A question for us

Scattered‘Do you love me?’

Inside all of us–I guess and hope, because I’m surely not the only one–is a red-faced, awkward, sweating, small and ugly person.  It’s when that person and Christ talk together the real work is done.

Peter and Jesus had that conversation. Ignore their history, their beards, the sound of lapping waves and crunching footsteps, the barbecued fish in their teeth. Ignore their age and size, big blokes, rugby team blokes. Ignore Peter’s  secret tears, recriminations, justifications, sleepless nights, self-doubt, arguments with himself and despair.

Here’s the conversation:

‘Do you love me?’

‘Lord–you know.’

‘Tend my lambs.’

The Silence

Silence‘Every mouth will be silenced’ (Romans 3:19)

I love that thought. A whole world’s chatter dying away as Christ looks on. Some people are looking straight at him. Others are talking among themselves, and they get a poke from their neighbours, or they look up.

I don’t think Christ looks on censoriously, the teacher about to give a telling off.

His look is just grace. Undermining our arguments. Dismantling our complaints. Shining on our tarnished trophies. Grace, grace, grace.

I feel hot, red, awkward, unworthy as the silence falls and the gaze continues.

So do we all.

 

 

A family business

It’s not a distraction.

Recently waved goodbye to son going to the USA to study a PhD. Both my children are earning Master’s degrees from Cambridge University this year. A nice thing to slip in at parties.

graduationCall me a slow learner, but I am just waking up to how important family life is. Careers run in families: doctors beget doctors. Lawyers spawn lawyers. Even criminality runs in families. Faith, too, trickles through families; not always–every generation makes its choices–but noticeably.

People who are interested in mission are usually concerned with how the rule of God in people’s hearts spreads out of one network into another. How–we usually ask–does it break new ground? How does it cross cultures?

But that focus can stop us seeing what is in front of us. The kingdom of God spreads through networks of loving relationships that already exist. It travels–at least some of the time–from parent to child. Sometimes it skips a generation or two, but up it bubbles again, like a hidden stream.

Do you have Christian ancestors? Do we ask God for Christian descendants, generations not yet born?

Mission strategy for the rest of us

simpleMany of our churches have a habit of investing too much in the next big growth-delivering, soul-saving, church-renewing spiritual product, often backed by a handbook and set of videos from some wealthy church somewhere a long way from where God has placed us.

This is all good, but in my experience doesn’t quite work as well as advertised on the tin. Most church-renewing spiritual products, it seems sometimes, haven’t met my church.

When Jesus first taught the Sermon on the Mount to his disciples, it must have been a shock. It’s still a shock today. What he majored on was not technique, was not slick and didn’t need a workbook.

Blessed are the poor in spirit … those who mourn … the meek …
those who hunger and thirst for righteousness …
the merciful … the pure in heart … the peacemakers … the ridiculed (or persecuted). (Matthew 5:3-12)

Instead, these Beatitudes are all these things:

  • slow
  • grounded in a deep need of God
  • long term
  • affecting all of life
  • undergirding and rising above any specific plans
  • concerned with our hearts, not our skillset
  • encompassing sadness and setback
  • starting small
  • costing nothing
  • using the materials to hand, and
  • successfully helping us and our works to be a sign, instrument, and foretaste of the total transformation of the world in Jesus.

A spiritual strategy, in other words, for the rest of us.

Things to do when you’ve missed your train at King’s Cross (part 2)

It’s even better than platform 9 3/4

Platform 9 3/4
a_marga@flickr

One of the things not to watch at King’s Cross station is tourists talking selfies as they crash luggage trolleys into a brick wall. On top of the brick wall is the sign ‘Platform 9 3/4’, and you can also find a convenient shop nearby of Potter memorabilia.

Great though Harry Potter is, you can find an even better story hidden around the corner from King’s Cross Station.

The British Library stores every book ever printed. Its greatest treasure, which may even be the UK’s greatest treasure, is on exhibition there. This is something more valuable than the crown jewels and more influential than than The Wealth of Nations or the Magna Carta (also on display nearby) or Newton’s Principia Mathematica.

The Codex Siniaticus, the book from Sinai, is the ‘oldest Bible in the world’, and the earliest complete New Testament, dating from 320 AD.

St Catherine's Monastery
Seetheholyland.net @flickr

How it was found is unbelievable.

The first 43 pages of it were discovered in a monastic fire-basket in 1844 by German scholar and explorer Lobegott Friedrich Constantin von Tischendorf. He was visiting St Catherine’s monestary on the traditional site of Mt Sinai.

I perceived in the middle of the great hall a large and wide basket, full of old parchments; and the librarian informed me that two heaps of papers like this, mouldered by reason of age, had been already committed to the flames. What was my surprise to find among this heap of documents a considerable number of sheets of a copy of the Old Testament in Greek, which seemed to me to be one of the most ancient I had ever seen.

