The essential story

Doctor Who is back and is back on form. I had a theory about why Doctor Who became rubbish and disappeared. It was because we no longer really believed in good or evil. We stopped believing in evil, or that there was anything really worth hiding behind the sofa for. Everything was relative, evil was just something that happened when people did not live in good enough conditions. Better housing, a better environment and suddenly everyone would be good. Nothing really mattered, and in a world where nothing really matters it is difficult to have a good yarn, and therefore Doctor Who went down hill. We never really believed in good either that was relative, so try having a story about the battle between good and evil when you don't believe in either, and it is not going to work. Doctor Who never relied on special affects or big fight scenes and therefore it just slowly died, and it was the lack of the story that was the enemy that finally killed off the Doctor.

However, whether or not September 11th changed the world, it and other such events changed our view of the world. Doctor Who disappeared before Kosovo, before the bodies started floating down through Burundi. When we were not really aware of what was happening in the Congo. While we still thought Zimbabwe would sort itself out. While here in the UK violence has increased, so that it is not just over there it is over here again. Till again we believe in evil, till again we believe that there is something worth hiding behind the settee about. J K Rowling has made an incredible success about the battle of good against evil in Harry Potter, and it is a battle where the goodies don't just get away scot free either, but are marked.

To have a good good versus evil story you have to believe in good. It is here again where changing in culture and outlook appear interesting. Both Doctor Who and Harry Potter show a leaning towards ideas of good and heroism that I once thought had disappeared for good in a cynical age. Of course both are family entertainment and have children in mind, there is still much that is unremittingly bleak and dark, where "heroes" just shoot and kill, and it would be very much premature to announce the death of the anti-hero. However there is a resurgence of the idea of goodness and that it might be so to speak a good thing. There is at least a small call to what we might even call traditional morality.

We have lived through the me generation and in one sense looking after yourself is such a part of human nature that it is never going to disappear, but the harshness of some of the self-centredness has been based on the idea that I can get on on my own. I don't need you, you don't need me. I can fight my battles on my own. However when life gets really difficult we turn to others not just because it is the warm and cosy thing to do, but because we have to. We might be a national of individualists but when it comes to fighting something as big of Nazism, you have to work together. When evil is out there and armed and dangerous, you have to alter your behaviour.

One of the interesting questions that is being posed and that I heard on the radio today was the discussion about how much you sacrifice individual freedoms for the interest of collective security. The fact that we live in a world with dangers, with an enemy does have an impact on how we may behave - though we need to ensure that we do not manage to imprison ourselves because of the threats of others.

The world of course has not changed, we have lived in a world of sin since the days of Adam and Eve - there is nothing new under the sun. However the fact that our thinking is in flux matters, really matters. Much of the way that we live is based on the idea that in the end everything will all turn out okay, whatever we do, that life does not really have consequences - that it will be all right on the night.

Car bombs and drunken louts remind us that the reality is very different, that in truth our actions do have consequences and as Iraq demonstrates it is far easier to cause problems than it is to solve them, far easier to set things in motion than to stop them once they are in motion. Our actions do have consequences, the war that we hatch in someone else's country can come home to roost, and of course our actions in terms of pollution and how we treat the planet do have consequences and if we are not careful they can have dire consequences, melting icecaps and rising sea levels and climate chaos.

In the end the battle of good and evil matters because it is the human story and it has consequences. I think sometimes the church has something to blame, we can treat religion as the ultimate panacea - bring it to Jesus and it will all be okay; just believe; just pray - but our actions have consequences. The choices we make matter. There may not be angels and demons on our shoulders shouting or gently reasoning with us to choose a certain direction, but what we do matters - it matters to us and it matters to other people.

Christianity and the church have been seen as irrelevant because the story that we told about good and evil did not matter any more. We lived in a world that not only did not believe in God and the devil, but did not believe in good or evil either, anything went between consenting adults and if you did not like it you could switch over. However we have reaped what we have sowed and perhaps whether or not it makes a difference to people's attitude towards God and Christianity or not, people's attitudes are changing - and as much because of fear as anything else.

History has lessons for us and one of those lessons is that sometimes terrible things can happen, and that once they begin to happen it can be too late to stop them. Events like the French Revolution remind us that nothing is eternal and that sometimes reaping the injustices that we have sown can be a very bitter pill. Mario Antoinette had an idealised peasant village built where she could hide from the world and enjoy the simple peasant life, but it was fantasy, in reality the peasants lived in poverty and many of the city dweller lived in squalor and her rural retreat could not save her from the reality.

Good and evil matter, and therefore Christianity deals with the essential story of humanity, that of the battle between good and evil. This is played out in every aspect of our lives, and that is why morality matters. Easy sex has become part of the British way of life, and sex has become disconnected from marriage, so that the majority of children are born outside of wedlock. The problem is that while easy sex has a certain appeal, the reality that giving in to our passions and desires opens the door to much that is not good. In the end bringing up children and building families and communities is about hard work and self-sacrifice and dedication. The reason why marriage makes sense is that if you cannot commit yourself to someone for life then really you should not be bringing a child into the world, and though your child will be influenced by you and by your genetics, you do not get to choose your child. In the end as the last Harry Potter film finished, the time is coming when we will all have to choose between what is right and what is easy. The time of that choice is now, and indeed is always now.

