“Adventures in Discipleship”

    What can you expect from Jesus when you are a disciple? Come find out at 10am on Sunday mornings this month. For the rest of November, we are going to be considering that question during our sermons on Sunday morning. There are three things that we can expect from chapters 3 through 5 in the gospel of Mark, as I see it.

    Sunday's passage is going to be Mark 2: 23 through Mark 3:35 and the adventure in discipleship for that Sunday is Defying All Comers. In the space of 40 verses, Jesus is going to, pardon the expression, piss of the civil authorities, the minions of Satan, and his own family. The response he's going to get are a conspiracy gathering two politically opposed parties, piles and piles of homeless demons (hoo-rah!), and a family trying to commit him to the nuthouse (or whatever the equivalent was back in those days). There is an old saying from the Civil Rights Movement that goes something like, "If they are shooting at you, you must be doing something right." Jesus must be doing something right.

    On November 20, we are sharing Mark 4: 1-34, where Jesus slips into that most annoying of literary forms, the "parable". The adventure in discipleship this Sunday is Confusing the Outsiders. Jesus says it as plain as day in vss. 11 and 12, "To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables; in order that they may indeed look, but not perceive, and may indeed listen, but no understand; so that they may nhot turn again and be forgiven." If that sounds confusing and very "un-Jesus", come on to church on November 20 and we'll talk about it.

    The last adventure in discipleship on this trek comes on November 27. The scripture passage is Mark 4:35 through the end of chapter 5. This adventure is Overwhelming Creation Itself… In our passage for this Sunday, Jesus stops a storm, casts out a Legion of shackle-busting, chain-breaking demons, drowns a bunch of pigs (let's talk Demon Bacon…), heals a woman who has hemorrhaged for forty years (in non-biblical, real world terms, this woman has had a continuous flow on menstrual blood for 40 years!), and raised a girl from the dead. So no pressure for those of us who seek to follow in his footsteps!

    First Church is on the corner of Market and High Streets in Perth Amboy, we are the stone church across Market Street from City Hall and not the brick church diagonally across the square from City Hall. For more information, check out contact info at www.fpcperthamboy.org.