Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity 2024

On the mountain of Transfiguration, the voice from the cloud says simply: listen to him. James explores what it might mean to truly hear Jesus — and to let his words reshape our lives from the inside out.

Transcript

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And so may I speak in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. One of the things in recent years I have found myself getting really interested by is story structure. The way that you might structure a story so that it has a really clear beginning and a middle and an end. And uh there's lots of different ways you can struck, you know, famously Shakespeare would have the five-act structure. Most films these days follow a three-act structure, and a key moment in the middle of act two is what's known as the midpoint, the center of the story. And a really well-structured story, that central midpoint acts as a kind of pivot where the story shifts dramatically from one set of expectations suddenly to a whole new set of expectations. It's the moment in the story where you find yourself thinking, ah, this changes everything. I want to give you some examples. This is always difficult because you might not have seen the same films that I've seen. I'm going to try and give three relatively diverse films and see if we can uh find some common overlap. Film number one, Jurassic Park. In that film, the midpoint is the scene when they have the car crash and it's raining, and you see T-Rex for the first time. This massive beast, and the image of that kind of sits in our cultural consciousness. You go, ah, that changes everything. Different film or musical in Les Mises, it's the moment where Jean Valjean turns and decides I need to face my past. I'm going to confront Javert. I'm no longer going to pretend that I don't have this past as a convict. I'm going to deal with my past and move forward. Ah, this changes everything. Someone has made a decision, they've realized something, and now everything is new. Third example, the Incredibles movie that Pixar film from a few years ago. It's the moment right in the center of the film where Mr. Incredible discovers that the company he's been working for has actually been killing superheroes all along. And simultaneously, Alastigirl realizes that her husband has been lying to her all this time about what he's been up to. Ah, suddenly this changes everything. Mark in his gospel structures things around a very clear midpoint. The gospel is 16 chapters long, and in chapter 8, Peter looks at Jesus and says, You are the Messiah. This changes everything. This is the pivotal thing upon which everything in the first eight chapters has been leading up to, and in the final eight chapters of Mark's gospel, everything is an unraveling of this central idea. Jesus is the Messiah of God. But what does that mean? And what are the implications for our lives? And how does that impact everything that we know about the world? And so in the immediate chapters after this revelation, chapters eight, nine, and ten, we have these vignettes, these stories of the disciples and the other people in Galilee trying to work out exactly what kind of Messiah is Jesus. And he starts telling them. And they don't believe him. And you get these back and forth stories. So last week Jenny told us about the first time that Jesus says, I'm the sort of Messiah who is going to go to Jerusalem and be crucified and rise again three days later. And Peter says, No, no, no, Jesus, that's not the sort of Messiah you are. You're a political leader who's going to help us overthrow the Romans. And Jesus says that famous phrase, Get behind me, Satan. And there we have our second time that Jesus tells the disciples, I'm the sort of Messiah who's going to go to Jerusalem, be crucified, and three days later rise again. And what does he find? The disciples are having a conversation about who is the greatest. And then in the next chapter, in chapter 10, Jesus a third time tells them, I'm the sort of Messiah who's going to go to Jerusalem, be killed, and three days later rise again. And in that third story, James and John come to Jesus just moments later and say, Jesus, when you're in political power, we'd really like to sit on your left hand side and on your right hand side because we kind of want to be important like you are. Again and again, the disciples have heard that Jesus is the Messiah. And as he tries to explain to him what kind of Messiah he is, they don't get it. They aren't listening. This is the hinge point upon which the gospel shifts. And all our gospel readings from now until the end of October are going to be about different people trying to understand who is Jesus. What does it mean that he is the Messiah? And again and again, they don't get it, they're not listening. I wonder if you've ever had a conversation with someone where you realize this person is just not listening to me. And actually, maybe I'm not really listening to them. Confession time, when Hannah and I are really tired, we do this over dinner, where she's telling me about her day and offloading, and I'm telling her about my day and offloading. And actually, we get three or four minutes in, and I haven't heard anything that she said to me, and she hasn't heard anything that I've said to her because we're not listening to one another, we're talking past one another. And this is, I think, typical of the conversation that the disciples are having with Jesus. Jesus is saying to them, I'm going to Jerusalem, I will be killed by the Romans, and three days later I will rise again. And they turn back to him and say, Okay, great, Jesus. But when you're in political power, could we sit on your left and your right? Jesus, which one of us disciples do you think is really the greatest? Jesus, what kind of political leader would you like to be? How are we going to overthrow the Romans exactly? They're not listening, they're not listening to what Jesus has to say. And so I think this morning, that's the first thing that this passage wants us to reflect on. Listen to Jesus. Listen to the words that he actually says. Hear him. Still yourself so that you can hear what he says. There's nothing more important than doing that. It is extremely difficult in this day and age to find the sort of silence necessary to listen. Constantly have the TV on, constantly with the radio on, the internet constantly buzzing in your