Sermon for the Third Sunday after Epiphany

Sunday 22nd January 2006

Preached by Rev Brain Parker

“The God gene?”

Last week BBC television showed a documentary about what might loosely be described as “Christian ministries” in Northern Ireland.

It was entitled ‘Born Again’. I missed it but I did read an article by local writer Glenn Patterson who fronted the programme.

It seems the production team in the course of a year visited every conceivable ‘Christian ministry’ in the country. Their research brought them to mission halls, house groups, and churches and mission tents to name but a few. The footage amounted to much more than they could use and much of it ended up on the cutting room floor.

Patterson said they met all sorts of folk exercising their “Christian ministry” from quote “mad evangelicals” to “ordinary decent Christians”.

I’m glad he found some ‘decency’ but I daresay that was cut out and regarded as too ordinary to be rated as television entertainment!

However Patterson also said that his producer believed that when it came to Christian faith there were people who had a “God gene” and people who hadn’t.

A ‘God gene’ then is one TV producer’s explanation of the ‘Born Again’ phenomenon in our society and I suppose in the world over the past 2000 plus years!

Christian faith is in your genes! Christian ministry is in your blood!

Certainly I’ve heard theologians talk about the ‘bias’ in our human makeup that gives us a sense of a greater power in our lives. It’s likened to the bias that every bowler recognises when he comes to play a game of bowls. The bowl is weighted, if you will, to turn with the bias built into it.

So we are made with a sense of our Creator. Is it the God gene or the bias – take your pick. It is this sense of the Divine – God the Creator of all.

The columnist Melanie Phillips said recently that we are being submerged by what she described as “a tidal wave of consumerism”. Like a tsunami our greed and self-interest is turning us away from God and sweeping us into a meaningless multicultural maze of nothingness.

Strong stuff. She suggested we should get a grip on the certainty that is Christ and take to heart His ministry of reconciliation and revelation. And we need to do it in a balanced and deliberate way as a worshipping community.

Of course in this media age religion can get sucked into the realms of entertainment. It can be enticed and sucked into media ‘exposure’ and come out the other end looking very odd and very intolerant of others. Religious ‘spin’ can be very ugly and destructive.

The prism of the television camera can take the most extreme expressions of faith and ministries and project images that come across at best as negative and at worst as downright dangerous brainwashing. We have all seen evidence of this in some shape or form.

However it’s worth saying that there have been many times when the media have performed a great public service in exposing religious extremism and the dangers of cults.

This evening our reading from St Matthew’s Gospel prompts us to think of the ministry of Jesus who, St Paul tells the Corinthians, ‘has given to us the ministry of reconciliation’.

When Jesus leaves home in Nazareth and begins his ministry he comes to live in Capernaum. There is a symbolic finality in the move.

He has left home never to return. His ministry begins with deliberate decisions. There is no vacillation.

He moves to Galilee, a small region that is densely populated.

He is moving now in a society that is in every sense ‘open’ to the wider world both in terms of commerce and also in regard to new ideas and various cultures.

The very name ‘Galilee’ comes from a Hebrew root meaning “a circle”. Galilee is surrounded, encircled by non-Jewish influences. Its road network carries traffic from all parts of the world, people “on the way to everywhere”. And it’s a region that has experienced invasion and occupation.

In this society Jesus begins his ministry, he begins to preach like a herald with a message from a king. He speaks with authority and is inspired by a power beyond himself. His message is ‘repent’ – turn to the Lord your God, stop walking away from God and begin walking towards God. Choose the right direction!

So ‘from that day’ Matthew tells us, Jesus ministered to the people, all the people. His location in Galilee somehow underlines that truth. In this multi-cultural, commerce driven crossroads region with people travelling ‘everywhere’, Jesus begins his ministry with certainty and compassion.

He preaches the good news of God. He teaches the truth of our identity as children of the same heavenly father. He brings healing where there is hurt and suffering. He joins with the people in prayer, in a holy fellowship of encouragement and hope.

And when we consider the character of his ministry we see more than anything the attitude of a servant.

“As the Son of Man he came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.”

“Whether is greater, he that sitteth at meat or he that serveth? Is not he that sitteth at meat? But I am among you as he that serveth”.

“If I then your Lord and Master have washed your feet: ye also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you”.

And so as individuals and as churches we are called to serve people everywhere. That’s the heartbeat of Christian ministries. When this is evident and expressed in tolerance and love of neighbour, St Paul says it is like “an odour of a sweet smell, well pleasing to God”.

That is the reality of Christian ministry. It is an experience of Christ in our midst. It is not something that comes out of a particular pattern of ministry or produced by a bureaucratic religiosity.

The Holy Spirit of God, not the so-called ‘God gene’, is at the heart of our ministry of service. The Risen Christ generates and stirs us to service. “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren ye have done it unto me”.

“So” says St Peter, “minister to one another as good stewards of the manifold grace of God”.

Amen.