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.
Tuesday, 27 March 2007
Created for Intimacy
"And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed." Genesis 2v25 KJV
There are various statistics about the number of searches on the internet that relate to sex and pornography, certainly a large amount of spam relates to it. Go into any newsagent and you will see that sex sells. Sexual temptation can destroy marriages and relationships and we live in an age where it is not uncommon for 12 and 13 year old's to be experimenting with sex. In such a world it is easy for the church to be different, but how should we respond?
First question. Why is sex and pornography such a strong driver?
C S Lewis argues that the devil cannot create anything, so instead he takes what God has created and misuses it and abuses it and turns the good into something bad. We were created to have intimacy with God and intimacy with one another. We were created to walk with God and walk with each other, to share our lives and to share ourselves.
God created woman because man needed company.
18 The LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him." NIV
The problem is that there are so many people who feel so alone, and therefore vulnerable to the false intimacies that the devil offers. We live in a world of full of lonely people, a world full of Eleanor Rigsbys. It is not necessarily that people do not have friends, but that friendships do not go deep. We live in a world where we teach people the biology of sex, but not the importance of real relationships. Indeed it is difficult to teach relationships, we tend to learn by having them. However if you are born to parents who do not relate to each other it puts you at a disadvantage.
We need intimacy, and even in our damaged world, I believe that God is the answer and the healer. I do not believe that we are fully human unless we truly connect with each other. Sin therefore makes us less human. God however can and does restore the broken image.
We were created for intimacy, we were created to connect, and with God's help we can in a real way as God intended.
There are various statistics about the number of searches on the internet that relate to sex and pornography, certainly a large amount of spam relates to it. Go into any newsagent and you will see that sex sells. Sexual temptation can destroy marriages and relationships and we live in an age where it is not uncommon for 12 and 13 year old's to be experimenting with sex. In such a world it is easy for the church to be different, but how should we respond?
First question. Why is sex and pornography such a strong driver?
C S Lewis argues that the devil cannot create anything, so instead he takes what God has created and misuses it and abuses it and turns the good into something bad. We were created to have intimacy with God and intimacy with one another. We were created to walk with God and walk with each other, to share our lives and to share ourselves.
God created woman because man needed company.
18 The LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him." NIV
The problem is that there are so many people who feel so alone, and therefore vulnerable to the false intimacies that the devil offers. We live in a world of full of lonely people, a world full of Eleanor Rigsbys. It is not necessarily that people do not have friends, but that friendships do not go deep. We live in a world where we teach people the biology of sex, but not the importance of real relationships. Indeed it is difficult to teach relationships, we tend to learn by having them. However if you are born to parents who do not relate to each other it puts you at a disadvantage.
We need intimacy, and even in our damaged world, I believe that God is the answer and the healer. I do not believe that we are fully human unless we truly connect with each other. Sin therefore makes us less human. God however can and does restore the broken image.
We were created for intimacy, we were created to connect, and with God's help we can in a real way as God intended.
Saturday, 10 March 2007
Happiness - The greatest gift that I possess?
There is the Ken Dodd song that has the words, "Happiness, happiness, the greatest gift that I possess I thank the Lord that I possess more than my fair share of happiness."
We live in a world that still more than anything else wants to be happy, the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. This involves living in peace with other people, by which we mean the absence of open conflict.
I sometimes feels I live in a culture that is not pursuing life, but living death. Aldous Huxley in Brave New World has a dystopian vision of a world living on Soma, a drug which keeps everyone happy - but by doing so removes meaning from the world. Probably most of the population of Britain would be happy with that idea. We seek happiness in pleasure, in material possessions, in the sexual possession of people, and in being comfortable. We live in a feel good world, and we want to feel good.
When we enter the church we do not leave this baggage at the door, because we do not even think of it as baggage. Indeed, it is very hard to identify baggage that has been with us for so long that we see it as us. Therefore when we come to church we want a church that will make us happy, that will make us feel good, that will keep us from pain, and that will make us comfortable.
We argue that God will help us to be happy far better than the devil's ways, but we do not question whether indeed we are pursuing the right goals, and how "Don't worry be happy!" really fits with, "If anyone wants to come after me, let him deny himself, pick up his cross and follow me." Matt 16v24. Now of course it is easy to pick out one verse and take it too far, but there are other verses and there is the life of those followers of Jesus who are recorded in the Bible. One of the most comprehensive summaries being Hebrews 11v32-39. Just a short extract says, "36Some faced jeers and flogging, while still others were chained and put in prison. 37They were stoned[f]; they were sawed in two; they were put to death by the sword." v36-37a.
