"A life of unmitigated 'ratio' (having to define all by what can be proven) where nothing was simply 'seen' would presumably be impossible; for nothing can be proved if nothing is self-evident". C S Lewis - The Discarded Image.
This past week has given me opportunity to catch up with some theological material I've been meaning to reference for a while (highly recommended - Mike Reeves F O C L lectures on You Tube, examining items as diverse as the Christology of Karl Barth to Luther's glorious discovery of salvation by Justification through grace alone).
One message that really struck home was Chad Bird's 1517 Conference message on The Cross before the Cross. Starting in Genesis 1 and touching also on the experience of Moses, Chad shows how all divine action is essentially cruciform in its nature - the Father pouring Himself out through the Son, into creation. It's when this is allowed to happen without hinderance (by us), that we savor and wallow in the beauty of Gods exquisite goodness. It's when this stops (because of us) that we find ourselves owning a house of broken rules and, worse yet, damaged lives.
Thankfully, as Chad notes, God is used to taking what is most crude and chaotic and speaking something far better into these realms because of that cruciform nature, and it is this that gives us confidence and assurance beyond our own inevitable ability to mess it up.
This is especially important when it comes to Christian ministry. Our priesthood (service) is both to God and our neighbor, but we're not going to be effective if all we have to offer is just ourselves. What is imperative as we read through the stories of prior believers throughout the scriptures is that there is something more going on than just the messing-up that they often inhabit. Quite often, amidst that failing, God comes alongside and speaks or acts in a fashion that re-assures us of His great affection to a people entirely lost without that.
In his second epistle to Timothy, Paul grants some very wise instruction in respect to our being children of the cross. 'Do your best", he writes "to present yourself to God as one steadfast after being tested, a worker without shame who rightly handles the Word of God" (2:15). That last statement really needs to weigh on us, because it's saying that without that manner of 'rightness' in our words which spring from invaluable experience of a great truth in life (hence Paul's words about a depth to Timothy's character), we will loose what should define us in our being less than what really counts.
The key here is that it is when God's word 'speaks', everything is made afresh, so that is the life that needs to be ours. If we settle for less, then we are missing out.
Sometimes, we find ourselves so far removed from being the kind of person that is doing well, and we're not sure how we change that - how we can become the kind of person Paul is speaking about here? The good news is that in the 'darkness' of both creation and of those hours of the cross, God works His deepest, most astonishing deeds, so He can work in us in that fashion as well.
The things which are currently 'unseen' can, indeed, become seen, because there is an amazing love that is waiting for us - the Father, revealed in Jesus Christ.
Saturday 26 October 2019
Saturday 19 October 2019
Killing the System
"In the course of time, Cain brought the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground".
Genesis 4:3.
It's probably the hardest thing we have to learn to live with.
I still recall the day it hit home for me.
I'd tried so hard to be filling the role of being there, at least when it came to "ministry", for others, that I'd entirely missed the ground vanishing beneath my feet, leaving my entire future in jeopardy.
Vanity makes us so narrow of vision that we in effect become blind to what really matters.
The root problem, as some good theologians have noted, is that we so often replace God's totally unmerited mercy for a bag of devices we employ as means to twist God's arm, or, at least to convince us that is what we're doing. We are, in effect, like Adam, shouting at God from the bushes, when He wants us to face the truth and understand that aside from His intervening love, we are without any help at all.
Religion is all about when we don't accept that answer. The temptation we succumb to by such means is to believe that we have the resources to play God ourselves - to become more than we are, sinners saved by grace. We don't merely do this in rash moments, but devise whole systems of mimicking godliness so we can appear garbed in piety.
That was my problem back in those days of 'full time ministry'. I not only lost sight of Christ's unique work for us, I also lost sight of myself - of my dreadful plight without the single overshadowing of His death and resurrection.
True freedom in Christ is a very dangerous thing. Paul says that he had liberty in all things (and notes so do we); that to those who are pure (because of Christ) all things are pure - that sets parameters that are way above and beyond what religious structures and disciplines can provide, because redemption is about all creation regaining the radiance it was purposed to express.
Thankfully, redemption is all about God in Christ invading our space with the opulence of His exquisite and abundant mercy, and using such as the way to engender in us a relish for Him above all else. Grace gives the means (word and sacrament) to establish what was very good in God's full intention for the world.
We, at our very best, do what we do in weakness, but that's OK. God took the mess that I had driven myself into in my youthful zeal and showed me there was so very much more to see in the death and resurrection of His beloved, that some 40 years on, I'm beginning to see a little of the true boundaries of such extraordinary grace.
The important things is, just like those disciples Jesus met on the Emmaus road, that Christ is seen and His living word burns in our hearts.
Don't become trapped by going inward. Look to that altar, outside of the scheduled rituals and rules where the Lamb of God opened the fountain that never runs dry, paid for by the sacrifice that sustains all things forever.
Christ alone must be what we are about, because if we in any fashion see ourselves taking the reins, we are in very deep trouble.
