Confusing testimony with control – follow up thoughts from Sunday

Two days ago, our series on the Sermon on the Mount arrived at the end of Matthew 5, and we reflected on Jesus’ deeply challenging words on the need for us to love our enemies, a theme which seemed especially poignant in light of last week’s horrific attack on Drummer Lee Rigby on the streets of Woolwich.

You can listen to the sermon here. After I preached, we had time for questions and answers, and I've been mulling over two of the points which were made from the floor. Alan spoke about the transition which is proving so painful to many of us at the moment, as the church finds itself losing the political power and influence to which it has become so accustomed in the history of Christendom. And then John, alluding to Romans 13, pointed out that while we’re called to love our enemies, it remains the role of those in civic authority to uphold law and order, which sometimes means withdrawing freedom from criminals, or imposing other penalties on them. In Paul’s words, the government is ‘the servant of God to execute wrath on the wrongdoer’ (Romans 13:5).

Reflecting on this feedback yesterday, I remembered some words from Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon’s wonderful book, Resident Aliens. In it, they describe the Sermon on the Mount as, ‘A vision of the inbreaking of a new society. They are indicatives, promises, instances, imaginative examples of life in the kingdom of God. In Matthew 5, Jesus repeatedly cites an older command, already tough enough to keep in itself, and then radically deepens its significance, not to lay some gigantic ethical burden on the backs of potential ethical heroes, but rather to illustrate what is happening in our midst.’ (p84)

Offering the world a demonstration of the new work of God, of the values of the kingdom he is bringing to birth is a task which doesn’t sit easily with dictating terms to everyone. As soon as power is placed in the hands of the church, it’s only natural that we begin to feel a sense of presumption or entitlement about the level of control we feel we can exert on the lives of others, and we want to start playing the roles of judge, jury and executioner which scripture tells us to leave to others.

True love for enemies is something we don’t see often, which makes it so dazzling and compelling in the rare moments we encounter it, an unveiling of God’s love and mercy. Perhaps a key lesson we can take from Sunday’s reflection is a fresh awareness that demonstration of this love represents the prime calling of the church, with law and order a task best left to others.

Suggestions for our church swear box?

I’ve spent some time this morning getting ready for Sunday morning at YWBC. We’re carrying on with our series on the Sermon on the Mount, and this week we’ve arrived at Matthew 5:33-37, the section where Jesus calls for our language to be characterised by honesty, and free from guile or deception. On the same morning, it’s been striking to read reports of Google executives appearing before the Public Accounts Committee to face questions on their financial reporting and tax bills, with exasperated MPs asking them to ‘call a spade a spade.’

I realise that we live at a moment when trust in the credibility of statements made by public figures is low, but I can’t help feeling this is one more area of life where it’s easier to distract ourselves with what goes ‘in the world,’ conveniently forgetting about the need to put our own affairs in order first.

Reading the passage again this morning has reminded me of so many of the pretentious ways we use language in church, how we dress up our gossip or criticisms in pious language (we don’t pass on bits of juicy information, instead we say ‘I’m just telling you this for prayer…) or how we use euphemisms to play down the significance of behaviour which causes hurt or bad feeling. I thought this morning of a person I once knew who prided themselves on the fact that ‘folk always know where I stand with them.’ This was a coded way of acknowledging that lots of people had been crushed by their criticism over the years.

I’ve also been reminded this morning of Adrian Plass’ excellent, and very funny, book, Bacon Sandwiches and Salvation, where he provides an A to Z of definitions on the Christian life. For example, ‘Pillar of the church’ is defined as ‘(1) person who is consistent and reliable in their commitment to the well-being of the congregation (2) big thick thing that holds everything up and restricts vision.’

I think that a major step in combatting this problem is to start by naming it for what it is, to be upfront with each other about the games we sometimes play. So, why not have a church swear box? But let’s make sure that it’s not just about the outlawing of ‘rude’ words, but the prevention of self-righteousness and pretensions. Let me know your suggestions in the comments section below.

On social media and self-projection in ministry

Over the weekend I’ve been doing some reading which has helped me crystallise thoughts which have been on the back of my mind for the couple of months since I took the plunge and entered the Twittersphere. I’ve been working through James Smith’s Imagining the Kingdom, the second of his Cultural Liturgies series, which follows 2009’s Desiring the Kingdom.

The central thrust of Smith’s argument is that our discipleship often fails to be effective because it focuses on head knowledge. We believe that if we get people to think correctly they will be able to live well for Jesus, forgetting that we have bodies as well as minds and that our passions and impulses are competed for by a culture which is constantly and compellingly offering us an alternative story to the Christian one.

A part of the book which I found especially helpful was Smith’s analysis of social media. At one point he writes:

‘… both Facebook and Twitter can seem to foster habits of self-display that closely resemble the vice of vainglory. Or at the very least, they amplify the self-consciousness and ironic distance that characterises late modern capitalism – to a debilitating degree.’ (p145)

Later on the same page, Smith fleshes out these observations in a discussion of the impact of social media on the average Western teenager: ‘Her Twitter feed incessantly updates her about all of the exciting, hip things she is not doing with the “popular” girls; her Facebook pings nonstop with photos that highlight how boring her homebound existence is. And so she is compelled to be constantly “on,” to be “updating” and “checking in.” The competition for coolness never stops.’