Really being a Christian what more could you want? What is even better the passage states, " 39These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised." Great, really great. So you get sawed in two, you get killed, and you still do not get what you were promised.
Reminds me of the old quip attributed to St Teresa of Avalla when having a bad day, "God, if this is how you treat your friends, it's not surprising you have so many enemies." Not really a case of keep taking the happy pills.
Following Jesus is not easy, and does not automatically lead to increased happiness. Moses suffered alienation from his own people and from the Egyptians, and the years spent tending sheep cannot have been easy. Joseph had done his time in Jail. David seems to have never really enjoyed what really matters, when you take a step back he had a heart after God, but he was perhaps a pretty dysfunctional creative genius. Jesus was rejected and crucified, Paul had a very difficult time, and probably ten out of the remaining Eleven Disciples were martyred.
If life is just about material happiness then Christians are losers. Paul comments, 1 Cor 15:19 "If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men."
We believe, whether we like it or not, in something that is bigger than life itself. We cannot escape the fact that either we have a hope of heaven, or our sufferings are in vain.
How we believe affects how we behave, indeed conversely sometimes how we behave tells more about what we believe than what we say we believe. We need to regain a sense of eternity, we need to regain a sense that we have a God who is bigger than life itself. That the concerns of this current age, or not ultimately our concerns, we were created for more and we have been redeemed for more.
Church buildings used to awe people with a sense of something bigger than themselves, today tiny in comparison with the shopping centres that instead block out the light in our City Centres we have lost sight of the fact that there is something bigger than all this. The answer to the plight of the church is not that God can make you happy, but that there is not just something bigger than happiness but someone.
Happiness is not and cannot be pursued as an end in itself, happiness for happiness sake makes us emotionally paralysed, happiness is a by-product not an end-product. Paul talks about joy, he talks about contentment, intermingled with suffering. Jesus is focussed on love, He promises peace and joy, but also a cross.
Ultimately we were created for something bigger, for something more. In a world that is addicted to happiness, it is easy for us as Christians to sing from the world's hymn sheet and say Jesus can make you happy. Except sometimes following Jesus can be very hard, and it forces us to put aside the things that in worldy terms we think make us happy. The Church therefore must point the world, like the Spire on a traditional church, heavenwards. To a world that is addicted to the moment, to the here and now, we present eternity. The Kingdom of Heaven is near, that it can and does break through into our reality.
We live in a world that still more than anything else wants to be happy, the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. This involves living in peace with other people, by which we mean the absence of open conflict.
I sometimes feels I live in a culture that is not pursuing life, but living death. Aldous Huxley in Brave New World has a dystopian vision of a world living on Soma, a drug which keeps everyone happy - but by doing so removes meaning from the world. Probably most of the population of Britain would be happy with that idea. We seek happiness in pleasure, in material possessions, in the sexual possession of people, and in being comfortable. We live in a feel good world, and we want to feel good.
When we enter the church we do not leave this baggage at the door, because we do not even think of it as baggage. Indeed, it is very hard to identify baggage that has been with us for so long that we see it as us. Therefore when we come to church we want a church that will make us happy, that will make us feel good, that will keep us from pain, and that will make us comfortable.
We argue that God will help us to be happy far better than the devil's ways, but we do not question whether indeed we are pursuing the right goals, and how "Don't worry be happy!" really fits with, "If anyone wants to come after me, let him deny himself, pick up his cross and follow me." Matt 16v24. Now of course it is easy to pick out one verse and take it too far, but there are other verses and there is the life of those followers of Jesus who are recorded in the Bible. One of the most comprehensive summaries being Hebrews 11v32-39. Just a short extract says, "36Some faced jeers and flogging, while still others were chained and put in prison. 37They were stoned[f]; they were sawed in two; they were put to death by the sword." v36-37a.
Really being a Christian what more could you want? What is even better the passage states, " 39These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised." Great, really great. So you get sawed in two, you get killed, and you still do not get what you were promised.
Reminds me of the old quip attributed to St Teresa of Avalla when having a bad day, "God, if this is how you treat your friends, it's not surprising you have so many enemies." Not really a case of keep taking the happy pills.
