Category: Kingdom of God

Peak bookshop

Dig out your book tokens. It’s time. Oh yum.

This is the best time of year to experience ‘Peak Bookshop’. All the titles for Christmas shopping will be in. (Or should be.)

Sort your way past the:

  • Celebrity puff pieces
  • Recipe books
  • Old horses being flogged (regular bestsellers hatching another well-timed Christmas hardback)

… and find the stuff that makes bookshops great. That makes bookshops still great despite being gutted and filleted by Amazon: a curated collection of original, brilliant, beyond-our-experience insight. Storytelling round a global campfire. Human minds on sale, packaged for easy consumption. The best thinking, expressed in the best ways, all ready for us to engage with, dream with, laugh with, lose ourselves in, ponder, be shaped by.

Glory be.
campfire

Frustration, difficulty and pain: God’s gifts to us

icu wordcloud
This particular wordcloud came from a coma-survivors’ focus group (of which I am a member)

Here’s a quote about what it means to stick with our friends while we also try to follow Christ.

‘Frustration and pain are essential features of incarnational ministry.’

It goes on:

‘If we are to truly identify with our people, we must expect frustration and pain. If we don’t, we may be taken by surprise when we encounter it and be tempted to leave this work for an easier path or be so disillusioned that we lose the joy of ministry. I think many people are suffering unnecessary pain in ministry today because they did not fully anticipate the suffering that ministry inevitably involves. This pain has caused them to be discontented when actually they should be rejoicing in tribulation.’

‘As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.’ (John 20:21)

‘That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.’ (2 Corinthians 12:10)

(Quote from popular Sri Lankan evangelist and teacher Ajith Fernando in his his book Jesus Driven Ministry. I’m grateful to my colleague Miriam Copeland for digging out this quote.)

Ajith Fernando has presumably enlarged on this theme in a more recent title:

Darkness and light. Really?

That’s no way to talk of my friends

Argemone ochroleuca flower6The people I know who are outside of the Christian faith would not respond too well to Bible verses like this:

But you were once darkness — now you are light in the Lord. (Ephesians 5:8)

I see their point. I would rather call my neighbours and colleagues funny, courageous, kind, hospitable, warm-hearted. And so on. Rather than, you know, ‘darkness.’

Of course the Apostle Paul (for it is he) is writing at this point not to outsiders to the faith, but to insiders, and surely he is encouraging them in their self doubt, and reminding them of God’s kindness. He uses a different language when he is stirring people to follow Christ in the first place.

But it raises the question: what are we actually talking about here? Is faith a thing? Or is it just a religious rebranding of an unchanged heart?

I think it’s a bit like re-purposing a good, old, disused building or taking on a neglected allotment (an allotment in the UK is a patch of land that you can rent cheaply to grow vegetables). An old allotment actually may contain all kinds of treasures, fruit trees, brambles, an asparagus patch. But it is overgrown.

A new owner comes. The bindweed and the ground elder don’t vanish overnight.  Both before the change and afterwards, the allotment is a mix of good crop and weeds. But after the new owner comes, it has new direction, new planting, new purpose, intentional ground clearing, a new direction and a new destiny. And it’s still easily neglected, plagued with slugs, not necessarily all that fruitful.

What came before wasn’t worthless. It contained real treasure. Yet the upheaval and change is real too. Darkness and light.

 

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.’

Revolution in the air

But it’s OK

In a single month a while ago I made four visits and had four snapshots of quiet revolution.

  1. A tour round Jimmy’s Nightshelter in central Cambridge
  2. Taking some furniture to be recycled at the Emmaus community north of Cambridge
  3. Buying some fairly traded food at the Daily Bread Cooperative in the North of Cambridge
  4. Popping in to see the manager of our own St Martin’s Centre for the elderly.

Each place exuded peace and a kind of a quiet well-ordered-ness. Each place runs through the hands of many volunteers and a number of full-time staff who are not paid well. Each fights almost daily battles with bureaucracy and politics that threaten to capsize the whole ship. Yet each provides a vital service to a large part of a city.

Each is an expression of Christian faith that is unsung, long-term, wholly appropriate for the 21st century.