The reasons why God sets good laws is that we may be blessed by living good lives, but God's laws make sense and can be summed up very simply love God and love one another. In a sense therefore God's rules for our relationships with each other are love. The reason for rules surrounding sexual restraint are because that is the loving thing to do, rather than exploiting and demeaning others.

As Christians we can often become uncomfortable with ideas of goodness. We do not like to teach it in case it makes us out to be boring, or to be the people who like to say no. However if we fail to share what it means to be good, then people will make mistakes and will hurt themselves - and others. People are into experience but the problem is that if we wait to learn from experience we may cause incredible damage both to ourselves and others in the meantime.

The other problem is that when we rely on experience we are limited by our experiences, i.e. we may not know any better, we may lack the empirical data that shows us the other choices that we missed. It is like deciding to go somewhere and not asking for directions but hoping that we will eventually stumble upon where we need to be. We need to take a look at the directions, we need to understand where we are going. The problem is that there are dangerous places, cliffs that we can drop off, bogs that we can sink into, objects that will block our paths - just setting off in hope is not enough. One of the images that I struggle with is the idea that the Bible is a map book, but the image that often we have is that we need to consult it at all times, like something that we carry in a case around our necks. However we know that is not the case, we know the way to go to the shops without needing a map, but there is a reason for that we have been shown, we have learned the way. It is like that with the Bible on much of it we just need to hear and obey, and once we have learned it and obey it we do not need to keep on looking up what to do in a certain circumstance we know because the Bible tells us.

There is a story of goodness and love, we need to learn it by heart, we need it to ring in our ears and to become our story. Not that we have to look at it nervously every day, but that we need to learn to live it out every day. Of course it is not a simple story and therefore we will still learn new things about it and we need to come back to it when fresh experiences challenge or where we find ourselves in uncharted territory. I'm not saying that we do not need to keep learning, of course we do, but we need to learn new things, not just to repeat by rote what we learned in Sunday School. It is about learning new things, and struggling with new terrain.

We live in a world of a battle, where there are real casualties, where what we do matters and has real consequences. In this world Christianity is 100% relevant and it is this message that the church needs to be unafraid to proclaim, it matters, it is the essential story.

I need you like the rain (on a Bank Holiday weekend)

Perhaps the worship leader did not want to go to the church BBQ. Perhaps he wanted a quiet weekend. As the rain poured down, and we sang "I need you like the rain" and I sat there thinking how nice it would be to see the sunshine again, I wondered if anyone else was thinking what I was thinking.

As far as I know there is not a song entitled, "I need you like the sunshine." Now, I know we need the rain, but sitting there on a damp Bank Holiday Sunday morning with things that I wanted to do which involved going outside, I did not particularly feel like I needed the rain. Or rather perhaps I did need the rain, just not here, not now.

Was I therefore trying to say to God, I need you, just not now, not here, not today - dear God please can I have a weekend off??? Today couldn't I have some sunshine....

Some people will be uncomfortable about me saying this, aren't I being slightly silly, a bit ridiculous, a little mocking of things that are spiritual, rather indeed unspiritual. Perhaps I am being slightly provocative, and it's not just that I think we should think seriously about the words that we sing it is something bigger than that.

Jesus came that the relations with Him and the relationships with others that sin has broken might be healed. I once had a boss who commented particularly negatively about some witticism that I had made in a meeting - people had laughed and enjoyed it, and I do not think there had been any negative feedback - it was just that she was rather lacking in the humour department. Her comment was not just that I should not say it, I should not think it. Well she was not exactly what I would describe as a friend, she was a particularly unpleasant boss.

However sometimes Christians can give that impression, don't say it, don't even think about it. Like the Emperor's New Clothes, we do not question the ridiculous - we submit, we love, we trust. What though we end up with is a pale imitation of a relationship. We are called to call God Father, but I can have a joke with my Dad - that is part of having a good relationship. I have said before that there ought to be a programme called Christians do the silliest things, and that is okay. However we need to be able to talk about it, to walk with each other, to travel together and to discuss.

Of course part of the problem is that Jesus did not do ridiculous things, so we do not have examples of how the disciples dealt with Him with spiritual ridiculousness. However Jesus himself had some tough words for the Pharisees and their ridiculous rules and some of that could be seen as mocking the spiritual and quite unspiritual. We know that His language upset them rather. Jesus had a taste for highlighting the ridiculous, for debunking the apparently spiritual. Jesus stood for truth and honesty, and sometimes we need to be more honest.

So God I need you like the sunshine on a bank holiday weekend, but I praise you Lord that you do exist. I need you like the dry ground needs rain. I need you like the plants need sunshine. I need you as a child needs a father.

At times we need to take ourselves rather less seriously. God likes it when we laugh together. Perhaps we need to review of understanding of God, I do not believe that God is the serious school master with a big red pen who delights to mark down our mistakes.

