Category: Kingdom of God

When prayer changes history

Sometimes it happens

A high wall is cracked open by a growing tree
Photo by Murewa Saibu on Unsplash

It’s quite good to notice that sometimes big things happen. In a world of monstrous, deepset, intractable issues–our world–sometimes things shift. The tide turns. And you sort of gasp.

  • Back in the 1990s, it seemed the low-level conflict in Northern Ireland would not end. The Unionists wanted the IRA to give up its weapons. That seemed like a silly request, an ask so certain to be refused, a surrender, that the only reason for making it was gesture politics. Yet it happened. And we had the pictures of Martin McGuinness and Ian Paisley laughing and joking together. I still think that was one of those times that reality wobbled and reset in a different place.
  • The recent church statistics: steadily down for a hundred years, aged and hunched congregations, the situation as long as I had been watching it. Except now, church attendance going from 8% of the nation to 12% in eight years, with a zealous infusion of youngsters. And perhaps the sound of a flywheel starting up: more people, more youth, more confidence, more growth. Another wobble to the way things just inevitably are: a new story, a flex in history.
  • Then a report I just read about Iran. The ‘death to America’ slogans being discarded; the American flag on which you had to tread to enter the Tehran University being taken away. The religious police turning on veil-vigilantes rather than veil wearers. The ayatollahs wanting to cling on to power even if it means playing nicely with America. The virus of Islamism, perhaps, mutating into less harmful forms in the two great rivals, Iran and Saudi Arabia. And underneath that, in Iran at least, another flywheel spinning as more and more Iranians meet Jesus. The black tide that swept the world, and which I spent a lot of my professional life recording, has, I think, receded in part.

So we keep praying through the dark hours of the night. We keep believing Jesus is Lord and is on the throne. We hold in our hearts the promises he has made to our hearts that live there but not yet in the world; I have some of these promises lodged in my heart as I guess you do too.

I am translating the Book of Revelation for fun, for myself, at the moment, and I am struck by how much suffering that book indicates will happen before the unfolding of justice and grace and glory. It is so slow. The Iranian revolution has been going on since 1979, all my adult life. Think of the masses given show trials and then hanged; the masses sent off to war. One memory of all the reading I’ve done about Iran (and I wrote a book too): a teenage girl went swimming in a pool in her own garden. Somebody looked over the wall and reported her for being inappropriately dressed, in her swimming things in her own garden. She was charged and sentenced to 32 lashes. The terrified teen only received 16 or so, because before the end of the punishment, she was dead.

Just today I read of the dream the anti-Nazi heroine Sophie Schol had the night before her execution1: she was carrying a baby up a hill to be baptised in a church at the top of the hill. A great chasm opened in front of her. She put the baby down before herself disappearing into the chasm. She explained that our ideas (and perhaps, I would add, the promises of God) do not perish even if we do.

Slow, slow, slow. So much suffering. But it moves!

The one-size-fits-all guaranteed easy to use popular Christian talk

Coming to a church near you

Here’s what you do.

  1. Read a Bible story at some length, always picking something that involves a miraculous transformation. There are plenty of these available, enough for a whole year’s preaching or more.
  2. Here’s your main point: someone in the story met Jesus, or God if it’s the Old Testament, and their life was transformed. Tell this story with as much drama as you can muster.
  3. Salt your story with promises plucked from elsewhere in scripture, again, plenty to choose from.
  4. Tell some stories about yourself or your children that vaguely illustrate the same point.
  5. Repeat (that’s a sermon series). Or write down (that’s a book).
  6. Change the theme slightly, and repeat again. So instead of ‘secrets of healing’, you could branch into ‘living a life of victory’ or ‘total financial freedom’ or ‘being a person of power and authority’.
  7. On you go. Same talk. It’s a career.

There are consequences to this Christian populism.

  1. You are pointing people to Jesus, perhaps the best thing you can do for anyone.
  2. Unfortunately the Jesus you are pointing them to is a one-shot wonder worker, a stripped-down version of the real thing.
  3. You’re missing the slow. We not finished, in both senses. We are still being patched up, and we are still pressing on in our incomplete state. Blessed are those at the end of their rope, broken, mourning, hungering, thirsting. Every day we search our minds and hearts to conform them to God’s will. Through faith and patience we inherit the promises. Suffering produces character produces hope. Not a charge to victory, methinks, a patient plod.

Harmless as doves

Sneaky but effective

Photo by Shubhankar Bhowmick on Unsplash

I was struck recently by the phrase ‘Wise as serpents, harmless as doves’. I must admit that I think the ‘wise as serpents’ bit comes a lot more easily to me (wily, crafty, political) than the ‘harmless as doves’ word.

