I was walking through the City Centre today and there were some people who I presume were Christians who had just done a Bible reading, and someone was now standing to talk from it. I started off really well, "God loves you." I love to hear that proclaimed on the streets. It is the good news.
However it did not end there, "God loves you but..."
The problem is that this is how so many people see God's grace, God loves you, but... and at times it seems like a very big but.
God loves you, but you have to deal with sin.
God loves you, but there is judgement.
God loves you, but...
Of course it is true that God is concerned over sin, it is true that there is a day of judgement, it is true that we have to face the issue called sin.
God loves you full stop end of story. God loves you and He sent His son into the world not to condemn the world but to save it through Him.
God loves you and does not want anyone to perish, of course you cannot avoid the but, but sometimes I think we need to transform our buts into ands.
God loves you and therefore He sent His son into the world to save you.
Hear me out on this one, but God does not have a problem with sin, we do!
Sin is sin, it is a killer, it is the ultimate killer, without sin, no death, no pain, we would live in paradise and the power of sin leads us to the road of death. God does not have a problem with sin, it is simply that He sees sin as it is, sin is a killer. God has the antidote to sin, it is grace, love, mercy, forgiveness, new life.
We have a problem with sin because we often fail to escape it and we tend to fall into it, and we do not come up smelling of roses.
God loves you, and therefore He sent His son to save you from Sin.
We may sometimes be deluded into seeing sin as something attractive and therefore we see God as a cosmic killjoy who does not want us to enjoy ourselves. Therefore we preach as if sin was something good and God wants the best for us, and therefore does not want us to enjoy ourselves too much because He knows that it is bad for us.
Like the diets we think we can have a few sins, but so long as we are generally good we will be okay.
However the problem is that sin destroys, it is death. Sin destroys relationships (take lust, jealousy, greed, envy), it destroys peace (the same again), it destroys identity (pride), it takes away hope (we can never change). That is not God's will, that is the very opposite of God's will.
The problem is that the devil has been superb at creating problems and then blaming them on God. The truth is that God wants the best for us.
God loves you, and therefore He does not want you to throw your life away in sin but to live the best possible life. That is all positive and not a but in sight.
God loves you, He wants you to have a good time. God loves you He wants you to party. God loves you He wants you to experience and enjoy all that is good in life. He calls Himself our Father, and Dad wants the best for His children.
He therefore calls to us, "Don't jump over the edge. Don't throw it away."
God's love is not one of buts, but of the possibility of new beginnings.
So often we have this big but, but perhaps instead we should have a big "and" instead.
Saturday 28 April 2007
Friday 20 April 2007
I do not want to be "healed"
The sermon at the church I attend last Sunday was on grief, and one of the leaders did not know what to say and about how we should pray in response to what had been spoken.
I asked if I could say something. I spoke about my own experiences of grief and it is an emotional subject, and perhaps therefore not the wisest of subjects to speak about off the cuff - there is that danger of speak first and repent later, even if you are praying that you will say the right thing.
I got to be passionate about what I was speaking about, and I said that "I am a broken person in a broken world with a broken Saviour and I did not want to be healed." Sometimes it is right to feel the pain, we cannot love without opening ourselves to the dangers of being hurt. There was an interesting comment on The Trap - What happened to our dream of freedom that a survey of mental illness said that a high proportion of people suffered from mental illness. The problem with the survey was that it had the opinion that we should not feel depressed or upset and therefore did not ask any questions about the interviewees circumstances. When if it had it might have found out that being depressed was a natural consequence of sadness or genuine pain.
We live in a world which struggles with its emotions. Being British we often speak about a stiff upper lip and that the British are emotionally reserved. However, actually there can be an honesty and a depth in that. We can avoid emotional intimacy and truth whether we show a lot of emotion or whether we show very little, what matters is that there is an emotional honesty. There can be a silent and shared truth that does not have to be shouted about, and there can be an open and emotional dishonesty. Shows like Trisha or the Jerry Springer Show for all their emotional head of steam do not necessarily take us any closer to the truth.