Following Jesus is not easy, and does not automatically lead to increased happiness. Moses suffered alienation from his own people and from the Egyptians, and the years spent tending sheep cannot have been easy. Joseph had done his time in Jail. David seems to have never really enjoyed what really matters, when you take a step back he had a heart after God, but he was perhaps a pretty dysfunctional creative genius. Jesus was rejected and crucified, Paul had a very difficult time, and probably ten out of the remaining Eleven Disciples were martyred.
If life is just about material happiness then Christians are losers. Paul comments, 1 Cor 15:19 "If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men."
We believe, whether we like it or not, in something that is bigger than life itself. We cannot escape the fact that either we have a hope of heaven, or our sufferings are in vain.
How we believe affects how we behave, indeed conversely sometimes how we behave tells more about what we believe than what we say we believe. We need to regain a sense of eternity, we need to regain a sense that we have a God who is bigger than life itself. That the concerns of this current age, or not ultimately our concerns, we were created for more and we have been redeemed for more.
Church buildings used to awe people with a sense of something bigger than themselves, today tiny in comparison with the shopping centres that instead block out the light in our City Centres we have lost sight of the fact that there is something bigger than all this. The answer to the plight of the church is not that God can make you happy, but that there is not just something bigger than happiness but someone.
Happiness is not and cannot be pursued as an end in itself, happiness for happiness sake makes us emotionally paralysed, happiness is a by-product not an end-product. Paul talks about joy, he talks about contentment, intermingled with suffering. Jesus is focussed on love, He promises peace and joy, but also a cross.
Ultimately we were created for something bigger, for something more. In a world that is addicted to happiness, it is easy for us as Christians to sing from the world's hymn sheet and say Jesus can make you happy. Except sometimes following Jesus can be very hard, and it forces us to put aside the things that in worldy terms we think make us happy. The Church therefore must point the world, like the Spire on a traditional church, heavenwards. To a world that is addicted to the moment, to the here and now, we present eternity. The Kingdom of Heaven is near, that it can and does break through into our reality.
Thursday, 1 March 2007
Creating a habitat for humanity
Alain de Botton in his series The Perfect Home gives the example of Marie Antoinette who built for herself an idealised rural village - a false pastiche. She wanted to escape Versailles and the artificiality of court life and reconnect. The problem was it was nothing like a real peasant village. We may say what is wrong with living in a world of delusions?
The need, as demonstrated by the French Revolution, is to be able to connect with the world, deal with the issues and resolve the problems. Nietzsche made the point that often such coping mechanisms create a worse mess than the problem that they are trying to resolve.
So what has this got to do with the church?
The point that he makes is that the modern British house shows nothing about who we are and where we live, it represents an escape into a rural idyll that never existed. It is a form of delusion and it is created by our unease, our alienation from the modern world.
It is a sign of our insecurity with our actuality, our lack of connection - and it creates bad housing. What is interesting is the programme starts off to say how housing affects the soul, but talks more about how the soul affects what we build and where we live.
I was listening to a recording of Jeff Lucas today speaking about Joseph in Egypt and saying that we cannot keep God as a Deity who lives in the church car park. We need to escape the separation of the spiritual and the none-spiritual.
God is interested in where we live. He created a wonderful world, and I wonder if he puzzles sometimes at why we then choose to live in such small boxes surrounded by small gardens - that reflect little of the creators creativity.
Housing can be seen as unspiritual, we are just passing through, where we live now has no lasting significance. We can get excited about the poor and their need for good housing, but we seem to have lost our heart to dream of a better world. One that is better not just in terms of justice and equality, but one which has better houses, great art, wonderful books and terrific music.
We are not just called to reflect God love as if it can be distilled as pure love like some clear liquid with all the colour removed. We are called to reflect the creativity of a creative God. When we think of the coming of the Kingdom of God, when we think about Redemption we need to see that not purely in terms of the soul - but in terms of the whole of our being. Heaven will not be a pale distillation of what is good, but a fulfilment of what earth was created to be. Heaven will not be less, but more.
As Christians we need to think about whatever we do be great at it. Whatever our job and our role is be great, but we need to go beyond the roles that society defines for us. We are now the out breaking of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, we need to get involved in transforming the world.