It means that at a certain point, after you have done all your wise-as-serpent stuff, you are defenceless. You are approaching people with innocence. You are choosing to believe that somewhere inside them, nestled among the faults you see, is a shred of decency. Somewhere deep inside is a concern for the welfare of others. And we are to approach them, or when not actually approaching them but just thinking and talking about them, we are to treat them is if that shred of decency really was inside them, and can be awakened by someone who believes against the odds that it is there.

The Lord Jesus, I think, had the childlike innocence when threatened. Pilate: ‘Are you the King of the Jews’? Jesus: ‘Your words.’ Or after being hit in the face when being questioned by the High Priest: ‘If I spoke evil, show me. If I didn’t, why did you hit me?’ Both times, I think, he’s probing inside the other person to justify what they just said or did, not slandering or insulting them; his innocence is disarming and unnerving.

It feels weak. But in fact it is a deadly infusion of grace that they may not know how to handle. They are used to fighting, being opposed, lobbing ordinance from their trench. They are not used to being told, by someone who opposes them, that they have a difficult job and perhaps they could be doing it better.

I am with you

Whether you like it or not

A welcome guest post from my friend Colin Bearup.

Doesn’t work. Photo by Caleb Woods on Unsplash

Perhaps one of the most treasured sentences in the Bible is ‘I am with you’. It occurs many times and is often preceded by ‘Do not be afraid’. In times of anxiety, crisis, challenge and, well, life in general, to know that the Lord, the capable and wise, is with us is reassuring. However, I came across it the other way round: I (human being) am with you (Lord). That simply must have a different vibe to it. The Lord doesn’t need us to reassure him.

Psalm 139:15 says “When I awake, I am still with you.” I don’t know about everyone else, but at the prompting of my bladder, I get up in the morning, feel around for my slippers, put on my dressing gown and go to the bathroom. Then I go to the kitchen, make myself some tea, get some cereal and then sit down. When I have eaten, I consider myself to be sufficiently awake. Then I compose myself and reach for my Bible. It is like the shopkeeper, entering the shop, opening the cash register, unlocking the front door and saying “OK you can come in. I am ready”. Or even “the doctor will see you now”.

The unarguable reality is that the Lord does not show up when or because we are ready. He is already there. It is just that we have not given him our attention. Personally, I have always read Psalm 139 as the story of a journey. David goes from pondering how fully God knows him and slides into a sense of near panic – he cannot get away, he is never private, never alone, always exposed. We human beings, generally want to manage how exposed we are. We like to have some say in the matter. Finally he arrives at a place of trust and willing surrender.

I suspect that many of us rub along with God, keeping him at a manageable distance, imagining that we go into his presence and come out again at our convenience. Then one day we realise, like David, how utterly open to his view we are. We need to pass through that discomfort of realisation and emerge on the other side into a place of total trust. We become just a little bit like a small child, who wakes up in the parental home, at ease in the presence of apparently all-knowing parents.

Although nothing is hidden, David concludes with the invitation “search me and know me,” a full and cooperative acceptance of the Lord’s overwhelming knowledge of him with a view to being purged of all that is displeasing and being led in the way everlasting. Living with this perspective, one of sure and trusting knowledge that absolutely everything we do and say is known to our loving father God, that knowing we are in his presence whether we are aware of him or not, must lead to a very different way of living. Whether we attain it, is largely up to us. The story of the prodigal son in Luke 15, does not end with the hug and the party. No, it concludes with the father speaking to the miserable elder brother and saying, “You are always with me, everything I have is yours.”

How to transform every community in the West

Nothing too ambitious….

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash
  1. Start with a worshipping community of Christians
  2. It has to use some energy maintaining itself but
  3. It has spare energy to use outside itself so
  4. Do some theology. Christians are heralds of a new world where God and people are together. We can’t make that new world, but we can be a sign of it, an instrument of it. A portent of it, if you like.
  5. Do some Bible study. Around Ash Wednesday (not so far from when I’m writing this) the great passage in Isaiah 58 defines what ‘fasting’ looks like:

“Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
    and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
    and break every yoke?
7 Is it not to share your food with the hungry
    and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—
when you see the naked, to clothe them,
    and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?
8 Then your light will break forth like the dawn,
    and your healing will quickly appear;
then your righteousness[a] will go before you,
    and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard.
9 Then you will call, and the Lord will answer;
    you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.

(Isaiah 58:6-9

6. Understand the times. We are not, in the West, surrounded by masses of starving people. But think of all the lonely people.

7. Think of one of the fruits of the covid pandemic. In the UK, local authorities started trusting churches to do community things decently and well. It has always been happening to an extent (it isn’t new) but covid was a kind of crash course for the nation.

8. Think of the need in our day for social prescribing. How many doctor’s surgeries are plagued by the lonely? How many ills (mental ill-health but much else also) can respond to the balm of community? In how many ways can community complement all that the state attempts to provide (housing, cash, healthcare)? Why can’t GP surgeries prescribe community in the same breath as they’d like to prescribe exercise and diet? Why are their options limited to applying chemicals or knives to human bodies?