We live in a world that may no longer subscribe to the stiff upper lip, but does expect to be almost continually happy, and prozac is just one lifestyle drug you can take if you are not. The problem is that we end up living in the land of the bland. We have to be flat, not too happy, not too sad, and not too human.
Society offers a form of "healing" but the problem is that we are not actually healing just numbing the pain, and the pain exists for a reason.
For instance, in grief pain is the loss that we suffer when we connect to someone and give ourselves and enter into intimacy and then because of death we lose that on this earth. We are confronted with the fact that we have lost that person on this earth, we will not hear their words, feel the warmth and joy of their presence, feel the happiness of a shared joke with them, or the comfort of just sitting and chatting over a drink. It is gone, it is lost, and we hurt.
The answer if we want to avoid pain is therefore to avoid love, to become hard, to stop feeling. The problem is that we become less human. Jesus wept, and at Gethsemane - He struggled. He did not just say I'm okay, I have the resources, I can cope, Praise God! Looking to the future he felt the pain, and he wanted to have his friends around and in that vulnerable place, he asked them to stay awake and pray with Him, and when they did not He shared his pain. Jesus was the Son of God, and yet He was no plastic every smiling saint. He was real, and He calls us to be real too.
It feels sometimes that in the modern world we have given up on intimacy and love because they are too dangerous we might get hurt, and if we are not careful the dominant thinking of the world because the dominant thinking of the church. The problem is that God is committed to love, however much the modern world may deride it.
If we become the kind of plastic ever smiling self-sufficient dare I say it smug plastic saints, then we deny the intimacy that we would have if we truly shared how we truly felt, or perhaps going deeper if we truly allowed ourselves to feel. Instead we can live in a land of spiritual denial, everything is wonderful, great, Praise God, but this is not the truth. Deep down we know and we feel that things are not right, but we do not want to admit it in case we are not accepted, in case it is seen that we have let the side down. Of course things are not right here. We are called to be strangers and aliens. This is a broken world and it bears the scars of sin, Satan is still alive and well on planet earth. The battle may have been won, Jesus is Lord, but we live in the time before the final defeat of the enemy. Not only is the world fallen but we ourselves are fallen.
What worries me most about the I'm all right attitude, is that the truth is that we all struggle and we are called to stand with each other and pray for each other and support each other in our struggles. The problem is that we are all so "okay" that instead of dealing with our emotional and spiritual garbage we just sweep in under the carpet, and therefore we never deal with it.
Instead of exhibiting the emotional openness of the Psalms, the Prophets or Job we accept a closedness, and we close our hearts not just to our own pains and failure but to God and to one another.
Rather than seeing sadness and pain as an enemy, difficult as they can be, we should see it as a resource. We should feel pain and sadness as we look at the lost going headlong into hell, but we should not just sit around feeling depressed, or taking happy pills or their churchey equivalent we should use the pain as a springboard to action. We should weep over the lost, over the broken, over the hurting and set off to find the lost, set out to hold the broken, and to seek to bind the wounds of the hurting. Perhaps also the sadness is the message that we need to give ourselves a break, to deal with our issue, to find a different way of being.
The idea that we pray and the pain goes away is wrong on so many different levels. One issue that concerns me is that of course if people are easily healed then we do not have to walk with them through the sorrow. It can become an opt out, we pray that God will heal so and so, when perhaps what they really need is the healing touch of people giving them time. To listen to their pain. A good point of the service was the emphasis on spending time with the hurting and learning to listen. The problem is spending time with the hurting is a long term commitment, and we really struggle with that.
If we are going to be truly alive then we will feel pain, and if Jesus makes us truly alive that will probably be more pain rather than less.
The main threat of both Aldous Huxley's dystopia in Brave New World and in George Orwell's 1984 is that we become dead to feeling. In Brave New World it is the Soma, Aldous Huxley's prozac, and a whole society based on the denial of real emotion, for Orwell it is the deadness of a totalitarian state. There was research where half the children were brought up by individuals and half the children were brought up by anonymous carers, it is said that some of the children even died mainly because they were not attached to anyone.
