God needs energetic Christians!

One of the ways in which I play with scripture is to summarize a chapter around a key theme; then I’m more likely to engage with it, and to remember it. Here’s an effort from some years ago preached in an Oxfordshire village, and now turned into a blog from my notes!

Hebrews 13 is summed up in my mind as ‘kingdom living’ and there are five simple but hugely demanding elements to that living. I won’t cross-reference them for you, but invite you to read the chapter, read the blog and examine your conscience.

We are to love one another as brothers and sisters, that is, as family. By this the writer is calling us to love out of knowledge, just as we have to do in our own families, where nothing is hidden. This is love, warts and all, love in all its messiness, unconditional, matched and trumped by Jesus’ unconditional love for us.

Secondly, we are to be hospitable. Again, there are no limits, because we don’t know when an angel is lurking! The bit that jumps out for me, of course, is that hospitality is not just to one another but to God. We welcome strangers as if they were the presence of God. Why? Because they are the presence of God. There is a ‘supernatural’ dimension to all hospitality – ‘the unseen guest’.

This is expanded in the third point, to our care for prisoners as if we were in prison with them. Hospitality is extended in this in a missionary direction: we go out to others; waiting for them to come in is not enough. We of all people go into the hard places, especially the places that non-Christians find difficult, the place of death, of disfigurement, of gross sin.

Fourthly, we are those who live free from consumerism. We do not need to purchase to find life. In that freedom, we live lives of appreciation, thankfulness, delight and pleasure in simplicity. Our language is still embedded with this ideal of ‘the simple things of life’. In recovering them, we return the world to God the creator, living in it with light and childlike footsteps.

And finally, this kingdom living is sacrificial: strengthened by grace, we respond to the cross by receiving gratefully (so hard for us to do these days!) and by responding with grace. We are called to speak gracefully of life and about one another, to serve gracefully, and to share all that we have. Sacrificial living is never spent. There is always more of life to give, under God’s grace.

Eyes to see: God in surprising places

The classical evangelical discipline of the ‘quiet time’ of Bible reading, study and prayer has sustained many generations of Christians, and continues to do so. For many reasons, not all to do with spiritual laziness, there are some who find this pattern and discipline difficult or unhelpful.  One of the aims of the Simeon Centre for Prayer and the Spiritual Life is to encourage exploration of new patterns and ways of prayer, both because guilt does not help our Christian discipleship, but also because God is not interested in style. What matters to God is relationship.

Two years ago, the Simeon Centre held a day on Spirituality and Creativity, using a number of art forms as the stuff of prayer. On June 9, another such day will be held on ‘spirituality and photography: praying through the lens.’ The purpose of it is threefold: to help participants to engage with a theology of beauty; to find ways of new or ‘deep’ seeing that might be revelatory; and to learn a little about the playfulness that ought to be inherent in our relationship with our heavenly Father.

 

We are familiar now with the idea that God, who is the goodness underlying all that is good, and the truth of all truth, is glimpsed through things of beauty. That’s why Paul enjoins us in Philippians 4 to ‘think on these things’. Play, too, is much more a part of Christian spirituality today. Perhaps the hardest thing for us to learn is the central theme of the day, that when we allow the Holy Spirit to give us ‘eyes to see’, we may once again glimpse heaven, and worship. To that end, the use of a camera may well become the ‘eyes of prayer.’

Substitionary prayer and how to do it

In 2 Corinthians 10, Paul speaks about the battles that we fight as disciples of Christ: Indeed, we live as human beings, but we do not wage war according to human standards; for the weapons of our warfare are not merely human, but they have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every proud obstacle raised up against the knowledge of God, and we take every thought captive to obey Christ.

There are many strongholds ‘out there’ against which we stand in the name of Christ. In this we are prayer warriors. There is a multitude of ‘arguments’ against which we speak the truth of the gospel of Christ. In this we are apologists. For every ‘proud obstacle’ raised up against the true knowledge of God, we have the name of Christ, a stone that makes them stumble and a rock that makes them fall.

