranging what is there,
it’s a matter of total breakdown and starting again.
The caterpillar more-or-less has to die before it can become a butterfly.

That's really scary.
But it's also very appropriate as we enter the season called Passiontide.
Jesus said, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies,
it remains just a single grain;
but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

Jesus knows that he is going to die.
He is dreading it. He was, after all, human.
We wouldn’t like it if we knew we were to be put to death tomorrow.
I once dreamed that I was going to be executed, and I can’t tell you how frightened I was!
I was so relieved to wake up and find that it was all a dream.

The farmers were sowing their fields.
Jesus knew, perhaps, that he would not live to see the crops grow.
But he knew that they would grow.
And, more importantly, he knew that they would not grow if they were not sown,
if they remained in their basket, they might germinate,
but they would rot away almost at once.
Or, if they were kept in very dry conditions, they might remain viable for years, but nothing would happen.

The seeds had to die.

The birds, at that time and in that place, were building their nests and laying their eggs.
But the eggs couldn’t remain as eggs –
they would addle and be no good to anybody.
The young birds had to grow inside the eggs,
and then they must force their way out or they would die.

Jesus could see the caterpillars that were hatching from the eggs laid last year.
He knew, I expect, that they had to become pupae before they could be butterflies.

Someone he knew had had a baby lately;
Jesus remembered this:
“When a woman is in labour, she has pain, because her hour has come.
But when her child is born, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy of having brought a human being into the world.”

Jesus saw all this and knew that from seeming dissolution, God brought new life.
He knew that he would have to die, so that new life could come.

Perhaps at that stage he didn’t really know how this would happen.
He knew that it must happen, but not how it would.

We know that God raised Jesus from death, and because of that, we have eternal life.
But that didn't stop it being really scary for Jesus.
You remember how he spent all night in the park, praying that God would make him not have to go through with it.
But he had to, and he knew he had to.
Because if he hadn’t died, he could not have been raised from the dead, and could not have made us right with God.
I expect St Patrick was very scared when he was sold into slavery.
We know that he was very lonely, so he learnt to pray, and turned to God for comfort.
And then, when he was able to leave Ireland and go to France,
that must have been scary, too.
However much he hated Ireland, change is always scary,
and he didn’t know what France was going to be like.
And I should think he was even more apprehensive when God asked him to go back to Ireland and bring the Good News of Jesus to the people there.

But Patrick did what God asked him to do.
He said “Goodbye” to his old life;
he died to it, if you like, and went bravely ahead into the new life God was calling him to.

Jesus did what God asked him to do.
We are just beginning the season called Passiontide, when we think about how Jesus went forward to his death, and through death to the glorious resurrection we will be celebrating on Easter Day.

But what does it mean for us?
Are we facing any changes in our lives?
Life is full of change, isn’t it?
Some changes are gradual, others sudden.
Some –
many, perhaps, are expected;
others come out of the blue.
But even the expected changes can be frightening –
it’s scary to move out of your parents’ home and live on your own for the first time, for instance.
And growing old is most definitely not for wimps!
But we know we have to grow and change;
we can’t stagnate, any more than an egg can stay and egg,
or a caterpillar not transform into a butterfly.
But the joy of it is, Jesus was there first!

Here, again, is St Patrick:
Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me,
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

As we face changes and new growth in our lives, let’s pray that we learn to recognise Christ in all around us, as Patrick tried to do. Amen.

What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth?

We don't always remember this in our day and age, but Jesus was a Jew. This seems obvious when I say it, but we don't often think through the implications of it. And one of the implications is that every Sabbath day, he went to worship at the local synagogue, wherever he found himself. Normally at home in Nazareth, but when he was on the road, he went local.  The picture above is of a synagogue in Capernaum which is thought to be slightly later than the one in Jesus' day, but still on the same site.

And here, in Mark's Gospel, Jesus is at the very beginning of his ministry. Mark tells us that he has been baptised, and then gone into the desert to think through the implications of this, to work out what it means to be “God's beloved Son, in whom he is well pleased.” He was tempted, and learnt what was and was not the right thing to do with his divine power.

And then John, his cousin, was put in prison and Jesus knew the time had come to start his own ministry in good earnest. He came out of the desert, and picked up Andrew and Peter and one or two others – we know from John's gospel that Andrew and Peter had been followers of John before this – and then, on the Sabbath, he finds himself in Capernaum, about 20 miles as the crow flies from his home town of Nazareth. So they all go to the synagogue there.

Now, one of the things about synagogue worship was that – is that, I should say, as I understand it is much the same today – is that you don't have to have a trained preacher up there, but almost any adult – adult males, in many synagogues, but some welcome women, too – can get up on his hind legs and expound the Scriptures. And visitors were very often asked to read the Scripture passage for the day as a way of honouring them, and it was quite “done” to comment on it. You might remember Jesus goes home to Nazareth at one stage and is asked to read the Scriptures there, with rather disastrous results. But not on this occasion.