If we truly want to see the life of God evidenced amongst us, then Paul urges indeed cajoles us to pursue one excellence alone - preach the irreplaceable person and work of Jesus, and you will rest on a surety everlasting.
Genesis 4:3.
It's probably the hardest thing we have to learn to live with.
I still recall the day it hit home for me.
I'd tried so hard to be filling the role of being there, at least when it came to "ministry", for others, that I'd entirely missed the ground vanishing beneath my feet, leaving my entire future in jeopardy.
Vanity makes us so narrow of vision that we in effect become blind to what really matters.
The root problem, as some good theologians have noted, is that we so often replace God's totally unmerited mercy for a bag of devices we employ as means to twist God's arm, or, at least to convince us that is what we're doing. We are, in effect, like Adam, shouting at God from the bushes, when He wants us to face the truth and understand that aside from His intervening love, we are without any help at all.
Religion is all about when we don't accept that answer. The temptation we succumb to by such means is to believe that we have the resources to play God ourselves - to become more than we are, sinners saved by grace. We don't merely do this in rash moments, but devise whole systems of mimicking godliness so we can appear garbed in piety.
That was my problem back in those days of 'full time ministry'. I not only lost sight of Christ's unique work for us, I also lost sight of myself - of my dreadful plight without the single overshadowing of His death and resurrection.
True freedom in Christ is a very dangerous thing. Paul says that he had liberty in all things (and notes so do we); that to those who are pure (because of Christ) all things are pure - that sets parameters that are way above and beyond what religious structures and disciplines can provide, because redemption is about all creation regaining the radiance it was purposed to express.
Thankfully, redemption is all about God in Christ invading our space with the opulence of His exquisite and abundant mercy, and using such as the way to engender in us a relish for Him above all else. Grace gives the means (word and sacrament) to establish what was very good in God's full intention for the world.
We, at our very best, do what we do in weakness, but that's OK. God took the mess that I had driven myself into in my youthful zeal and showed me there was so very much more to see in the death and resurrection of His beloved, that some 40 years on, I'm beginning to see a little of the true boundaries of such extraordinary grace.
The important things is, just like those disciples Jesus met on the Emmaus road, that Christ is seen and His living word burns in our hearts.
Don't become trapped by going inward. Look to that altar, outside of the scheduled rituals and rules where the Lamb of God opened the fountain that never runs dry, paid for by the sacrifice that sustains all things forever.
Christ alone must be what we are about, because if we in any fashion see ourselves taking the reins, we are in very deep trouble.
If we truly want to see the life of God evidenced amongst us, then Paul urges indeed cajoles us to pursue one excellence alone - preach the irreplaceable person and work of Jesus, and you will rest on a surety everlasting.
Saturday 12 October 2019
W H A M !
"The Jesus who confronts us in the New Testament, and supremely in the Gospels, is not a phantom figure, whose only importance is meaning. He is very real, and so relevant to our world because He has lived in it". Dr John Drane.
So, this week I have to say thank you to Tom Holland and his new book, Dominion - not because I'm particularly comfortable with much of what he's authored there, but principally because it gave me a jolt to think afresh about why I am a Christian, and what is so easily taken for granted about the faith that's changed our world.
Let me unpack this a little.
Mark's Gospel begins by telling us that it's an account about someone who is simply remarkable - Jesus... and this is where we immediately find ourselves undone - "the son of God". What comes in the next 16 blunt chapters is nothing short of extraordinary, but what's important to note here is that it's the person at the core of these events and what He says and does that ignites and fuels something that was already spreading across the Roman world by the time we get to the conversion of Paul.
It's imperative to understand this chain of events. The reason there was a Damascus Road moment for Saul was because there'd been a martyrdom in Jerusalem of a man named Stephen who was preaching Jesus, and the reason for that was because the day of Pentecost had seen Jews 'from every nation under heaven' hear and respond to Peter telling them about the recent events that had happened in the very place they were now standing.
Christianity doesn't begin with Paul. However key he is to the growth of both the global expansion of the church and it's application of the good news towards the end of the first century (and he truly is), the fact remains that he was part of something that was already taking the world by storm.
I say all of this because Tom Holland's book, in some respects, makes any need for a real Jesus secondary to the creeds and powers that came to bear or use his name. There's no denying that much of the surge and grandeur that came to define Christendom from the 5th to 12th centuries took place as he shows, but as other authors have noted, this was commonly at the expense of the very teachings and message of Jesus Himself, turning Christianity into a power which often brutally crushed any and all who sought to question or resist its worldly authority. The inquisition, as Peter De Rosa notes, was in so many ways the prototype for the Holocaust and the Gulags of the 20th century. The only truth to delight in here is that slowly, over the next 300 years, men awoke to the fact that the Gospel required something very different.
It's awakening to the message of the Gospels themselves that truly matters. Holland admits that behind the last two thousand years, there remains the remarkable 'myth' of the man they crucified, but it wasn't a contrivance or a story that so troubled those disciples who had travelled with him on that first easter sunday.
The original ending of Mark's short gospel concludes with these words:
"and they fled from the tomb (because of what they had seen), trembling and astonished, and said nothing to anyone, for they were terrified" (16:8).