St Catherine's Monastery
Prayer life: good. Central heating fuel, some improvement needed. seetheholyland.net@flickr

His excitement prevented the monks from handing over the rest, but also, fortunately, from burning any more pages.

In 1859, he persuaded the monks to present the whole MS to Tsar Alexander II of Russia.  It contained about half the Old Testament and all the New Testament. After the Russian Revolution, and long after Tischendorf’s death, the revolutionary government didn’t want it, and the British bought it.

Golly.

 

14 things the Old Testament taught us

A very short summary

Cristo Redentor
Rodrigo Soldon@flickr

Like the overture to a symphony, or a trailer for a film, the Old Testament gives us appetizers for what was going to be happen after Jesus came. Here are 14 things about Jesus and his Kingdom, promised then, unfolding now.

1. A King

  • Rules in the midst of his enemies.1
  • Brings justice, hearing the cry of poor people, punishing their oppressors, and setting things right.
  • Increases his rule
  • Conquers his enemies
  • Reigns forever.2

2. A shepherd

  • Seeks out the lost sheep
  • Fixes up their wounds
  • Pastures them securely
  • Replaces useless leaders and shepherds3

3. A Kingdom of forgiving and forgetting

  • The prophet Ezekiel talked about ‘sprinkling clean water on you, and you will be clean’.4
  • Isaiah had ‘sins [that] are like scarlet’ becoming ‘white as snow’.5
  • Zechariah talked of a ‘fountain’ that would cleanse from sin and impurity.6

4. New people

  • Ezekiel talks in terms of a heart-transplant: stony, unyielding hearts replaced with tender, responsive ones.7
  • Jeremiah promised a new day when God’s purposes and ways would live in people’s hearts and minds. Theirs wouldn’t be a second-hand knowledge, a second-hand love. People would know the Lord for themselves.8

5. Life-giving water

Some Old Testament poetic pictures of the kingdom of God are of abundant, flowing, splashing water.

  • Isaiah had a vision of living water that anyone could come and drink for free: ‘Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters … without money and without cost.’9
  • Ezekiel described a river that made the dead places live: ‘Swarms of living creatures will live wherever the river flows … this water … makes the salt water fresh; so where the river flows everything will live.’10

6. Flourishing

Within the reign of God, the land would flourish and the people prosper.

  • ‘I will send down showers in season; there will be showers of blessing,’ says Ezekiel. ‘The trees of the field will yield their fruit and the ground will yield its crops; the people will be secure in their land.’11
  • Jeremiah talked of how God’s people, ‘will rejoice in the bounty of the Lord … they will be like a well-watered garden.’12
  • There’s talk of rebuilding and renewing, both of communities and of physical infrastructure. The images pour out of scripture: tambourines, dancing, weddings, songs of praise, thronging crowds, re-planted vineyards, re-dug wells, re-built walls.13

(How does this work today? That’s for a later entry. But a clue is Paul saying, ‘I have learnt to be content whatever the circumstances.’ 14)

7. A spreading kingdom

This kingdom was going to spread through the world:

  • ‘It is too small a thing’, Isaiah taught, for the King just to reign over the Jews. All the nations would be blessed. Light would come to the non-Jews and into the most distant parts of the earth. 15
  • God will send his people to the ‘distant islands that have not heard of my fame or seen my glory.’16
  • Representatives of the kingdom will ‘proclaim my glory among the nations.’
  • In several places the Bible pictures the nations loading up their mules and making their way to Mount Zion, an image of peoples entering the presence of God and joining his people.17
  • All kinds of foreigners, says Psalm 87, will say of ‘Zion’, God’s dwelling place with people: ‘I was born there. That’s my home.’

8. Multitudes

  • God promised ‘multitudes’ of descendants to Abraham. He repeated the promise to his son Isaac and repeated it again to his son Jacob.18
  • Even in the leanest time of Jewish history, with wars lost, people exiled and the temple destroyed, God renewed the promise through Jeremiah. He had not forgotten or changed his mind. God’s people will be more than the stars in the sky, Jeremiah prophesied, more than the sand by the sea.19

9. The greatest kingdom

  • Isaiah20 and Micah21 describe Mount Zion as becoming ‘the highest among the mountains’ with peoples streaming to it.
  • The prophet Daniel says: ‘The God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed, nor will it be left to another people. It will crush all those kingdoms and bring them to an end, but it will itself endure for ever.’22

10. A peaceable kingdom

This kingdom, though, is peaceable rather than warlike.

  • As peoples (poetically speaking) camp themselves on Mount Zion, disputes between them will be settled. ‘Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war any more.’23
  • One of the King’s titles is ‘prince of peace.’ Isaiah’s famous prophecy of him includes the line, ‘of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end.’24

God’s kingdom is built not through making war but by waging peace.

