Last Sunday’s Playlist @ Newmarket Baptist 

16th September 2012, Ordinary Time 24B: Colour: Green

Highlights from our Sunday 10am Community Prayer space ‘playlist’… in the hope that it may re-source you to better follow Jesus in your world…

PoC (Prayer of Confession):

A interesting arrival for attendee’s on Sunday morning as an IKON inspired, semi-clad man stood silently in the sanctuary holding our Christ candle with the word ‘WHO?’ written boldly in texta upon his bare chest.

The prayer took the shape of the gospel lectionary reading for the day of Mark 8:27-38 , the famous “Who do you say that I am?” passage otherwise known as Peter’s Confessional Crisis.

As we read the text Rachael used the marker provided to write the ‘labels’ from the text upon the human body.  (The body belonged to our Praxis student Matty Byrnes… thanks Matt!)

HOLY ANGEL, BAPTIST, PROPHET, MESSIAH, SATAN

We then considered Jesus’ own designation of ‘Son of Man’ or ‘Human One’

We were invited to consider ways in which humanity can be reduced by the power of labels.  We considered ways people had ‘labeled’ us or the ways that we had labeled others in ways that had proved destructive.  People were then invited to write these labels in marker upon the body which bore the Christ candle.

Assurance of Grace:

“This is the image of the ‘Human’ One, the one labeled ‘King of the Jews’ and hung upon a tree.  The ‘One’ who bears the abusive labels of a broken work upon his own body.  This is our image of the Human One, the labeled, broken body who invites and enables us to live our full humanity, setting us free of the labels that seek to control and diminish us, re-defining and transforming them through the power of his resurrection. Amen”

(MoW) Ministry of the Word: 

We used this image to consider the title ‘Son of Man’ as a play on the title of Caesar (divi filius).  This is an image of Christ that we have hanging in the Newmarket Sanctuary which our oldest member, Betty Lynch is very fond of because of the ‘humanness’.  This version of it is made of over 2000 images of ordinary people going about their everyday business. You can view the zoom on the original image by clicking upon it or here.   Paul Beylian Boyer suggest this image indicates that Jesus way contains a power that Caesar can only imagine, concluding:

We’re in position to answer Jesus’ question when we know what God is doing for us. Caesar depends on keeping people off-balance, so they can be pushed, coerced, seduced, threatened, and rewarded into dancing the empire’s tune. Caesar cannot stand except on the backs of the conquered, those who have bowed down, who have become obedient to Caesar. Caesar cares not if they submit willingly or by force, only that they submit. By contrast, God’s kingdom depends only on God standing with us, in the hard places and the very ordinary ones. Who do you say that I am? “It is the Lord God who helps me…”