Christianity begins with a moment of utter bewilderment and total astonishment.
It's hard for us to take in just how overwhelming this moment is, because so few events in our own lives come close, and even momentous historical changes really don't touch this,
because this, as Holland notes, is the genuine 'molten core' that drives the faith.
The world can never be the same again because of what happened on that morning at that empty tomb.
Dominion tells us of centuries of consequences of Christianity rising and falling, and no doubt much of what the author states here about the ramifications of that is true, but the real thing we need to understand is what Mark is saying about the man who was truly the Son of God. Everything else pales when we encounter Him.
So, this week I have to say thank you to Tom Holland and his new book, Dominion - not because I'm particularly comfortable with much of what he's authored there, but principally because it gave me a jolt to think afresh about why I am a Christian, and what is so easily taken for granted about the faith that's changed our world.
Let me unpack this a little.
Mark's Gospel begins by telling us that it's an account about someone who is simply remarkable - Jesus... and this is where we immediately find ourselves undone - "the son of God". What comes in the next 16 blunt chapters is nothing short of extraordinary, but what's important to note here is that it's the person at the core of these events and what He says and does that ignites and fuels something that was already spreading across the Roman world by the time we get to the conversion of Paul.
It's imperative to understand this chain of events. The reason there was a Damascus Road moment for Saul was because there'd been a martyrdom in Jerusalem of a man named Stephen who was preaching Jesus, and the reason for that was because the day of Pentecost had seen Jews 'from every nation under heaven' hear and respond to Peter telling them about the recent events that had happened in the very place they were now standing.
Christianity doesn't begin with Paul. However key he is to the growth of both the global expansion of the church and it's application of the good news towards the end of the first century (and he truly is), the fact remains that he was part of something that was already taking the world by storm.
I say all of this because Tom Holland's book, in some respects, makes any need for a real Jesus secondary to the creeds and powers that came to bear or use his name. There's no denying that much of the surge and grandeur that came to define Christendom from the 5th to 12th centuries took place as he shows, but as other authors have noted, this was commonly at the expense of the very teachings and message of Jesus Himself, turning Christianity into a power which often brutally crushed any and all who sought to question or resist its worldly authority. The inquisition, as Peter De Rosa notes, was in so many ways the prototype for the Holocaust and the Gulags of the 20th century. The only truth to delight in here is that slowly, over the next 300 years, men awoke to the fact that the Gospel required something very different.
It's awakening to the message of the Gospels themselves that truly matters. Holland admits that behind the last two thousand years, there remains the remarkable 'myth' of the man they crucified, but it wasn't a contrivance or a story that so troubled those disciples who had travelled with him on that first easter sunday.
The original ending of Mark's short gospel concludes with these words:
"and they fled from the tomb (because of what they had seen), trembling and astonished, and said nothing to anyone, for they were terrified" (16:8).
Christianity begins with a moment of utter bewilderment and total astonishment.
It's hard for us to take in just how overwhelming this moment is, because so few events in our own lives come close, and even momentous historical changes really don't touch this,
because this, as Holland notes, is the genuine 'molten core' that drives the faith.
The world can never be the same again because of what happened on that morning at that empty tomb.
Dominion tells us of centuries of consequences of Christianity rising and falling, and no doubt much of what the author states here about the ramifications of that is true, but the real thing we need to understand is what Mark is saying about the man who was truly the Son of God. Everything else pales when we encounter Him.
Sunday 6 October 2019
Harvest
Each day, as the sun rises and we enjoy all the gifts that life brings,
reminds us that we should be deeply thankful for what is given...
We plow the fields and scatter the good seed on the land,
but it is fed and watered by God's almighty hand.
He sends the snow in winter,the warmth to swell the grain,the breezes and the sunshine,and soft refreshing rain.
He only is the Maker
of all things near and far;
he paints the wayside flower,
he lights the evening star;
the wind and waves obey him,
by him the birds are fed;
much more to us, his children,
he gives our daily bread.
We thank you, then, O Father,
for all things bright and good:
the seed-time and the harvest,
our life, our health, our food;
no gifts have we to offer
for all your love imparts,
but that which you desire now:
our humble, thankful hearts!
All good gifts around us
are sent from heav'n above;
then thank the Lord, O thank the Lord
for all his love
reminds us that we should be deeply thankful for what is given...
We plow the fields and scatter the good seed on the land,
but it is fed and watered by God's almighty hand.
He sends the snow in winter,the warmth to swell the grain,the breezes and the sunshine,and soft refreshing rain.
He only is the Maker
of all things near and far;
he paints the wayside flower,
he lights the evening star;
the wind and waves obey him,
by him the birds are fed;
much more to us, his children,
he gives our daily bread.
We thank you, then, O Father,
for all things bright and good:
the seed-time and the harvest,
our life, our health, our food;
no gifts have we to offer
for all your love imparts,
but that which you desire now:
our humble, thankful hearts!
All good gifts around us
are sent from heav'n above;
then thank the Lord, O thank the Lord
for all his love
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