9 Churches have premises, a certain facility with tea-pots, and a tolerance for the misfitting people whom every congregation anyway hosts.

10. Community heals. Humans are a herding species. Churches have the plant, the location, the resources, the opportunity and — best of all — the moment. We can built the connections. Every community in the West. Think of it.

Worship. Aaah.

Sometimes it’s the only thing that will do.

Ely Cathedral
Image by Diego Echeverry from Pixabay

It isn’t controversial to think that politics or the World Situation or whatever are disturbing right now. I don’t have enough of a historical perspective to see exactly how disturbing. (Remember the 1970s: petrol ration coupons, IMF loans for the UK, so many strikes that you couldn’t bury your dead? But I was young and shielded from all that.)

The true patient revolutionary still has somewhere to turn. We can do our small acts of grace but it isn’t all we have. There’s someone else on our side, the true master of history.

This is why we worship. This is why places of worship, often situated on good land that could be sold and cleared for social housing, do and should dot our cityscapes.

Righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne;
    love and faithfulness go before you.
15 Blessed are those who have learned to acclaim you,
    who walk in the light of your presence, Lord.
16 They rejoice in your name all day long;
    they celebrate your righteousness. (Psalm 89:14-16)

Never mind that the context of this 89th psalm is defeat, retreat, discouragement and loss. The truths are still true. We can step back from the news cycle, and make ourselves small, and adore, and hope.

Community can heal

I was gob-smacked and jaw-dropped, if you can be both, when I watched this this week:

As well as a few side-benefits – a second revolution, saving the NHS, that sort of thing – it was a glimpse into what the future could be like for all of us. And what a happy, healing place it looked like.

At root it what’s being described is, I think, an NHS GP practice in one of the most deprived areas of London, that has realized doctors only get to a fraction of illness. The rest is caused, or cured, by things like employment, education, environment and creativity.

With that realization taken seriously, what has evolved is a thriving community with an NHS medical practice (and, as it happens, a church) at its heart.

I do recommend you put this on next time you are cooking or driving or working out or something. (You don’t need to see the video and the pictures anyway add little to the story.) Instead of a clinical setting, think cafe, community, art, creativity, fun … it’s just really something.

Unpolitics

and breathe…

AI-generated image by Craiyon

We have had a lot of politics in recent years, or maybe it’s just me, but I found Keir Starmer’s first words outside Downing St on July 5th 2024 refreshing:

To restore service and respect to politics, end the era of noisy performance, tread more lightly on your lives

I am not missing (in the UK scene at least) the burlesque, the cries of ‘look at me!’ and the fighting over who gets to drive the clown car.

Even if the UK has temporarily rounded up the pub-bores who were roving wild and swinging like apes on the levers of power, unworthy people remain in charge in many other places around the world. You can feel depressed and powerless in the face of it.

Perhaps we needn’t, though. I am reading through, for the second time, Richard Bauckham’s book ‘The Theology of the Book of Revelation.‘

Really keen readers of this blog will know that I have wanted to read this volume for some time, and I have finally managed to do at a decent price via my subscription to the wonderful Perlego. Prof Bauckham wades into the Book of Revelation, disdaining the many authors and preachers who treat it as their own clown car. He is Scots-Presbyterian sober, theologically focussed, academically on top of things, devotionally hearted, and every dry paragraph can be mined for the good stuff.

It’s political. The rest of the New Testament, in my reading, isn’t really. The Roman Empire is a given. Luke, in particular, is keen to show the reasonableness of Roman rulers when he can. But all that political tiptoeing gets shoved out of the way in Revelation. Rome is a harlot, Babylon, wiping her mouth between lovers. The cultural discourse that accepts all this is a false prophet. They won’t be reformed. They are heading for the lake of fire. They will be entirely replaced with the City of God: a city still, but one not wormy with exploitation and injustice.

Prof Baukham notes a fascinating thing. What gets us to that happy place is not ‘politics’ but faithfulness. Not politics but ‘unpolitics’ perhaps.

In Bauckham’s telling, Revelation’s visions teach theological truth. Seals are broken on the scroll of history, and along come disasters on a quarter of the earth. But nothing shifts. Trumpets blow, and along come disasters on a third of the earth. And nothing shifts. Seven thunders roar (perhaps heralding disasters for half the earth) but they are held off. Why? Disasters don’t lead to lasting change, to repentance. What does make a difference? When you add to the disasters the faithful witness of the Church. That’s the picture in Revelation 11 of two prophets (you need two witnesses to establish a matter) who are martyred. Everyone parties initially. The ‘world’ has won. But then…

But after the three and a half days the breath[b] of life from God entered them, and they stood on their feet, and terror struck those who saw them. 12 Then they heard a loud voice from heaven saying to them, “Come up here.” And they went up to heaven in a cloud, while their enemies looked on.