Yet we live in an impersonal world, and yet we were created to be personal, personal with God and personal with one another. We should "rage against the dying of the light". If we do not accept pain, if we do not accept the reality of feelings then there can be no success or failure any pleasure, but in the end we become mediocre, in the end we become a mere shadow of what we could be, what we were created to be.
I do not want to be "healed" I want to still feel the pain, because if I do not I am less alive, and I have less of God. God did not remain happy in heaven, he felt the pain of the world, and moved by compassion came and dwelt amongst us and died for us. We have a broken saviour, broken for us upon the cross, and we live in a broken world, and we need to be a broken people if we are ever to reach the broken world.
When I was younger we used to sing regularly, "Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me... break me, melt me, mould me, fill, Spirit of the living God fall afresh on me."
It is not just that to truly live we need to come to God in need of Him, but if we are truly to live we need to come to each other in need of one another. Communities are based on interdependency not self-sufficiency.
The aim of many people is to self-sufficient happiness, but what is more wonderful is to be connected to one another and to mourn with those who mourn and laugh with those who laugh (see Roman 12v9-21).
The Act of Love by Roger McGough tells the story of a sexual encounter after a party, the next morning "It's cornflakes and then goodbye"
So often church can be like that we encounter God, we encounter one another, but afterwards we just get on with the mundane and try to pretend that nothing really happened, and perhaps that is the truth. Perhaps nothing much really did happen, as Jeff Lucas puts it, "We are moved, but we are not changed." Or perhaps "It's coffee and then goodbye" and we never go deeper, indeed we feel embarrassed by the intimacy and try to pretend that nothing has happened.
We live in a dead world but we are called to be alive, the irony is that perhaps we do need healing. Perhaps we need to be healed so that rather than saying "Praise God, everything is wonderful" when clearly it is not we need to be healed so that we can acknowledge the pain, the failures, and the problems. Perhaps we need healing so that we can start hurting where we need to hurt, and crying where we need to cry. Perhaps I do need to be healed, perhaps I should still want to be healed.
I asked if I could say something. I spoke about my own experiences of grief and it is an emotional subject, and perhaps therefore not the wisest of subjects to speak about off the cuff - there is that danger of speak first and repent later, even if you are praying that you will say the right thing.
I got to be passionate about what I was speaking about, and I said that "I am a broken person in a broken world with a broken Saviour and I did not want to be healed." Sometimes it is right to feel the pain, we cannot love without opening ourselves to the dangers of being hurt. There was an interesting comment on The Trap - What happened to our dream of freedom that a survey of mental illness said that a high proportion of people suffered from mental illness. The problem with the survey was that it had the opinion that we should not feel depressed or upset and therefore did not ask any questions about the interviewees circumstances. When if it had it might have found out that being depressed was a natural consequence of sadness or genuine pain.
We live in a world which struggles with its emotions. Being British we often speak about a stiff upper lip and that the British are emotionally reserved. However, actually there can be an honesty and a depth in that. We can avoid emotional intimacy and truth whether we show a lot of emotion or whether we show very little, what matters is that there is an emotional honesty. There can be a silent and shared truth that does not have to be shouted about, and there can be an open and emotional dishonesty. Shows like Trisha or the Jerry Springer Show for all their emotional head of steam do not necessarily take us any closer to the truth.
We live in a world that may no longer subscribe to the stiff upper lip, but does expect to be almost continually happy, and prozac is just one lifestyle drug you can take if you are not. The problem is that we end up living in the land of the bland. We have to be flat, not too happy, not too sad, and not too human.
Society offers a form of "healing" but the problem is that we are not actually healing just numbing the pain, and the pain exists for a reason.
For instance, in grief pain is the loss that we suffer when we connect to someone and give ourselves and enter into intimacy and then because of death we lose that on this earth. We are confronted with the fact that we have lost that person on this earth, we will not hear their words, feel the warmth and joy of their presence, feel the happiness of a shared joke with them, or the comfort of just sitting and chatting over a drink. It is gone, it is lost, and we hurt.
