20th Sunday after Trinity 2024 St Andrew’s Milngavie
Today we celebrated 20th Sunday after Trinity accompanied by Alison.
The AGM will be held after the service next Sunday 20th October. Please do support, any outstanding reports, please send to Helen.
We have a vacancy on the vestry, if anyone is interested in serving on the vestry, please let me know.
This Week
Tuesday 10am – Prayer Group in the Garden Room.
Wednesday 2.30pm- Book Group – Clare’s
Thursday 10am – Said Holy Communion followed by coffee in Friendship House
Sunday 10am – Sung Eucharist followed by AGM in church
Readings for next Sunday – 21st Sunday after Trinity – Iasiah 53:4-12 Hebrews 5:1-10 Mark 10:35-45
Today’s readings – Amos 5:6-7,10-15, Hebrews 4: 12-16, Mark 10: 17-31
As the winter approaches and the temperature drops, I have found myself turning to my winter wardrobe. In the interest of being organised and tidy I have tried to sort out what is worth keeping and likely to be worn and what is not. Discarding unnecessary possessions is generally a good practise but for complex reasons it’s not always an easy one.
Today’s gospel story of the Rich Young Man is all about such things. “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” the rich man asks Jesus. Mark 10 :17
And this is a rich man’s question, a first world problem we might say, posed by someone whose bills are paid, whose income is secure, someone who is not preoccupied by finding employment, feeding a family and trying to make ends meet. This man is free to pursue the good-life-to come, secure in the knowledge that he is one of God’s chosen people because that was the belief in those days, that wealth was a sign of God’s blessing. It was considered one of the ways God freed them from the daily grind to serve the Lord.
So, this man approaches Jesus with no shame about his great possessions. If anything, they are his credentials. But Jesus has other thoughts.
“Go sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, And you will have treasure in heaven” Mark 10:21 The Rich Young Man is invited to close his accounts on earth and open one in heaven, and he couldn’t do it.
This parable is quite clearly about money and possessions yet it’s not only about money and possessions. The kingdom of God is not for sale, the poor cannot buy it with their poverty any more than the rich can buy it with their riches. The kingdom of God is God’s gift to us. But the point is you must be free and willing to receive the gift. You cannot receive it if you have no spare hands to take it, you cannot receive the gift if your priorities are elsewhere. You cannot receive the gift if you put up barriers and that is why the rich young man went away sorrowful because he was beholden to his possessions. He couldn’t see life without them, they were his priority – they were his barrier.
“How hard it is for rich to enter the kingdom of God” Jesus tells his disciples. Mark 10:24
The disciples are amazed at Jesus’ words, and yet they had all in their own way understood the cost of discipleship. Two of them had left their fishing nets behind, another a career as a tax collector, some family. All had walked away from something. Jesus called and they followed, and things got left behind, not because they were bad but because they were in the way. They followed not because they had to but because they wanted to. He called and nothing else seemed that important anymore.
So, we may ask ourselves, what is the cost of our discipleship? What are the barriers in our lives? What is the one thing as Jesus puts it in this text preventing us from being the people God calls us to be
We hear this expression “one thing” mentioned several times in the bible.
In Psalm 27 the psalmist says, “One thing I asked of the Lord…… to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord” Psalm 27:4
Jesus tells Martha, “you are worried and distracted by many things but there is need of only one thing” (Luke 10:42).
When the religious authorities questioned the man blind from birth whom Jesus had healed, he said, “One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see” (John 9: 25).
In his letter to the Philippians St Paul writes, “This one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead” (Philippians 3:13).
So, we may ask ourselves what is our one thing? What is the “one thing” we might lack?
When Jesus says “You lack one thing.” It’s not a criticism. It’s not a judgment. It’s not a deficiency. It’s a door opening to new life. It’s an opportunity with the God for whom nothing is impossible.
As the letter to the Hebrews says “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathise with our weaknesses……Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need” Hebrews 4:15-16