Perhaps the hardest battle of all is against the strongholds within ourselves, the habits, patterns of behaviour and learned responses which remain fleshly, sometimes years after we took our first stumbling steps as Christians. Once, we sought to overcome them, but have grown tired, jaded, and almost used to their company.

What’s instructive for me in Paul’s language is that he doesn’t speak about obliterating bad thoughts or fantasies, but about taking them captive, taming them, turning wild beasts into farmyard creatures who – more or less – behave. And there are several ways in which we can do this. We can

• catch ourselves descending into unhelpful or dangerous spirals of dark or sinful thought, and tell ourselves off there and then. ‘Stop it, you silly fool!’ I say, sometimes aloud. And the wild thought usually listens, and lopes off into the undergrowth. 
• crowd the beasts out with beauty and blessing. Against those murderous thoughts that I have when drivers carve me up, I sign the sign of the cross over them and bless the drivers instead. (Well, to be honest, I do on a good day!) 
• turn those crazy twisted thoughts into energetic prayers. As someone said to me recently, ‘I have learned to turn my complaints into Kingdom protests.’

It’s the last of these I’d like to illustrate by offering you a short litany of substitutionary prayer to pray, as part of your arsenal against the strongholds within:

Lord, in place of the complaints I have voiced this day, I ask you to transform those unjust situations;

For all my cheap jibes at the expense of others, I ask you to make me humble;

For the congregations and Christians I have written off, I ask for their healing and restoration;

For the discrimination I have exercised in my head, I ask you to bring me to a place of meeting with ‘the other’;

For the little wars that I have waged, defeat my aims and make me a peace-singer;

For the pollution I have spilt through my mind and heart into a needy world, I ask you to cleanse not only me, but the other hearts and minds my actions have sullied.

And all these things I ask in and through the name of Jesus Christ, who hung in our place on the cross, and dying gave us life. Amen.

Times of refreshing

The first big miracle in the life of the early church happened, it seems, almost by accident. The lame man at the Beautiful Gate, begging for alms, called out to Peter and John as he had called out so many times before, probably without even looking up. You can read all about it, as they say, in the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 3!

The two apostles themselves, perhaps with their companions, were not on the prowl for pastoral or evangelistic opportunities. They were simply going up to the temple at the hour of prayer – going to pray. Their ministry to this man sprang out of – was fed by – the soil of prayer and worship.

It was the continuation of one of the key narrative strands in Acts, a primary response to the resurrection. Already in chapter 2 of Acts, we’ve been told that they were devoted to prayer and teaching, fellowship and the breaking of bread. Four verses later we hear that they spent much time in the temple.

But on the way, they were interrupted by the man’s need. And then they jump into action, stepping quite naturally into the continuation of the ministry of Jesus. Jesus’ teaching, healing, forgiving, the exercise of power and authority, through the Holy Spirit, have fallen upon the church, and Peter and John are that church. At that moment, in that place, Christ becomes present for the lame man, in Peter’s words and actions, in his very life.

We might say that as Jesus was, so the body of Christ became. Peter didn’t have to think what to do; he just had to do what he did in the name of Jesus. And surprise, surprise, it worked!

The amazed crowd gathered like flies to the honey pot, but Peter has learnt his lesson well at the feet of Jesus. He immediately turned the attention of the crowd away from the leaping, praising walking man, to the Kingdom of God.

Our business, he says, is not about signs, but about that which signs signify. From why do you wonder? he turns pretty immediately to the good news: the God of Abraham has glorified his servant, or son Jesus. The healing is a small but significant act, pointing to the need for a total reorientation in the light of the death and resurrection of Christ.

The sermon itself has the typical structure of

a.       A summary of the Old Testament narrative;

b.      fulfilled in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

c.       This is followed by judgement on the faithlessness of the past;

d.      and a call to the faithless ones to become faithful. They are to repent, to turn to Jesus, follow Jesus, be baptized in the name of Jesus.

e.       And as the new faithful, they are called to a community of power: in the name of Jesus: And by faith in his name, his name itself has made this man strong, whom you see and know; and the faith that is through Jesus has given him this perfect health in the presence of all of you.