Then I read this quote — more appropriate to regions outside Europe, but still relevant.

‘Alongside the political, economic, social and technological revolutions … which have commanded enormous media attention and coverage … there has been this far less trumpeted, but equally important revolution in the status and standing of worldwide Christianity. Few have taken on board what is happening.’ (Kenneth Hylsom-Smith To the ends of the earth ISBN 978 1 842 274 750)

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?

Secret of moving big things: stand still

Pretty cool.

Is this a law of the universe?

To make the maximum impact for good with your life:

  • keeping doing the simple things that you love and are good at.

It might be called the ‘horse chestnut principle’. If a conker can avoid being stolen by squirrels or collected by children, it can become a horse chestnut tree, huge and lovely.

horse chestnut tree
Attached by fungus, but still doing the business, the horse chestnut outside our our house

Here’s an open letter, from a much-loved Sri Lankan Christian leader Ajith Fernando, to elderly theologian J I Packer. It’s a testimonial to Packer’s long lifetime, to Ajith Fernando’s consistent service, and to the compounding power of faithfulness.

The Rock that is higher than we are

And we don’t quite know how we get there

Rocks, Sedona“Believing in him is not the same as believing things about him such as that he was born of a virgin and raised Lazarus from the dead. Instead, it is a matter of giving our hearts to him, of come hell or high water putting our money on him, the way a child believes in a mother or a father, the way a mother or a father believes in a child.”
― Frederick Buechner

So stirred by this quote. I think we can pray in many ways. Sometimes it’s good to lift up people we love and situations we care about, working through our lists.

Sometimes we can worship.

Sometimes we work our way through a psalm, or a liturgy.

Some of us like to use the Lord’s Prayer as a set of headings or jumping-off points, a kind of road map to guide our thoughts.

But I wonder if this best sort of prayer is beyond all of these. It’s to do with unpacking our problems before Christ until we come to a place, not necessarily of understanding, but of peace.

Or clambering up an impossible problem in prayer, scrabbling for a foothold, until again, Jesus reaches down and gives us something to hold onto, something that holds us and gives us quiet, happy hearts. The view all around may be terrifying,  but we are safe and snug, supported by some promise or gift of trusting that is beyond our understanding.

We have stumbled onto the rock that is higher than we are: Christ’s own trustworthiness. We don’t know how it happens, but it happens.

First light

First light: it isn’t dark: the sky is brightening, day is inevitable. But it isn’t day either, because the Sun has yet to rise in all its glory, transforming everything.

When the Sun rises, it touches the mountaintops first. The church is very like these mountains. We are positioned there in the night-time landscape. We ourselves are a mixture of darkness and light. But what makes us different is that without any merit on our part, without us even particularly doing anything, the Sun is shining on us.

Here in the night-time, we are already enjoying the day-time. God brings a little day-time to us, and through us a light is cast on a twilit world.

Something real has happened to us if we turned to Christ. The New Testament boldly states that when Christ gives someone a new heart, it’s a piece of the world to come: ‘Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: the old has gone, the new is here!’

Then—like that sunlit mountain—we are a sign of something, and an example of something, to the world around.

It may not be the end of the world

But it is the end of a paradigm

As has been often observed, the old paradigm in the West is Christendom, and it’s disintegrating.

We now need to rethink this new day. But we have help.

The prophet Jeremiah also saw two paradigms in his own lifetime. He saw the idea of God’s-people-as-a-country, with its surface-mounted devotion, corrupt and hollow, collapse — the end of one paradigm.

At the same time he called on Jewish exiles in Babylon to “seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.” (Jeremiah 29:7).

This was astonishing. God’s people are no longer a nation, Jeremiah was saying. They were to be more like a network. In his way, Jeremiah was as radical as Moses, radical enough to see what of Moses to scrap.

No more separation from the non-Jewish people around you, Jeremiah told the people of God: get stuck in. Keep your faith, but build a good city along with them.

No more Promised Land: now the God of the Promise, present with God’s people in every land.

No longer propping up an abandoned structure: now they were starting a new build. No longer a national focus: now a global one.

This echoes down into the New Testament, and is our call now.

Day 33 2014
Andy Atzert@flickr