Greater Things Than You Ever Imagined

John 1:51  Genesis 17:1-7  Mark 8:31-38

You realise don’t you that even in Lent, I’m preaching under the shadow of the Christmas tree. That great big thing that stood so strong and mighty and green just a couple of months ago –  has been thrown outside the back door of the church, cut down to size, shorn of its branches and reduced to this – a simple, prickly cross piece from which stories of the passion will hang during the coming weeks.

Then just before Easter ladies will creep into church, like saints going to the Easter tomb early and they will cover this cross shaped tree with all the beauty of spring flowers they can muster.

It’s like the story of Jesus acted out in branches and roots.

It’s like my life and yours hung about with happy Christmas lights one minute ,then reduced to stories of the passion the next.

Being human and believing in God means you end up capable of greater things than you ever imagined. That’s the message I get from our Old Testament reading.

Abram’s life is passing into its shadow. Ninety nine years gone – we read.

Yet God chooses this unlikely moment to fill this one man’s life with preposterous promises.

I wonder that you could keep a straight face during the reading.

A childless pensioner is to be the father of many nations.

An ordinary workaday chap is going to be the man in whom the Lord’s covenant promise is vested.

A wandering nomad is to set his people in the direction of a promised land.

His life must have been like this bare tree and yet through God’s blessing it was going to be turned into an Easter Garden.

Being God and loving your creation so much means that you end up being capable of humbler things than you ever imagined. That’s the message I get from our Gospel reading.

Jesus is the promised Messiah and he’s starting to show that by raining down miracles upon his expectant people and filling their heads with tales of a kingdom.

Yet now he starts talking about being seized and imprisoned – about suffering and death.

Imagine the disciples’ horror when they heard such talk.

It was inconceivable wasn’t it that God could be reduced to that .

It was impossible that any kingdom worth its salt could evolve out  of– well, the death of God.

It must have seemed them as like the taking of a beautiful Christmas tree and carelessly chopping off its life

When I think of Abraham in our Old Testament reading I am reminded of the exaltation  and blessing to which people like you and I are improbably lurching and that we ought to be expecting great things of one another.

When I think of Jesus in the Gospel I am reminded of the graciously given love by which God cuts himself down to size to make this possible and that when I cast around in my life to see where God is – it is in the most unlikely – even humiliating places that he stakes his claim.

There is a mysterious passage at the end of the fist chapter of John’s Gospel.

The disciples are being called like people on the end of an old fashioned chain letter.

You think this is exceptional – says Jesus in not so many words.

I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.

I think this is to remind us that with Christianity, something wonderful is afoot.

Something which points to the uniqueness of the Gospel.

Heaven comes down to earth and earth goes up to heaven.

And our lives see saw between those two places through each day of our lives.

Abraham’s exaltation.  Jesus’s humiliation.

Both highly improbable. Yet both wonderfully true.

Their stories part of our very own.

Watch this space then in the months between December and April and you will see your own salvation unfolding in the branches of a single tree.

RH  8.3.09