Preach it, Oswald…

Been thinking a lot lately about the difference between trusting our beliefs about God rather than trusting God. Our beliefs about God are based on a whole lot of factors which may actually obscure God and prevent us from trusting, from having faith, in him.

In his book “The Sin of Certainty”, Peter Enns identifies some of these factors:

No one just “follows” the Bible. We interpret it as people with a past and present, and in community with others, within certain traditions, none of which is absolute. Many factors influence how we “follow” the Bible. None of us rises above our place in the human drama and grasps God with pure clarity, without our own baggage coming along for the ride. We all bring our broken and limited selves into how we think of God

Peter Enns, “The Sin of Certainty” p 17

On the My Utmost for His Highest site, Oswald Chambers is quoted in a post entitled Gracious Uncertainty:

“When we become simply a promoter or a defender of a particular belief, something within us dies. That is not believing God–it is only believing our belief about Him. . . . If our certainty is only in our beliefs, we develop a sense of self-righteousness, become overly critical, and are limited by the view that our beliefs are complete and settled.”

Oswald Chambers

It is reassuring to find that even as the nineteenth century moved into the twentieth, believers like Chambers were thinking about the difference between a ‘who’ and a ‘what’ focus for faith.

Being a follower of Jesus is not focussed on what we believe…it centres on who we believe in. If we say we believe in Jesus but the set of beliefs by which we run our lives don’t resemble his way of living, something must be wrong…

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Day 35 of 40…Rejection

Luke 20: 1-26 in words and pictures…

Day fourteen of forty…Freedom

 Back in the days when I was invited into schools to talk about Christianity from a personal perspective I sometimes challenged someone in the class to pay a game of noughts and crosses (I think some people call it Tic Tac Toe). The only thing was…there were no rules. It didn’t take long for moves to become increasingly creative as each player tried to outdo the opponent. It also became increasingly frustrating as the realisation dawned that no-one could ever win and the game dragged on.

Religion can be a terrible thing. Rules and laws are put in place to help us, to keep us safe and to make the world run the way it should. A world without laws would be a scary and uncertain place.

But it’s all too easy for rules to become weapons in the hands of those who seek power or of those who are too afraid to be free and allow others to be the same.

10] On a Sabbath Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues, [11] and a woman was there who had been crippled by a spirit for eighteen years. She was bent over and could not straighten up at all. [12] When Jesus saw her, he called her forward and said to her, “Woman, you are set free from your infirmity.” [13] Then he put his hands on her, and immediately she straightened up and praised God. [14] Indignant because Jesus had healed on the Sabbath, the synagogue leader said to the people, “There are six days for work. So come and be healed on those days, not on the Sabbath.” [15] The Lord answered him, “You hypocrites! Doesn’t each of you on the Sabbath untie your ox or donkey from the stall and lead it out to give it water? [16] Then should not this woman, a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has kept bound for eighteen long years, be set free on the Sabbath day from what bound her?” [17] When he said this, all his opponents were humiliated, but the people were delighted with all the wonderful things he was doing.

Luke 13:10-17 NIV

Jesus loved the scriptures and lived out the Law of God, but when it came to living he drew from his relationship with the Father and the guiding of the Holy Spirit. He knew only too well that if we cling to the laws rather than the one who gave them we swiftly run the risk of becoming set in our ways, judgemental of all who disagree, and using the very laws that God gave for our good and our freedom to enslave, label and exclude.

“And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in obedience to him, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, [13] and to observe the Lord ’s commands and decrees that I am giving you today for your own good?”

Deuteronomy 10:12-13 NIV

“What Jesus had done for that poor woman was what he longed to do for the whole of Israel, to set her free from her rigid rules, her exclusiveness, her oppression of the poor. His message of the kingdom was the great explosion Israel needed to free her from her slavery to conservatism.”

John Pritchard, “The Journey” p 36

Today Jesus still longs for Israel’s freedom, so that they may truly represent the God who loves them…and I suspect that may have extended to the church and the whole world too!

Day four of forty…Boundaries 2

Jesus was a rabbi and teacher. Paul worked in cross-cultural mission. Both were Jewish men influenced by their context and culture.

Paul’s teaching on women in society and church has often been misunderstood, misinterpreted and deliberately misused. I believe he has been wrongly maligned. His first responsibility was to introduce Jesus to people who had no Jewish background and experience of God to help them out. He was anxious to put no cultural or contextual barriers in the way, avoiding obscuring the message of and about Jesus. Faith in Jesus was his first priority…he assumed that changes in lifestyle and cultural attitudes would follow on from the change to people’s hearts.

And Jesus?

 [38] As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. [39] She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said. [40] But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!” [41] “Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, [42] but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”

Luke 10:38-42 NIV

According to sources writing about Jewish society and culture in Jesus time, women were much freer in Jewish society than we have often been led to believe. Many of the restrictions, like separation of men from women at worship seem to have been introduced later than the first century AD.