The answer if we want to avoid pain is therefore to avoid love, to become hard, to stop feeling. The problem is that we become less human. Jesus wept, and at Gethsemane - He struggled. He did not just say I'm okay, I have the resources, I can cope, Praise God! Looking to the future he felt the pain, and he wanted to have his friends around and in that vulnerable place, he asked them to stay awake and pray with Him, and when they did not He shared his pain. Jesus was the Son of God, and yet He was no plastic every smiling saint. He was real, and He calls us to be real too.
It feels sometimes that in the modern world we have given up on intimacy and love because they are too dangerous we might get hurt, and if we are not careful the dominant thinking of the world because the dominant thinking of the church. The problem is that God is committed to love, however much the modern world may deride it.
If we become the kind of plastic ever smiling self-sufficient dare I say it smug plastic saints, then we deny the intimacy that we would have if we truly shared how we truly felt, or perhaps going deeper if we truly allowed ourselves to feel. Instead we can live in a land of spiritual denial, everything is wonderful, great, Praise God, but this is not the truth. Deep down we know and we feel that things are not right, but we do not want to admit it in case we are not accepted, in case it is seen that we have let the side down. Of course things are not right here. We are called to be strangers and aliens. This is a broken world and it bears the scars of sin, Satan is still alive and well on planet earth. The battle may have been won, Jesus is Lord, but we live in the time before the final defeat of the enemy. Not only is the world fallen but we ourselves are fallen.
What worries me most about the I'm all right attitude, is that the truth is that we all struggle and we are called to stand with each other and pray for each other and support each other in our struggles. The problem is that we are all so "okay" that instead of dealing with our emotional and spiritual garbage we just sweep in under the carpet, and therefore we never deal with it.
Instead of exhibiting the emotional openness of the Psalms, the Prophets or Job we accept a closedness, and we close our hearts not just to our own pains and failure but to God and to one another.
Rather than seeing sadness and pain as an enemy, difficult as they can be, we should see it as a resource. We should feel pain and sadness as we look at the lost going headlong into hell, but we should not just sit around feeling depressed, or taking happy pills or their churchey equivalent we should use the pain as a springboard to action. We should weep over the lost, over the broken, over the hurting and set off to find the lost, set out to hold the broken, and to seek to bind the wounds of the hurting. Perhaps also the sadness is the message that we need to give ourselves a break, to deal with our issue, to find a different way of being.
The idea that we pray and the pain goes away is wrong on so many different levels. One issue that concerns me is that of course if people are easily healed then we do not have to walk with them through the sorrow. It can become an opt out, we pray that God will heal so and so, when perhaps what they really need is the healing touch of people giving them time. To listen to their pain. A good point of the service was the emphasis on spending time with the hurting and learning to listen. The problem is spending time with the hurting is a long term commitment, and we really struggle with that.
If we are going to be truly alive then we will feel pain, and if Jesus makes us truly alive that will probably be more pain rather than less.
The main threat of both Aldous Huxley's dystopia in Brave New World and in George Orwell's 1984 is that we become dead to feeling. In Brave New World it is the Soma, Aldous Huxley's prozac, and a whole society based on the denial of real emotion, for Orwell it is the deadness of a totalitarian state. There was research where half the children were brought up by individuals and half the children were brought up by anonymous carers, it is said that some of the children even died mainly because they were not attached to anyone.
Yet we live in an impersonal world, and yet we were created to be personal, personal with God and personal with one another. We should "rage against the dying of the light". If we do not accept pain, if we do not accept the reality of feelings then there can be no success or failure any pleasure, but in the end we become mediocre, in the end we become a mere shadow of what we could be, what we were created to be.
I do not want to be "healed" I want to still feel the pain, because if I do not I am less alive, and I have less of God. God did not remain happy in heaven, he felt the pain of the world, and moved by compassion came and dwelt amongst us and died for us. We have a broken saviour, broken for us upon the cross, and we live in a broken world, and we need to be a broken people if we are ever to reach the broken world.
When I was younger we used to sing regularly, "Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me... break me, melt me, mould me, fill, Spirit of the living God fall afresh on me."
It is not just that to truly live we need to come to God in need of Him, but if we are truly to live we need to come to each other in need of one another. Communities are based on interdependency not self-sufficiency.