We tend to shy away from the idea that the environment affects the person wanting people to take responsibility for their own lives - which of course is important and can be the beginning of finding liberation. However, we need to look at transforming the environment. Christians in all societies need to be fundamentally involved in making the world a better place, and sometimes we can help people more by working in business at creating jobs than we can by doing worthy things to reduce poverty. We can sometimes do more to help people by improving their environment, then by just looking at their problems. We need to do this in a partnership approach where everyone can participate rather than having a holy us approach.
It is easy to say that God could have created a black and white world with few pleasures instead he created an earthly paradise (which we then set out to spoil) - but I'm not sure if that is true. I'm not sure that God could have created a boring world - it would just be so much out of character.
There are limited resources and the plight of the poor must always be in our hearts, but it needs to be not either justice or beauty - but both.
The call of the church is not just to be just, but to make the world a more beautiful place for people to live in.
The need, as demonstrated by the French Revolution, is to be able to connect with the world, deal with the issues and resolve the problems. Nietzsche made the point that often such coping mechanisms create a worse mess than the problem that they are trying to resolve.
So what has this got to do with the church?
The point that he makes is that the modern British house shows nothing about who we are and where we live, it represents an escape into a rural idyll that never existed. It is a form of delusion and it is created by our unease, our alienation from the modern world.
It is a sign of our insecurity with our actuality, our lack of connection - and it creates bad housing. What is interesting is the programme starts off to say how housing affects the soul, but talks more about how the soul affects what we build and where we live.
I was listening to a recording of Jeff Lucas today speaking about Joseph in Egypt and saying that we cannot keep God as a Deity who lives in the church car park. We need to escape the separation of the spiritual and the none-spiritual.
God is interested in where we live. He created a wonderful world, and I wonder if he puzzles sometimes at why we then choose to live in such small boxes surrounded by small gardens - that reflect little of the creators creativity.
Housing can be seen as unspiritual, we are just passing through, where we live now has no lasting significance. We can get excited about the poor and their need for good housing, but we seem to have lost our heart to dream of a better world. One that is better not just in terms of justice and equality, but one which has better houses, great art, wonderful books and terrific music.
We are not just called to reflect God love as if it can be distilled as pure love like some clear liquid with all the colour removed. We are called to reflect the creativity of a creative God. When we think of the coming of the Kingdom of God, when we think about Redemption we need to see that not purely in terms of the soul - but in terms of the whole of our being. Heaven will not be a pale distillation of what is good, but a fulfilment of what earth was created to be. Heaven will not be less, but more.
As Christians we need to think about whatever we do be great at it. Whatever our job and our role is be great, but we need to go beyond the roles that society defines for us. We are now the out breaking of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, we need to get involved in transforming the world.
We tend to shy away from the idea that the environment affects the person wanting people to take responsibility for their own lives - which of course is important and can be the beginning of finding liberation. However, we need to look at transforming the environment. Christians in all societies need to be fundamentally involved in making the world a better place, and sometimes we can help people more by working in business at creating jobs than we can by doing worthy things to reduce poverty. We can sometimes do more to help people by improving their environment, then by just looking at their problems. We need to do this in a partnership approach where everyone can participate rather than having a holy us approach.
It is easy to say that God could have created a black and white world with few pleasures instead he created an earthly paradise (which we then set out to spoil) - but I'm not sure if that is true. I'm not sure that God could have created a boring world - it would just be so much out of character.
There are limited resources and the plight of the poor must always be in our hearts, but it needs to be not either justice or beauty - but both.
The call of the church is not just to be just, but to make the world a more beautiful place for people to live in.
Wednesday, 28 February 2007
Special features commentary
I wonder what it would have been like if you could watch creation. Everything starts off with darkness, and then there is light. Then after the light appears, the blur starts to separate, shapes and forms, sky, water and earth. Then from this barren earth, out from the very mud plants emerge, and not just one plant but many different species. The sky is shaped, the stars of the sky, the moon the sun. Then fish start swimming in the sea, and then the birds and then the animals on the land and then mankind.
Imagine if you were to watch it unfold on a DVD and you could see it all happening, it would be wonderful. It's great, but we may want to know what the Director had in mind, how did they achieve this wonder? Then you would go to the menu, click on special features and the Director's commentary and we would hear those familiar words from Genesis, "In the beginning..."
And we realise that the film of life has a Director, and that He is interested in the plot and suddenly it all means so much more. We understand, but then we continue to watch.