13 At that very hour there was a severe earthquake and a tenth of the city collapsed. Seven thousand people were killed in the earthquake, and the survivors were terrified and gave glory to the God of heaven. (Revelation 11:11-13)

A great universal repentance follows the martyrdoms. In a reversal of Elijah’s day (when a remnant of seven thousand was preserved) a remnant of seven thousand is lost but the rest give ‘glory to the God of heaven’.

This theme recurs in Revelation 14 when there are two harvests, one, ‘the harvest of the earth’ for gathering the good grain into the barn; another for grapes for the ‘winepress of God’s wrath’.

And it recurs again in Revelation 15 where the faithful witnesses re-write the Song of Moses (sung after the Exodus) for a new and better deliverance:

Who will not fear you, Lord,
    and bring glory to your name?
For you alone are holy.
All nations will come
    and worship before you,
for your righteous acts have been revealed.” (Revelation 15:4)

What brings the monumental change? What makes ‘all nations’ come? The faithful witness of God’s people. I absolutely love this.

Of course there is a calling and obligation for some people to serve in politics. But for the rest of us, deep, lasting change at the national level is brought about by what? By living faithfully for Jesus and bearing testimony to him. This is the mountain-moving act. Slow, steady, patient … this is the mountain-moving act.

In the United States, at the moment, the New Apostolic Movement is busy ‘mapping spiritual strongholds’ and seeking to overthrow them. (As described in a fine piece of journalism in The Atlantic.) They are hungry and zealous for God and for reform. I unfortunately believe they are being played by the current President Elect, who has co-opted them. I studied under Pete Wagner, the first and most influential academic to write about this stuff, and I appreciated Pete Wagner, but I do not agree with him here. It isn’t revolutionary holy struggle that gets us Christians where we want to be. It isn’t ‘spiritual mapping’. It isn’t politics as such–politics follows the path others have beaten down.

It is faithfulness.

We know this from the psalms:

Do not fret because of those who are evil
    or be envious of those who do wrong;
2 for like the grass they will soon wither,
    like green plants they will soon die away.

3 Trust in the Lord and do good;
    dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture.
4 Take delight in the Lord,
    and he will give you the desires of your heart. (Psalm 37:1-4)

Unpolitics. The superpower.

Why not me?

Healing seemed to come quickly in the New Testament

Photo by Johannes Roth on Unsplash

Today (yesterday as you read this), my wife and I listened to the Pray as you go app as we often do, a little daily dose of Ignatian spirituality. The passage was about the person with leprosy who said to Jesus, ‘If you are willing, you can make me clean’ and Jesus’ reply, ‘I am willing! Be clean.’

My body was still upside down after our very recent and lovely holiday in Singapore. We had arrived back three days earlier. I was extremely breathless, perhaps exacerbated by jet lag. The previous evening it had taken me many minutes and several stops to walk the 200 yards in the dark and cold to our post box and I was frightened.

My first thought on hearing the passage was ‘why not me?’

But this was followed by a second thought: ‘It is you, and has been you.’

This lifted my spirits as I realized it was true. It was true in the larger sense 12 years ago when I recovered from a coma in which I was expected to die after my church held a 36-hour prayer vigil. But it was also true in the lesser senses of other bad times and fears negotiated. It was true in the smallest sense of daily acts of grace and goodness to my life and soul. I am a child of the kingdom! What a thing. I am a beneficiary of the power of Christ! Goodness and mercy has pursued me all my life! The (remaining) light and momentary afflictions are not to be compared with the glory to be revealed. In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.

This time of year we are also putting away the cards and letters received over Christmas, and I see these tendrils of love and faithfulness extending into lives all over the place. So many grateful! So many restored, or maintained, in life and health!

Why not me? It is us. In the midst of the shadows all around, it is us.

Green old age

Photo by Joseph Corl on Unsplash

Last spring we held a party for three 90-year-olds in our church. In the months since, two have died and the third lost his wife of many years.

It was, perhaps, a good shout that we had the party when we did.

I was thinking about them the other day. I liked them very much. The thing that stood out, I think (particularly in the two who have now passed on) was their zest and enthusiasm for life. They gave life to people, rather than sucking it out of them (as an introvert I am sensitive to this). Bits of them were falling off into the grate, as it were, but the flame was still burning bright. I remember joshing with each of them, weeks, as it turned out, before the end.

A life-filled, green old age can’t be easy, and perhaps doesn’t always happen even with God’s saints. The Bible describes old age as ‘the clouds return after the rain’ (Ecclesiastes 12:2): it must be hard not to be depressed at yet another medical appointment, yet more health-related indignity, yet further limitation. Yet their record stands. This life, this life-givingness, is that what healing looks like in old age and decline?