11. A meek kingdom

Unlike every other great kingdom, the promised rule of God is saturated in meekness and lowliness.

  • In a passage nowadays read on Palm Sunday, Zechariah tells the people to ‘rejoice greatly’ because the King comes to them ‘righteous and having salvation, gentle and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.’25
  • Isaiah notes that the King will bring justice to the nations, but he won’t ‘shout or cry out, or raise his voice in the streets.’26

12. A human kingdom

It’s also a kingdom that manages to work within humanity despite our darkest depths. All the Old Testament prophets speak from a context of human rebellion and divine love, these two principles clanging and sparking as they combat each other. We are at war with ourselves and with God and yet the kingdom will win.

The kingdom is the story of the determined lost wooed by an irresistible Finder; the attempted rejection of a love that will not let us go. Expect turbulence.

13. A kingdom of death and resurrection

It is also a kingdom that only reaches its final shape after a death and resurrection.

  • Several scary Old Testament passages seem to predict some kind of end of the world before the final expression of the kingdom of God. This is a total mystery and best not speculated upon, though it’s not so hard to believe if you’ve lived in the 20th century, or have studied geology or astronomy.
  • The Messianic Psalm 110, much quoted in the New Testament, talks of a ‘day of wrath’, and many prophets agree with Isaiah: ‘The Lord Almighty has a day in store for all the proud and lofty, for all that is exalted (and they will be humbled).’
  • The Prophet Zephaniah warns ‘in the fire of his jealousy the whole world will be consumed, for he will make a sudden end of all who live in the earth.’27
  • The book of Daniel talks explicitly of the death and resurrection of people: ‘multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth’ will wake up, some to ‘everlasting life’ others to ‘shame and everlasting contempt’.28

14. A new order

Some prophetic words seem to refer to the kingdom after the end, but these come to us perhaps more like the music of distant party rather than a precise account.

The final one of Isaiah’s visions, for example, includes the fascinating picture of ‘all mankind’ bowing down and worshipping; but also of ‘the dead bodies of those who rebelled’—asking us to hold in tension the paradox of God’s universal love and purpose, and the human capacity to spite them.29

What does it mean for us?

  • Some of this is about the far future
  • But most of it is the now, our world, with Christ as King.

Faith comes by herring, and herring by the word of cod

Why fish are confused

ShoalI don’t think the average fish can get its head around the idea of dry land.

Perhaps a really creative fish could picture it, but it would face all kinds of scepticism from other fish. How do you swim without water? Wouldn’t the world be two-dimensional, spread on the sea-bed? How can there be room for everything? It’s a wreck.

Nor can science help. How can you do experiments to confirm or deny the presence of a world beyond the sea? Even if fish go there (a big if), they never come back.

The best schools of fish might conclude the whole ‘dry-land delusion’ is a theory, of no practical use, and best ignored. They would, in short, fillet the argument.

Send in the marine (biologist)s

Since the fish can’t figure out dry land for themselves, the only way they can be educated is if we land mammals take the initiative and send someone to tell them. Without revelation from outside, the fish are like the proverbial sailors of the ship carrying red paint that collided with the ship carrying blue paint: marooned.

So, you say, send a marine biologist to tell the fish about the world outside the sea. But would they believe her? Maybe not. Because to get to talk to the fish you have to become so like a fish that they think you are a fish. And who would believe what a raving fish told them?

Not only that, but I have it on good authority that the sea is full of all kinds of voluble fish who speculate widely about a life beyond the sea. Many of them are unreliable witnesses—fishy, in fact—and they contradict each other all the time.

The conclusion of reasonable people? Stick with what you can see, feel and measure. Truth can’t come from anywhere else.

Comments welcome, as are fish jokes.

 

‘Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is the most fun’

“Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back–in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.”
Frederick Buechner

Coincidence: God’s way of saying you haven’t been forgotten

“I think of a person I haven’t seen or thought of for years, and ten minutes later I see her crossing the street. I turn on the radio to hear a voice reading the biblical story of Jael, which is the story that I have spent the morning writing about. A car passes me on the road, and its license plate consists of my wife’s and my initials side by side. When you tell people stories like that, their usual reaction is to laugh. One wonders why.

I believe that people laugh at coincidence as a way of relegating it to the realm of the absurd and of therefore not having to take seriously the possibility that there is a lot more going on in our lives than we either know or care to know. Who can say what it is that’s going on? But I suspect that part of it, anyway, is that every once and so often we hear a whisper from the wings that goes something like this: “You’ve turned up in the right place at the right time. You’re doing fine. Don’t ever think that you’ve been forgotten.”
Frederick Buechner

Does this resonate with you? Let us know!