The action changes from the good world without death, without a shade a pain, things start to go wrong. There is the fall, there is murder, there is death, and without the commentary you are lost. Why has all this happened? What has gone wrong?
You watch the tape, but you do not understand, and because you do not understand you do not see it coming.
It is interesting in the Sixties, people said they wanted free love, none of the restraints of society they wanted love without restraint.
The seventies was the decade of consent, what did it matter so long as there was consent. What went on between consenting adults was no one else's business. So long as no one was hurt.
By 1984 Tina Turner was proclaiming, "What's love got to do with it?"
It was about me and my pleasure.
By 1998 it was not ice creams and deck chairs, but "Sex on the beach."
We live in a selfish generation where it is no longer so long as no one gets hurt, we know that people get hurt but heh it's a tough world. Consent is debatable, so long as the other does not object too strongly. The family breaks down and we ask the question where is love.
It is like we are playing the film in reverse. We have switched off the commentary and ignored the warnings.
Paul in Ephesians 4v19 comments,
Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, with a continual lust for more.
Or as the Rolling Stones put it in 1965 "I can't get no satisfaction."
We can make our world without God but it is formless and dark, but as John comments at the start of his gospel, writing perhaps in prison in an occupied country far from home,
"The light shines in the darkness."
If we turn from God we soon find ourselves far from God, there is a certain inescapable inevitability about the decline of culture without God. The problem with British society is not essentially drink, drugs, family breakdown - the essential problem is that we are fallen human beings and that without God's help we quickly collapse, and that affects the whole of our lives and our culture.
However God is a God of redemption and victory. In the 18th Century following the realisation of what it all meant, either John or Charles Wesley wrote a rather different song
Long my imprisoned spirit lay,
fast bound in sin and nature's night;
thine eye diffused a quickening ray;
I woke, the dungeon flamed with light;
my chains fell off, my heart was free,
I rose, went forth, and followed thee.
Jesus comes into our lives, and there is light!
Imagine if you were to watch it unfold on a DVD and you could see it all happening, it would be wonderful. It's great, but we may want to know what the Director had in mind, how did they achieve this wonder? Then you would go to the menu, click on special features and the Director's commentary and we would hear those familiar words from Genesis, "In the beginning..."
And we realise that the film of life has a Director, and that He is interested in the plot and suddenly it all means so much more. We understand, but then we continue to watch.
The action changes from the good world without death, without a shade a pain, things start to go wrong. There is the fall, there is murder, there is death, and without the commentary you are lost. Why has all this happened? What has gone wrong?
You watch the tape, but you do not understand, and because you do not understand you do not see it coming.
It is interesting in the Sixties, people said they wanted free love, none of the restraints of society they wanted love without restraint.
The seventies was the decade of consent, what did it matter so long as there was consent. What went on between consenting adults was no one else's business. So long as no one was hurt.
By 1984 Tina Turner was proclaiming, "What's love got to do with it?"
It was about me and my pleasure.
By 1998 it was not ice creams and deck chairs, but "Sex on the beach."
We live in a selfish generation where it is no longer so long as no one gets hurt, we know that people get hurt but heh it's a tough world. Consent is debatable, so long as the other does not object too strongly. The family breaks down and we ask the question where is love.
It is like we are playing the film in reverse. We have switched off the commentary and ignored the warnings.
Paul in Ephesians 4v19 comments,
Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, with a continual lust for more.
Or as the Rolling Stones put it in 1965 "I can't get no satisfaction."
We can make our world without God but it is formless and dark, but as John comments at the start of his gospel, writing perhaps in prison in an occupied country far from home,
"The light shines in the darkness."
If we turn from God we soon find ourselves far from God, there is a certain inescapable inevitability about the decline of culture without God. The problem with British society is not essentially drink, drugs, family breakdown - the essential problem is that we are fallen human beings and that without God's help we quickly collapse, and that affects the whole of our lives and our culture.
However God is a God of redemption and victory. In the 18th Century following the realisation of what it all meant, either John or Charles Wesley wrote a rather different song
Long my imprisoned spirit lay,
fast bound in sin and nature's night;
thine eye diffused a quickening ray;
I woke, the dungeon flamed with light;
my chains fell off, my heart was free,
I rose, went forth, and followed thee.
Jesus comes into our lives, and there is light!
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