Nevertheless, for many of the early readers of the Gospels something quite shocking is going on in the story of Mary, Martha and Jesus.

I’ve heard many sermons which speak about the active life and the contemplative life as equally good ways to serve Jesus. I don’t really think the passage is about different kinds of Christian lifestyle…it’s about responding to the call of Jesus to use our God-given gifts and experiences to build God’s Kingdom…regardless of our gender.

“If we were first century visitors, we would have recognised the significance of something else in that story. It was customary for rabbis to sit on low pillows or chairs while they were teaching. Their disciples would sit on the ground or on mats around them. That’s how the phrase “sit at his feet” became an idiom for learning from a rabbi. In Acts 22: 3, Paul describes himself as someone who had learned “at the feet of Gamaliel” (NRSV). So when Mary was described as “sitting at Jesus feet”, she was being described as a disciple. Clearly, Jesus welcomed her as such.”

Ann Spangler and Lois Tverberg, “Sitting at the feet of Rabbi Jesus” p 14

Early gospel readers would have understood that in this story Jesus is calling Mary to follow him, a rabbi and teacher, as a disciple. Disciples were more than just followers in the sense that we often talk about ‘discipleship’ in a watered-down way today. They were chosen by the rabbi to sit at their feet, to listen and learn, to debate and question and, ultimately, to go out and teach others what the rabbi had taught them.

“The real problem between Martha and Mary wasn’t the workload that Martha had in the kitchen. That, no doubt, was real enough, but it wasn’t the main thing that was upsetting Martha…No the real problem was that Mary was behaving as if she was a man. In that culture, as in many parts of the world to this day, houses were divided into male ‘space’ and female ‘space’ and male and female roles were strictly demarcated as well. Mary had crossed an invisible but very important boundary within the house, and another equally important boundary in the social world.

Tom Wright, “Luke for Everyone” p 130

Many would have seen Mary sitting in a place generally reserved for men instead of getting on with a woman’s domestic work, which may well have been behind Martha’s complaint, “Come on Lord, get my sister to behave like a real woman!” In effect, Jesus reply, “Mary has chosen what is better…” suggests that he thought that there could be much more to being a ‘real’ woman than preparing meals, raising children and doing housework if that is what God has equipped you and called you to be (and actually, I believe that ‘real’ men can do those things too, as part of their calling to marriage and parenthood).

As Jesus travels to Jerusalem and a confrontation with the religious leaders of the day, everywhere he goes he is leaving behind evidence of just how radical, how boundary-breaking, the call to follow him must be.

Day three of forty…Boundaries 1

 

[36] “Which of these three do you think was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” [37] The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.” Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”

Luke 10: 36-37

Jesus has always been a boundary breaker.

It is, therefore, a great travesty that we Christians have often used Jesus as an excuse to build barriers in life and in church. “You’re not one of us!”, “You don’t belong!”, and, “You’re just a woman, divorcee, Muslim, immigrant, gay, single, uneducated, new, wicked, not in membership… (please choose taboo) …are words that have only too often been on our lips.

I’ve heard more sermons than I can count about the “Good Samaritan”, often using the latest cultural pariah (e g who remembers a drama sketch about a Good Punk Rocker) as the star of the story. I was tempted…but you can do the work there.

So I guess lesson one is usually don’t judge by appearances. Help can come from unexpected places.

Lesson two is usually a general moral one…if you see someone in a ditch go and help them out…and not just your friends! Tom Wright reminds us that even here there is a deeper, more challenging message to be had:

“Underneath the apparently straightforward moral lesson (‘go and do the same’) we find a much sterner challenge, exactly fitting in with the emphasis of Luke’s story so far. Can you recognise the hated Samaritan as your neighbour? If you can’t you might be left for dead.”

Tom Wright, ‘Luke for Everyone’ p128.

I don’t think even this takes it far enough. Back then Jesus had a poignant message for the young lawyer about conflicting views of what it meant to be Israel, God’s people. I don’t think it would be wrong to see what lesson we can learn as the church, God’s people, from the story.

I think it has something to do with whether, as the church, we see the grace, mercy and love poured out by God as something that causes us to revel in our own sense of being the ‘chosen ones’ with all the isolated security and purity we think that brings, and therefore jealously protect our boundaries…we can’t let ‘outsiders’ spoil our church!

Or, on the other hand, we sign up to God’s greater vision of a group of people chosen to model and share a different way of living to the world, a group with committed to seeing God’s love, grace and mercy extended to everyone. As Tom Wright says:

“No church, no Christian, can remain content with easy definitions which allow us to watch most of the world lying half-dead in the road”.

Let’s find new ways to tell the story, to act as signposts to Jesus as we model the life he lived and now shares with us, to learn how to rescue, and allow ourselves to be rescued, by unlikely people.

