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In touch

Up-to-the-minute jumping-off points for sermons, linking the reading to the latest news and global issues

Trusting God

‘Those who want to save their life will lose it.’ Mark 8:35.

 

Context

• Jesus’ prediction of his persecution and death has been echoed in the past week in the murder in prison of the Russian opposition leader and activist, Alexei Navalny. The news arrived too late for last week’s ‘In touch’, but David Wilkinson’s Radio 4 ‘Thought for the Day’ on Monday last week proved strikingly prophetic. Wilkinson marked the 50^th anniversary of the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s exile, following the publication of The Gulag Archipelago. He referred to Solzhenitsyn’s essay, ‘Live not by lies’, quoted by Navalny in his trial. This led to a description of the Christian faith which inspired both Solzhenitsyn and Navalny.
• Perhaps this anniversary influenced Putin to resolve that Navalny would not live to repeat the denunciation of a brutal regime that Solzhenitsyn had made. Certainly that message has been understood by brave Russians daring to leave flowers for Navalny on a memorial to those who suffered under Stalin. The effort made by authorities to prevent this may indicate that the comparison with Stalin has touched a raw nerve. The realisation that Navalny’s death was preceded by the removal of cameras monitoring him earlier in the week would appear to confirm that this 50^th anniversary is what precipitated his death.

 

Ideas for sermons or interactive talks

• The weaving together of the Old Testament reading with Paul’s use of the Abraham story awakens us to the long and mysterious road along which God calls his followers. The future is at times unimaginable. But then, it was unimaginable for Peter that Jesus would suffer. When Peter rebukes Jesus he may have had in mind the kind of miraculous deliverance with which Jesus was tempted in the wilderness. We note that in Luke’s version of the story of Jesus’ temptations, they end with the devil ‘biding his time’ as the New English Bible puts it. In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus immediately showed that he knew that such a time had returned.

• To many people that fact that Navalny chose to return to Russia after the attempt on his life looks incomprehensible. He clearly saw that not to return might have looked like a denial of everything he had lived for. The picture of him in captivity, smiling with his hands held in a heart shape as a sign that he was acting out of love shows his understanding of his purpose. It bears comparison with the way Jesus ‘set his face to go to Jerusalem’ (Luke 9:51). Jesus had said (Luke 13:33) that ‘it is impossible for a prophet to be killed away from Jerusalem’. His words carry the sense that any true prophet had to remain there in order that his message, and even his death, might be seen where it mattered. Navalny has died in Russia for Russia, the final sign that he would never live by lies.

 

Questions for discussion

• When we had the first liturgies in modern English, one suggestion was to replace the line in the Lord’s Prayer, ‘Lead us not into temptation’ with something like ‘Deliver us from the time of trial’; i.e. a prayer that we might be delivered from the kind of challenge that would make us give up our faith, give up everything we stood for, give up our opposition to evil. How do we understand that line in the Lord’s Prayer? Should it be re-worded?
• How do we support those who campaign for peace and justice, for example in Palestine and Israel, without writing off one side or the other?

Revd Dr Tom Ambrose is an Anglican priest in the Parish of the Ascension, Cambridge.

 

Check-in

Connecting faith with everyday, real-life issues for young people

The big news at the weekend and carrying on through the week has been the death in an Arctic jail of Alexei Navalny, a prominent opponent of the Russian President Vladimir Putin. As we read the various accounts of what has happened and is still happening we find conflicting stories. On the one hand we are told he died from natural causes; on the other we read that he was murdered at the instigation of the Russian government. On the one hand we read that others are exercising a basic human right to protest at what they perceive as oppression; on the other we read that the Russian government has the right to treat those they consider to be trouble causers in a way that suits them,

In Genesis 17 we read that God calls Abram and Sara to become  the father and mother of many nations. However this is not simply a gift. It is a recognition of a covenant relationship and the authority that Abraham and Sarah have received carries with it responsibility. Those responsibilities are spelled out as the scripture progress. There is a responsibility to rule with justice; to offer government guided by compassion and to seek the wisdom, will and mercy of God in all that they do.

As we read conflicting accounts of events in Russia we should trust in God to offer us the wisdom to understand what is going on; we should seek to discern God’s will in how we respond; and we should seek God’s mercy for all those directly affected by what is happeneing.

Revd Stuart Wild is Superintendent Minister of the Blackpool and South Fylde Methodist Circuit.

 

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