My extended family is large and close-knit, with all of the usual ups and downs, joys and difficulties. Like many, we’ve not had much chance to gather recently. Two of my cousins-in-law are Adventist pastors. They are wonderful and enterprising, and boldly suggested we all got together online to read the Gospel of Mark. Now, dear reader, this is not the kind of family discussion to which we’ve been accustomed. I wondered if people would have anything to say. I was anxious that there might be conflict in theology or worldview.
Of course, I needn’t have worried. It’s been a rich and enlightening experience. You’ll be delighted to hear that we’ve tried to add the odd “wondering” or other bit of St Martin’s magic. But, as ever, it’s the sharing of untold experiences and arrestingly different perspectives that have made it. And it’s given us those moments of deeper conversation, of listening, of togetherness, that we’d largely missed for the best part of two years.
It probably shouldn’t be a surprise that God appears when we read the Scriptures together, even on a Thursday evening Zoom. We have found God in the breaking of bread for two thousand years, and we’re not going to stop now.
But perhaps we’ve grown used to looking for the Kingdom in the same places. Maybe the one simple rule we need to remember is this: that when two or three are gathered together, God is with us. Jesus’s first words in Mark are that the Kingdom is near: we just need eyes to see and ears to hear.
Chris Braganza