The aim of many people is to self-sufficient happiness, but what is more wonderful is to be connected to one another and to mourn with those who mourn and laugh with those who laugh (see Roman 12v9-21).
The Act of Love by Roger McGough tells the story of a sexual encounter after a party, the next morning "It's cornflakes and then goodbye"
So often church can be like that we encounter God, we encounter one another, but afterwards we just get on with the mundane and try to pretend that nothing really happened, and perhaps that is the truth. Perhaps nothing much really did happen, as Jeff Lucas puts it, "We are moved, but we are not changed." Or perhaps "It's coffee and then goodbye" and we never go deeper, indeed we feel embarrassed by the intimacy and try to pretend that nothing has happened.
We live in a dead world but we are called to be alive, the irony is that perhaps we do need healing. Perhaps we need to be healed so that rather than saying "Praise God, everything is wonderful" when clearly it is not we need to be healed so that we can acknowledge the pain, the failures, and the problems. Perhaps we need healing so that we can start hurting where we need to hurt, and crying where we need to cry. Perhaps I do need to be healed, perhaps I should still want to be healed.
Sunday 8 April 2007
Riding on a donkey
Jesus rides into Jerusalem riding on a donkey. The Messiah, the King of Kings, comes not in a stately carriage, a white charger or even a chariot of fire, but on a donkey. The image is not just of humility, but a deliberate and stated refusal to play the world at its own games. The refusal to rule by power of force. God gives us free will and free choice, he forces us to make a decision. He does not brainwash us, he does not back us into a corner.
Yes our eternal destiny depend on it, yes it is a question of heaven or hell, but it is our question and we do, for good or evil, have a choice.
Jesus could have played the power game, and forced us to do his will. He could have said you will do it my way, and there will be no other choice. Instead he came in weakness. He was crucified, and he was killed, but he did not need all the power of heaven to save himself. He could have just chosen to manipulate the crowd. He was not just all powerful, he was all knowing as well. Jesus could have found a way out - but He did not, he chose to be silent like a sheep to the slaughter.
Let me repeat what I said about power games, and his refusal to play.
So what would you expect the followers of this suffering servant to be like, the one who declared that the "meek will inherit the earth"? The one who spoke about blessed are you when you are insulted?
Wouldn't you expect them to be people who were as humble and poor as a medieval monk? Who sought not power and prestige but rejected it? Who served the poor and one another? Who themselves rejected the power game?
It is interesting to note the early church. The apostles decided it was not good for them to wait on tables - but this is exactly what Jesus did and what He encouraged them to do. So they picked seven men to wait on tables, to do the practical service while they got on with the far more important work of preaching the gospel. Acts 6v1-7.
So who do we hear of next? Indeed who do we hear of next with the ministry of the word? Is it the disciples? No, it is Stephen the man who waited on tables. He gets to be the first Christian martyr. Why? Because He was effective, because God blessed Him. Now we always say that this is because the twelve were protected, but that argument does not appear in scripture. The fact was Stephen was being effective and His effectiveness got him noticed.
Stephen the man who could wait on tables, the man who did not get the plum job of preacher, the one picked to play second fiddle, the man picked for the B team, does not moan and complain - he gets on with it. Stephen becomes Stephen the martyr, the one whose wisdom they cannot beat and therefore they have to kill him. Stephen who sees heaven, and sets the grand example to us all. Stephen the waiter on tables. I cannot resist the comment that in the end God makes a powerful point.
So now back to the apostles? No, now to Philip, and who is Philip the Evangelist, well Philip the Evangelist is actually Philip who waits on tables. I think you may be getting the picture of the argument that I am developing? Philip picked to wait on tables but scattered because of the persecution goes off and starts a mission to Samaria. Again Philip is highly effective.
So when do we next hear of these Apostles, who were so important that they had no time to wait on tables?
Ac 8:14 When the apostles in Jerusalem heard that Samaria had accepted the word of God, they sent Peter and John to them.
Who is leading the action the Apostle's or those who wait on tables?