pocket, trying to take your attention, trying to uh grab your focus. And Jesus will not shout at you. He will not use an algorithm to hack your attention. He speaks gently. I came to serve, not to be served. You must be like a child. I go to Jerusalem to be killed, and on the third day I will rise again. And it is very easy to just talk right over Jesus in those moments, to just be distracted by the noise of our current political uh whatever's going on, and you will miss it entirely. Jesus does not shout. Jenny talked last week about the conversation that was going on between the disciples, trying to work out exactly who Jesus is. Some say this, some say that. Who could you be? The one thing the disciples didn't do was listen. Listen to the words of Jesus. Listen to the voice of Jesus. He speaks to us gently. Find some silence in your life and hear the voice of Jesus. Secondly, as you're listening to Jesus' voice, what you will find is that he invites you to radically reorient your life around him and his way of being. The truth is, what the disciples were doing is not unreasonable. It's exactly the sort of thing that you or I would have done if we were in their position. They weren't bad or weird people. Their assumptions about who Jesus was and the sort of thing he was trying to do were totally reasonable in their day and age. In the first century, they were oppressed by this Roman Empire that would not allow them to live their own states and be their own people. And so it's quite reasonable, is it not, to say, well, what we need is to be bigger and badder than the Roman Empire and to overthrow them, to use political strength and power to uh dominate this organization, this empire that's dominating us. What we need is more power and more control in order to overcome. Our key concerns should be strength and control, greatness, who can be the biggest and the best? Because if we're the biggest and we're the best, then we can defeat our enemies and we can challenge the empire. Maybe what we need to do is build some sort of management hierarchy, some structure to optimize return on investment in the coming quarter, etc. etc. etc. Fill in the blanks. And Jesus speaks gently. I came to serve, not to be served. You must be like a child. I will go to Jerusalem and I will be killed, and I will be risen, I will rise again on the third day. And slowly, slowly, slowly, as we listen to the voice of Jesus, our lives become reoriented around his way of being in the world. Like an ocean liner, you pull on the rudder, and the thing just slowly moves, degree by degree. You find yourself able to unfurl your fist and put down that defense mechanism. You don't have to try and be the greatest. You can just be you. And then you can serve the people around you, you can love, you can trust, and you can relax. Jesus speaks gently. I came to serve, not to be served. You must be like a child. I will go to Jerusalem and I will be killed, and I will be raised on the third day. So as we listen to the voice of Jesus and as we slowly but radically reorient our lives around his way of being in the world, this morning, the orientation that Jesus wants us to reflect on is that we stop playing status games. We today, just like the first disciples, are desperate to be the greatest. I don't know what that is for you, what field of life you live in, what it means for someone of your age and your color and your um gender to be the greatest in your social group with the people that you hang out, what the status games that you are encouraged to play in the world in which you live. Let me be honest for a second about status games that I'm involved in. I work in a cathedral. Cathedrals are places of high status, and I'm surrounded all the time by people of very high status, and I'm here because I want to be here, because I like being in places of high status, because it makes me feel good about myself, and I enjoy it. I did not get told to come here, I volunteered. Did you know that it's actually very important to some people what order the clergy process in and out of the services are? The more important you are, the further back you go in the processional, and these processionals and recessionals in and out of the building are carefully constructed so that the right hierarchy is maintained and that the people are in the right place. It's all well and good on one level. I understand order in worship. I think it's uh not a bad thing, but I'll be honest with you, I found it intoxicating and toxic for my own life when I started being involved in these processionals. Because as a residential clergy, I get to go quite far back in the queue. Not quite as far back as some people, but definitely further back than others. And I found myself constantly fixated on this thing. And within six months of being here, I had my first away day at Murfield, and I went and had a quiet day, and I spoke to my spiritual director, and I spent an hour and a half talking about this particular status game and how I found it intoxicating. I loved it and toxic. It was hurting me. What are the status games that you're engaged in? I think about our young people in the choir and the way the whole of school can just be one big status game constantly being marked and graded against your peers. How fight, how high up on the league table are you? What are the status games that you are involved in? Friends, those games are killing you. Stop playing them. You don't have to be engaged in them. Listen to the voice of Jesus. He speaks gently. I came to serve and not be served. You must be like a child. I will go to Jerusalem and I will be killed, and on the third day I will rise again. As we listen to the voice of Jesus, and as his voice radically and slowly reorients our life around his way of being, we are invited to follow Jesus into an undefended life, to join him on the journey towards Calvary, to take up our cross and follow him, to love and to serve and to pour out our life, to lay aside our need to be the greatest, to stop play the status game, to no longer need to be strong and safe to become the servant of all. Now, if that feels impossible to you, you've started to understand what I'm saying. Because you cannot live this way of life unless you're filled by the Spirit to sustain you. And you cannot live this way of life unless you receive sustenance from the Father, Jesus' broken bread and wine outpoured, a morsel each week that helps you live this undefended life.