Perhaps He does have a big red pen, perhaps He does mark crosses all over our mistakes, and by it He marks the words, "Paid in full". He has done it because He wants us to live again, to laugh again, to rediscover the joy of living and loving.

Send the Bus???

This originates from an exercise in writing a Psalm in church, except the Psalm writing led me to have an idea that was not really a Psalm at all. With apologies to General Booth.

Lord, Send the Bus.

I'm hungry and I'm cold
I feel like I am growing old
I've been waiting here so long
I started to write this song
Lord, send the bus, send the bus, send the bus

Lord, I am still waiting here
And it feels like a passing year
The battle needs to be won
It's time for me to move on
Lord, send the bus, send the bus, send the bus

I'm tired of all this waiting
The transport procrastinating
The world seems to be passing me by
It makes me want to cry
Lord, send the bus, send the bus, send the bus

I have been waiting here so long
Perhaps my method has been wrong
It's time to stop the talking
I'd be better to set off walking
Lord, send me, send me, send me.

We live lives waiting for God to do something, for God to send some magical transport to get us from where we are to where we feel we ought to be or where we are called to be. So we wait at the heavenly bus stop doing nothing but waiting. But God wants us to stop behaving like passengers and start using the transport he has given us and start acting like followers.

A rose by any other name

Back to Genesis Ch1

Ge 1:5 God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.”

In Genesis everything gets given a name, it is not just people who have names but the day and the night. We get to verse five and God starts to give things a name. Pure science can cope with descriptions, but the poet demands words. The omnivorous quadruped is called a rabbit, and things have a greater sense a greater meaning. Every hair on your head is numbered. Not a sparrow falls to the ground but He knows it.

God is a God who watches over His garden and delights over it. We give names to things we value, so people name their cars and assert to them personalities, it is a sign of affectation - if not affection. God does not just look and observe, he gets involved. When we give something a name we enter into a relationship with it, it becomes more real. So God uses words and gives names.

There is something mystical about creation and the relationship that God has towards it. So often we treat the planet like these are just routes to somewhere else, and we spend life travelling to somewhere not knowing that where we are matters. God though gives names like a tourist taking snaps shots. This I call day, this I call night. Like a artist naming his works, this is not just a splash of paint, this is "A Sunflower", "Water Lillies", or a "Madonna Col Bambino"

Names matter, they give the opportunity of distinction and description. The world finds not just a physical but a literary form. It is not just a flower, it is a rose.

" What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;" Romeo and Juliet.

But if Juliet could only call Romeo, him over there, and could not have nouns and descriptors then the whole of the play might be spent in trying to describe Romeo so that he could be identified. Of course if we did not have variety, if everyone did look just the same then it really would be very difficult to identify who they were. Names give us language they enable us to communicate and interact.

Of course the problem is that God did not call day, he called it something else in a language that we do not entirely understand or is perhaps beyond language, since of course there was no man to hear God's utterances.

Words matter, the gospel of John begins, "In the beginning was the Word". Words have a certain significance. Words matter, God says let there be light and there is light. Words matter in our relationship with one another, and words matter in our relationship with God.

We live in a world created by the Word, we need to start talking God's language.

Lost in Ibiza?

I was wandering through San Antonio Bay in Ibiza on holiday with the family. We walked past a group of males just as a group of women came up to them. One of the males spoke to the women, "Hello Ladies" he said, but the women just walked off.

What really struck me was the inevitability of the situation, indeed, what made the situation almost tragic was the fact that the guy who said, "Hello Ladies," tone of voice seemed to be a meditation on hopelessness. He knew that he was sober and they were sober and it was not going to happen. He was lost in Ibiza looking for something, he probably would not call it love, but something, and he knew that though he was seeking it there was an inevitability about the fact that he was not going to find it.

We live in a world that is failing by its own standards. Often we try and measure the world by God's standards and the world cannot understand it because it does not understand God's standards. The issue though is that the world is failing by its own standards.

The world says that if you go for it, you will find it. Go out there and get it, but the problem is that those who do go for it - do not get it. The world may deliver for a short amount of time, like the drug dealer who is trying to get you hooked, but it does not deliver in the long term. The Bible warns that, in Proverbs 14

12 There is a way that seems right to a man,
but in the end it leads to death.

We need to better understand how sin works. If we were dealing with a disease we would look at the infection risks, look at how the virus or other cause of the disease operates and try to work towards a cure. That would appear to be a sensible way to operate. The problem is that many people go into denial and do not accept that they have a problem, which is exactly what happens with sin.

The reason most people are not interested in Christianity is that they do not believe they have a problem. You only need a cure if you have a problem and they do not have a problem. There is the problem of pride. I do not need religion, I do not need God. That is a lie.

I have heard of people dying of treatable cancer because they denied the symptoms, by the time they made it to the doctor it was too late.

We have a problem it is called sin, but there is a cure. Sin causes alienation from ourselves and God and ourselves and each other. There is a cure that offers the opportunity not only for reconciliation with God, but to also start to find reconciliation with ourselves and others.

God has come to us, He has said Hello, He has offered us new life, the question is will we just walk away not interested.

Do we have too big a but?

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.

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.