So why is it that status is so important for so many leaders? Why does authority and power become such a question in the church? Simple. The disciples constantly bickered about who would be the greatest, we humans like power, we like authority, we like a bit of greatness - and it would be wrong of me to cast the first stone. Of course it appeals, and since we always believe that we are right (and that is not a bad thing if we believed that what we are doing was wrong then we would be stupid to do it) we give it a spiritual spin. The real issue is that underneath it all, Lord Acton's maxim is true, "All power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
The problem with most churches is that we give our ministers almost absolute power over the life of the church, and then we cannot understand why things go wrong. The problem is that power is tempting, but that temptation can be subtle. In the Lord of the Rings, the Ring of Power destroys all it comes into contact with, and the aim is to destroy it, to keep away from it, and not to wear it.
So celebrate Jesus riding on a donkey, but don't be a donkey! Like Jesus refuse to play this world's power games because in the end you can only win by not playing.
Yes our eternal destiny depend on it, yes it is a question of heaven or hell, but it is our question and we do, for good or evil, have a choice.
Jesus could have played the power game, and forced us to do his will. He could have said you will do it my way, and there will be no other choice. Instead he came in weakness. He was crucified, and he was killed, but he did not need all the power of heaven to save himself. He could have just chosen to manipulate the crowd. He was not just all powerful, he was all knowing as well. Jesus could have found a way out - but He did not, he chose to be silent like a sheep to the slaughter.
Let me repeat what I said about power games, and his refusal to play.
So what would you expect the followers of this suffering servant to be like, the one who declared that the "meek will inherit the earth"? The one who spoke about blessed are you when you are insulted?
Wouldn't you expect them to be people who were as humble and poor as a medieval monk? Who sought not power and prestige but rejected it? Who served the poor and one another? Who themselves rejected the power game?
It is interesting to note the early church. The apostles decided it was not good for them to wait on tables - but this is exactly what Jesus did and what He encouraged them to do. So they picked seven men to wait on tables, to do the practical service while they got on with the far more important work of preaching the gospel. Acts 6v1-7.
So who do we hear of next? Indeed who do we hear of next with the ministry of the word? Is it the disciples? No, it is Stephen the man who waited on tables. He gets to be the first Christian martyr. Why? Because He was effective, because God blessed Him. Now we always say that this is because the twelve were protected, but that argument does not appear in scripture. The fact was Stephen was being effective and His effectiveness got him noticed.
Stephen the man who could wait on tables, the man who did not get the plum job of preacher, the one picked to play second fiddle, the man picked for the B team, does not moan and complain - he gets on with it. Stephen becomes Stephen the martyr, the one whose wisdom they cannot beat and therefore they have to kill him. Stephen who sees heaven, and sets the grand example to us all. Stephen the waiter on tables. I cannot resist the comment that in the end God makes a powerful point.
So now back to the apostles? No, now to Philip, and who is Philip the Evangelist, well Philip the Evangelist is actually Philip who waits on tables. I think you may be getting the picture of the argument that I am developing? Philip picked to wait on tables but scattered because of the persecution goes off and starts a mission to Samaria. Again Philip is highly effective.
So when do we next hear of these Apostles, who were so important that they had no time to wait on tables?
Ac 8:14 When the apostles in Jerusalem heard that Samaria had accepted the word of God, they sent Peter and John to them.
Who is leading the action the Apostle's or those who wait on tables?
So why is it that status is so important for so many leaders? Why does authority and power become such a question in the church? Simple. The disciples constantly bickered about who would be the greatest, we humans like power, we like authority, we like a bit of greatness - and it would be wrong of me to cast the first stone. Of course it appeals, and since we always believe that we are right (and that is not a bad thing if we believed that what we are doing was wrong then we would be stupid to do it) we give it a spiritual spin. The real issue is that underneath it all, Lord Acton's maxim is true, "All power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
The problem with most churches is that we give our ministers almost absolute power over the life of the church, and then we cannot understand why things go wrong. The problem is that power is tempting, but that temptation can be subtle. In the Lord of the Rings, the Ring of Power destroys all it comes into contact with, and the aim is to destroy it, to keep away from it, and not to wear it.
So celebrate Jesus riding on a donkey, but don't be a donkey! Like Jesus refuse to play this world's power games because in the end you can only win by not playing.
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