Towards the end of the sermon, Peter gives a strange promise: there will be times of refreshing from the presence of the Lord, followed by the sending of the Messiah at the time of universal restoration.

We sort of understand the end times. But times of refreshing? These are the moments, the markers, the signs, which remind us that the people of the Way, Peter, John, we, have stepped out of the world into the Kingdom of God as it unfolds and moves towards completion on the last day.

These times of refreshing are what George Herbert calls ‘heaven in ordinary’, when we are suddenly and strangely made aware of the fact that we inhabit a new world, a Kingdom that cannot be overthrown, in the midst of what is still a very mixed, confusing and often painful life.

All very promising, until we realize that we can’t make these moments happen. However, if we wheel back to the beginning of Acts 3, and two disciples on the way to the Temple to pray , we remember that these times of refreshing come from the presence of the Lord.

And so there are 4 little principles that we can practise that relate to the presence of the Lord. In order to prepare space for these times of refreshing in our lives, we must

a.       wait – make ourselves available in the temple so that God may draw near to us.

b.      watch – look for the signs of God’s presence, encouragement and refreshing that are already around us, but which get ignored in the haste of life.

c.       ask – reminded by Jesus that we never got anything by not asking, we approach a generous God in faith. And finally

d.      seek – with risky praying that we too, in the midst of a messy and turbulent life, may see miracles, signs of God’s presence as the Kingdom breaks in to a humdrum and despairing world.

His sword is aimed at his own naked heart: Anders Breivik

I've been thinking a lot lately about Anders Breivik and his so-called crusade against multi-ethnic society and the supposed de-Christianization of Norway. It would be so much easier to say that he is mad, but if there is any madness in him, it seems to me that it is the madness of society writ large.

70 years ago this year, Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi leader of German-occupied Bohemia and Moravia, was assassinated by Czech partisans supported by our secret services here in Britain. The Nazi response was immediate and violent in the extreme. Notably, the village of Lidice - thought to have harboured the partisans - was razed to the ground and its inhabitants murdered or transported to concentration camps. After the war, only 153 women and 17 children returned.

The poet Cecil Day-Lewis wrote a memorial to the village which has brought Breivik to mind again. It's a short poem, and the second and final verse says:

Must the innocent bleed for ever to remedy
These fanatic fits that tear mankind apart?
The pangs we felt from your atrocious hurt
Promise a time when even the killer shall see
His sword is aimed at his own naked heart.

I'm not sure that I have Day-Lewis' confidence that the pangs we felt... promise a time. Redemption is always possible, but it is not a necessary outcome. But I was struck by the absolute truth of the last line: His sword is aimed at his own naked heart. Breivik is not a loser, but his is the greatest loss; he is indeed the greatest victim of his own sin.

I give thanks for the bravery and dignity of the families, police, prosecutors and the people of Norway. At the same time, I pray that Breivik may see past his vain and pompous posturing - as if he were Norway's redeemer - and feel the sword penetrate his own heart. May he be broken by an awareness of the evil, and redeemed by the contrition that God demands of all.

As I continue to think about this sombre subject, I am reminded of the Apostle Paul's willingness to face deep evil. In an entirely different context, but equally passionate for redemption, he called on the Corinthian church to hand this man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord.

Jesus carried his cross vicariously

Jesus carried his cross on your behalf and mine; on behalf of those who followed him, but had deserted him; on behalf of those who had condemned him to death; on behalf of those who had welcomed him into Jerusalem with one breath and cried, ‘Crucify him’ with the next breath; on behalf of those who were unaware of his existence.

‘Christ bore our sins in his body on the tree.’

‘He was wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and by his stripes we are healed.’

When Jesus spoke of his disciples ‘taking up their cross’, he was not just referring to their attitude to their own lives but he was also urging them to take up the cross of others, to bear the burdens of others. In Gal 6:2 Paul urges his readers:

‘bear one another's burdens and so fulfil the law of Christ.’

His readers would have been familiar with the law by which a Roman soldier could force any member of a subject people to carry his pack, but Christ urges us voluntarily and vicariously to shoulder the weight of those who are at any point in their lives too weak to carry on.