Day one of forty…Cost

Ash Wednesday 2016

[51] As the time approached for him to be taken up to heaven, Jesus resolutely set out for Jerusalem….[57] As they were walking along the road, a man said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.”[58] Jesus replied, “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”[59] He said to another man, “Follow me.” But he replied, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.”[60] Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”[61] Still another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but first let me go back and say goodbye to my family.”[62] Jesus replied, “No one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.”

Luke 9:51; 57-62 NIV

“Family life is holy ground”

Northumbria Community

I am challenged to think that sometimes we followers of Jesus get a bit hung up on the sanctity of family life to the point of almost making it an object of our worship. It is possible to read the gospels with an awareness that Jesus sometimes consider family to be more of a hindrance than a help, which I find quite shocking, if a practical possibility.

I’ve always believe that if Jesus is at the centre of my life, then other relationships will fall into place, and family life will be holy ground, in the sense that it’s the environment in which my faith in Jesus is worked out. So what do we make of Jesus harsh words to the people who expressed a desire to follow Jesus.

A number of years ago the Youth for Christ  band, Alphabet, that I worked with, visited Zimbabwe where we were able to sing and speak to people about faith in Jesus.

Shortly before our visit, a well-known evangelist had visited Bulawayo and reported mass conversions to Jesus. When we arrived the local pastors told us that there was very little evidence that these new converts had ever found their way into the local Christian community.

The first time I spoke about my faith in Jesus, I think it was in a Bulawayo factory, at the end I gave people the opportunity to respond by standing if they wanted to know more or to become a follower of Jesus. I was stunned when every single person rose to their feet. This did not indicate a lack of faith on my part…I’m from the UK where people keep their bottoms firmly on their seats rather than drawing attention to themselves unnecessarily!

Afterwards a local black pastor who’d been with us took me on one side. Rather than encouraging me in my effective evangelistic ministry he delivered an encouraging education on local culture.

“You have to understand,” he explained, “that because you are a visitor people want to please you. If you ask people to stand, they will, out of respect for you, and not necessarily in response to the content of what you’ve said. They’re standing for you, and not for Jesus.”

So, from that time on, whenever I had opportunity to speak, I spent at least as much time spelling out the cost of following Jesus as I did talking about why it was a good thing!

As Jesus “resolutely set out for Jerusalem” he must have had an inkling of what sort of reception awaited him. His followers, still refreshingly naïve, seemed to have little clue about what was happening. In that context his determination to make people face up to the consequences of following seems less cruel.

This was not a jolly jaunt to Jerusalem…it was a date with a destiny that might well include death.

 

 

 

Forty days minus one

Shrove Tuesday 2016

So, tomorrow is the first day of yet another Lent. I find that the seasons of Lent and Advent provide a wonderful and necessary focus for my monkey-mind. During Advent my focus is on waiting and watching, antidotes to both the fast-food culture of today, that has so often spilled over into our spiritual lives, and to our sense of inertia as we grapple with the tension of being people of faith moving to the rhythms of grace rather than the pressures of our culture.

Then there is Lent, with it’s traditional emphasis on prayer, giving things up and giving to those in need. As I’ve got older I try to do these things throughout the year, but I find it really helpful to have a season when I really try to focus. More than anything, I try to use the time leading up to Easter as a time for a kind of spiritual check-up…am I more like Jesus than I was this time last year? What new things am I struggling with? What sins and habits are diverting me from being like Jesus? What do I need to change to get back on course? Who do I need to forgive? Who needs my help?

This year I’ve chosen John Pritchard’s book, “The Journey” to be a guide and companion during this time. The book provides a creative journey with Jesus to Jerusalem and the cross, as told through the eyes of John, probably the youngest follower of Jesus.

Today I read the introductory chapter, in which he sets out what he is hoping to achieve through the book. These words in particular caught my eye:

 

“He had a way of speaking that turned everything upside down in a way that made it seem the right way up. He cut to the heart of faith, bursting through tired ideas and pointless rituals. Sometimes he fretted over the slowness of people’s response, but still he kept to his patient programme of travel, teaching, healing and prayer.

Until the time came for him to turn towards Jerusalem and to say to his friends, ‘Let’s go.’

“The Journey”, John Pritchard

Sometimes it’s not just individual believers that get off track…it’s the whole church. We all have a lot of praying, giving up and giving away to do if we’re to make up for our terrible mistakes of the past so that we can re-capture our reputation as a group of people who look a bit like Jesus and behave a bit like Jesus in the way we treat each other and those who don’t know Jesus yet.

On Sunday someone in our church shared a passionate word of prophecy which included the scripture “For the time has come for judgement, and it must begin first among God’s own children. 1 Peter 4:17 (NLT) Our minister later suggested that among other things the time had come to stop focussing on the wrong stuff (which is often stuff that divides us and gets us off track) and to put Jesus back at the centre.

Britain in 2016 could use people like that.