What happens here, though is equally unexpected. Someone with an evil spirit is there, and the evil spirit recognises Jesus, and causes its host to cry out, interrupting whatever Jesus was saying or reading, to cry out: “What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth?”

“What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth?”

It's a good question, isn't it? What does Jesus want with us? Why does he come, interrupting our nice, peaceful church services? Why does he come, interrupting our nice, peaceful lives? What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth?

Of course, the answer is going to be different for each and every one of us. And yet there are some universal truths.

Firstly, I think, he answers “I want you to let me love you.”

To let him love us. That sounds as though it ought to be a no-brainer, but in fact, it can be very difficult to allow ourselves to be loved. And we tend not to look at it that way round, anyway. We think it's our business to love God – I am not quite sure what we think God's business is, but we don't always expect him to love us. And yet, how can we love unless he loved us first?

There's a story you may have heard before, told by the theologian and writer Gerard Hughes, in which he describes an image of God that many of us may have grown up with; a God who demanded our love and attention, and threatened us with eternal damnation if he didn't get it. And we ended up telling God how much we loved him, while secretly hating him and all he stood for, but terrified of not appearing to love him, because of the eternal damnation. We weren't told, or if we were told, we didn't hear, the first bit, which is that God loves us! God loves us so much that he knows quite well we can't possibly love him first. “We love, because He first loved us,” we are told. His love comes first. We need to let him love us. That's the first answer to the question, “What do you want of us, Jesus of Nazareth?”

“I want you to let me love you.”

And the second answer is “I want you to let me heal you.”

Healing. It's a bit of a vexed question, isn't it? We know that healings happened in the Scriptures, and we know that they can and do happen today, but we rarely seem to see any. We do see miraculous physical healings now and again, and we thank God for them as, indeed, we thank God when people are healed through modern medicine. But our bodies are going to wear out or rust out one day, whatever we do. We aren't designed to live forever on this earth, in these bodies, and they will eventually come to the end of their usefulness to us. But Scripture teaches that we will be raised from death in a new body, so it makes sense to me that the parts of us that make us “us”, if you like, are the parts that need healed. Our emotions, our personality, our memories. Things that have screwed us up in our pasts, that we find hard to get beyond. I believe Jesus always heals us when we ask, but we usually get the healing we really need, not necessarily the one we thought we wanted!

Also, while our language differentiates between healing and forgiveness, Jesus doesn't seem to so much. Remember the paralysed bloke whose friends let him down through the roof? Jesus' first words to him were “Your sins are forgiven!” which was what healed him. We need to be forgiven our sins, we need to be healed of being a sinner, if you like. We need to be changed into someone who can love God, and who can step away from sin – and we'll never do that without Jesus, let me tell you. We need to be healed so that we can become the person God created us to be. “I want you to let me heal you.”

“What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth?”

“I want you to let me love you.

I want you to let me heal you.

And I want you to let me fill you with the Holy Spirit!”

To be filled with God's Holy Spirit. According to the Bible, this isn't an optional extra, it's an absolutely central part of being a Christian. Remember the believers at Antioch, who were asked whether they'd received the Holy Spirit when they were baptised, and they were like, “You what? What's the Holy Spirit?” and Paul had to re-explain the Gospel to them. It turned out they'd only got as far as John's baptism of repentance, not the baptism into a new life with Christ. So far as Paul is concerned, receiving the Holy Spirit is an absolutely central part of being a Christian.

Makes sense, really, when you think about it. Because if we are filled with the Holy Spirit, we are filled with God Himself, and can be loved and healed and made whole, and God Himself can direct our lives, never forcing, never compelling, but always asking and reminding us, and enabling us. We need to be filled with God's Holy Spirit if we are to grow and change into the people God designed us to be.

“What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth?”

Of course, at that time the question was inappropriate, as was the follow-on of: “I know who you are, the holy one of God!” because Jesus was only just at the start of his ministry. He wasn't ready to become universally known, and anyway, he could sense that that which asked the questions had no interest in wishing him well. So he did the only possible thing, which was to command the evil spirit to come out of its host, which it did, and when the host recovered, all was well. But, of course, stories like this spread around, and Mark tells us that Jesus' fame in the area began to grow.

“What do you want of us, Jesus of Nazareth?” The question still resonates down the years, and I think the answers are still the same as ever: “I want you to let me love you. I want you to let me heal you. I want you to let me fill you with the Holy Spirit.” What is your answer? What is mine?

Will you let Jesus love you? Will you let Jesus heal you? Will you let Jesus fill you with his Holy Spirit? Amen.