It is interesting that Christ, in the weakness of his flesh, was unable to carry the weight of his own cross all the way to Calvary. Tradition has it that Jesus stumbled a number of times before Simon of Cyrene was pressed into service by the guards that accompanied him. Up to this point in the story Simon is unheard of, and nobody is sure whether he was a disciple or not at the point at which he was commandeered to carry the cross of Christ.

However, his sons were later known to be members of the Church and it is possible that carrying the cross on that Good Friday, led to a life of discipleship for Simon and for his family.

Christ, who shared our humanity in its fullness, also needed the strong arms of another, to bear his cross and carry its load, when he came to the end of his physical strength.

{     How often when we despair do we need someone to hope for us?

{     How often when we lose faith do we need someone to believe for us?

{     How often when we cannot see the path before us  because of our tears, do we need someone to help us discern the way and walk with us?

{     How often when we cannot pray, do we rely on the prayers of others?

{     How often when we lose the physical health and strength to look after ourselves, do we depend on the well-being and the good will of others?

If Christ, in his humanity, needed Simon's strength, surely it is no surprise that those who follow in his footsteps will sometimes need the strength of others who are walking with them. And so Christ bids us take up not just our own cross, whatever that might be, but the cross of those around us,

{     the cross of our brothers and sisters in Christ, and

{     the cross of our brothers and sisters in the world.

Christ bore his cross for those who knew him and for those who ignored him.

There are vast numbers of people in our world

{     who suffer at the hands of the powerful, of those who exploit them;

{     people who are imprisoned without recourse to proper justice;

{     people who suffer at the hands of violent minorities;

{     people who have no voice, who have nothing with which to fight for themselves;

{     people without strength and without hope.

As we remember the Christ who carried his cross on behalf of those who were powerless against sin and death and evil, let us hear afresh his call to take up our cross - the cross that presents itself in various guises

{     in our own lives;

{     in the lives of our brothers and sisters in Christ;

{     and in the life of the world around us.

Jesus shouldered his cross voluntarily

Having been condemned to die, the Roman soldiers would have used physical coercion to ensure that a reluctant prisoner carried his cross to the place of execution.

Jesus needed no such persuasion. In the Garden of Gethsemane he had contemplated the cross in its grim reality and in the weakness of his human nature, he had shrunk from it. Jesus shared that same fear of death that so often makes us unable to look it squarely in the face.

‘If it be possible let this cup pass from me.’

Jesus prayed to be released from the cross, but having wrestled with his own weakness, and with discerning the will of his Father, he shouldered it willingly, without complaint, held to his fate by the love which he bore for his Father and for you and me, fastened to the cross in the faith that God would be there in that darkness and would bring good out of his anguish.

As Christians we sometimes find ourselves shrinking from circumstances and situations that we face:

{     a debilitating or life threatening sickness

{     the untimely death of someone we love

{     a handicap that limits our freedom to do and be what we would like to do and be.

And it is with an air of weary resignation that people sometimes refer to these things as a cross which they must bear. A cross to be reluctantly shouldered.

I think the way in which Christ approached his cross has something to say to us, when we find ourselves in that kind of situation.

It is all right to pray for release. Suffering is not something which God delights to give to his children. Life is not some kind of ‘sufferathon’ with a prize for the one who suffers most. Suffering is an intruder, an unavoidable intruder into the harmony of life as God created it and intended it to be.

{     It is all right to acknowledge our weakness and inability to face some of the things that life throws at us.

{     It is all right to pray that this cup should pass from us.

But if having wrestled with our weakness, and having wrestled with God, we still face the inevitability of the path before us, we need to ‘take up’ our cross.

Not passively submitting to life's hardships, but positively summoning our limited resources and God's infinite resources, so that whatever our experience may be, it becomes creative for us and for those around us. Faith displayed amidst great difficulty can exert an amazing power on people of little or no faith. It is an amazing witness to the faithfulness of God and it has the power to soften the hardest human heart and encourage the faintest human spirit.