As you will remember, Jesus, in our New Testament reading this evening, names his twelve Apostles and then sends them out to heal the sick, to raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons and preach that the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
Whether at that time they were any good at doing what Jesus told them to do we don’t know; probably they were not much better than we.
Some of us heard last Sunday how, when the disciples returned to Jesus on one occasion, they complained to him that one man who was not one of his disciples was casting out demons in his name. Do I detect a hint of envy, or frustration because this man was succeeding in doing what they were having difficulty in doing? Well, I don’t know, but we do know that on at least one occasion they failed because we are told of a complaint made to Jesus that someone had gone to the Apostles for a healing but in vain, which made Jesus react rather irritably in saying that that particular problem could be cured only through prayers; something which the Apostles had failed to realise.
Were they any good at doing what Jesus said? Well, I don’t know and ultimately it matters not.
But the one very simple and obvious and maybe to you a boring and dull point which I want to make in my few words this evening is that the apostles whom he chose were very ordinary people. None of them, I suspect, were that time’s equivalent of men who today might have a degree at Oxford or Cambridge or some other university. There is no evidence that Jesus had tested them educationally or sent them to the equivalent of some modern theological college to be trained, as your brilliant clergy today are!
They were ordinary men – four fishermen at least, a tax collector, one who was hasty and rash too and one a doubter – and hardly people whom others would have thought to be saints, if that word had been in vogue then. It was because of what they were and what they did later that the church designated most of them as saints.
They were men who, like the rest of us, had their strengths and their weaknesses, their good points and their bad, ordinary men. Sadly in Judas Iscariot the weaknesses outweighed the strengths. We may have some sympathy for him because the Bible tends to speak of him as the fall guy; it is as if a pre-arranged destiny had fated him to send Jesus to the cross and, paradoxically therefore, to set us towards our salvation.
I repeat that the Apostles were ordinary men as you and I are ordinary men or ordinary women. It is as ordinary men and women that Jesus calls us to his service, as he has called each of us here this evening. It is as ordinary men and women that on this Dedication Sunday we re- dedicate ourselves and this Church to the service of Christ.
We are not called to be extra-ordinary except perhaps to the extent that we are to be extra- ordinary in our ordinariness. We need to dare to be ordinary; that is, to be just what we are, and it is probable that only by being extra-ordinary in ordinariness that we shall help others to Christ.
Too often, I believe, some of us strive too much to be extra-ordinary; we think that Jesus will only want us if we are better than we think we are. I have known people who refrain from receiving Holy Communion because they feel themselves unworthy. Perhaps some of us feel like that from time to time, but if so that is the very time that we need to come to communion remembering that Jesus said that he had not come to heal those who are well but those who are sick. He is not here to judge us because we are not good enough but to heal us so that we may truly have life abundantly. That is one part of what the apostles would have been preaching when they were sent to preach that the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
Many years ago a woman who was my secretary in my then solicitor’s office and was, I suppose, some 20 years older than I and a Christian, gave me a prayer card which I treasure to this day. It contains a number of prayers and perhaps as a message to me to use it today it fell on the floor a couple of days ago and thereby force me to pick it up and look at it. I would like to read one of the prayers on it to you, although there is just one sentence in it which is particularly relevant to what I am trying to say this evening:-
“O God, I have many problems
and I worry so much.
Lord Jesus, help me
to leave my worries to you
to accept help gratefully
to take advice humbly
to know you see me
as I really am
and yet still love me.
Thank you
That in the midst of this storm
I can find your way.
O Jesus Christ help me
to treat you as
my Saviour and my Lord,
Amen.”
The one sentence which hits me in that prayer is:-
“Lord Jesus, help me to know you see me as I really am and yet still love me.”
It is to me a tremendous thought, a tremendous experience if one can catch it, a tremendous transforming experience to know that I am loved in what so often seems my rather awful and certainly very weak ordinariness.
We have over the past weeks seen and heard people of all political parties at their party conferences – doing their best no doubt but somehow seeking to be extraordinary, to be other than ordinary and sadly they have too often reminded me of a poem of T S Eliot
“We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpieces filled with straw.”
I share their hollowness but then remember that the Apostles were to preach that the kingdom of heaven is at hand. We can lose our sense of hollowness by coming to the realization that the kingdom of heaven is indeed at hand and it is at hand because Jesus Christ is alive, he is risen and is close to us, loving each one of us and transforming us as we rededicate ourselves today.
Derek Spottiswoode