Years ago at College, I remember the regular advice of one of our tutors that the last thing to ask anyone at a minister’s meeting was the question: ‘How many people do you get on a Sunday morning?’ I suspect the loneliness and thanklessness of this role make those who hold it more susceptible than most to insecurity, even to the occasional prima donna moment. Added to that can be the need we often feel to justify ourselves and our use of time.

And then enter Twitter. Am I being overly-anxious when I detect a variety of trends in the content of our tweets? There are…

• The ones which show how edgy we are: e.g. I’ve just spent the morning at our new missional/radical/enterprising project
• The ones which show how connected we are: e.g. great to meet today with @’insert name of high profile colleague here’
• The ones which show how techy we are: I’ve shared x, y or z, on my most recent gadget acquisition or on the latest app I’ve discovered.

And as I read this, there’s a nagging question at the back of my mind: For whose benefit do we broadcast all this news? Of course, I realise that one of the great advantages of a tool like Twitter is to share ideas and information. I do it myself with updates to friends and members of our church, so I don’t want these words to be misunderstood as cynical, or critical. But when most of us have felt the lack of honesty in our churches, the feeling we have that we often can’t be real about how awful we feel, the lack of lament in our worship, isn’t it troubling that we may now have discovered a tool which takes this problem to a whole new level?

So a plea… how can we redeem this medium with a bit more honesty and balance? Or am I being naïve to think we could actually reach the point where we feel sufficiently honest to tweet that it’s been a lousy day and we could really do with a prayer or encouragement, or that all I’ve done today is follow the same routines I’ve done for weeks, months and years, because a major part of our calling is simply to be faithful?

On Salt and Light and being 'Sorted'

I spent this morning getting ready for Sunday in YWBC, when we’ll be carrying on our series on the Sermon on the Mount with a reflection on Matthew 5:13-16, Jesus’ famous words on the role of the church, to be ‘the salt of the earth’ and ‘the light of the world.’

As I’ve mulled over the passage, a question has occurred to me which we might want to think of ahead of Sunday: is be better to be deliberately different to others, or does being salt and light mean we model a lifestyle which is a redeemed and more attractive version of what everyone else is doing?

My reason for posing this question arises from time checking out the website of Sorted, which makes the claim to be ‘The UK’s Only Christian Magazine for Men.’

At this point, it’s probably only right to declare my prejudices ahead of browsing the site. I’ve had one or two bad experiences of men’s Christian gatherings. I realise they’re very helpful to some chaps, but my abiding memory of Mandate in Belfast several years ago was a lecture from a retired US Army General who didn’t actually tell us all to ‘man up’ even if that was the gist of his message. Think of Robert de Niro from Meet the Parents in a pulpit and you’ll get a picture of what I’m talking about. I’ve decided I like a mixture of testosterone and oestrogen in church, I’m not ‘wild at heart’ and I’ve never been able to share the angst of those who feel the church is somehow overly-feminised.  

Perhaps because of that, I came to Sorted in particular need of convincing. But I didn’t expect to be so taken aback by the way in which it’s so obviously in thrall to our culture’s idea of what it means to be successful and a proper man. Can someone explain to me the redemptive nature of articles like ‘the ultimate guide to cool winter coats’ or a review of the latest smartphones?

The underlying message is clear – to be a credible witness means we need the latest gadgets, clothing, and a body that we wouldn’t be ashamed of at the gym? But in the Sermon on the Mount, doesn’t Jesus go on to say that it’s ‘the Gentiles who strive for all these things,’ before calling us to ‘strive first for the Kingdom of God’? How can we ever redeem shallow notions of what it means to be successful or masculine, if we’re so obsessed with our need to somehow prove ourselves as being capable of reaching those standards ourselves?

This isn’t call for all of us to live like Amish communities, trading in our cars for horses and carriages. But there are serious grounds for concern here. Five years on from a financial meltdown of global proportions, having chased the idols of credit and conspicuous consumption, lots of people in our country face the prospect of struggling on, either unemployed, underemployed or overworked. When so many are asking big questions about the sustainability of our current economic mode, are we really being salt and light if our message is simply that you too can have Jesus, an iPhone and a great six pack?

Exodus 21: Rules and regulations

The American satirist PJ O’Rourke once remarked that, ‘God is an elderly or, at any rate, middle-aged male, a stern fellow, patriarchal rather than paternal and a great believer in rules and regulations.’

We spent last night in church looking at Exodus 21, one of those passages which contains a long list of instructions for various scenarios. Perhaps, PJ O’Rourke has read Exodus 21 too, and he reckons it’s texts like this which represent such a drag on God’s reputation. But as I’ve spent time thinking about Exodus 21, I’ve begun to think about similar OT passages in a new way.

One of the strangest things about Exodus 21 is the subject matter of the opening verses: how to treat slaves. Given that the people of Israel have just been delivered from the bondage of Egypt, this is the last thing you would expect to read. It seems like such a letdown to contemplate that in the post-Exodus landscape there will still be those who are owned by others, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that this is still a world which is governed by some harsh economic realities. However, Exodus 21 does at least affirm that in Israel’s life slaves are to have certain fundamental rights, disappointing to us but a significant piece of progress in 1200 BC.

Thinking about these instructions, I remembered Jesus’ words about divorce in Matthew 19, where he says that Moses only allowed such measures, ‘because you were so hard-hearted.’ These rules and regulations don’t exist to make us better people, they exist to safeguard us and the community when things, inevitably, go wrong. I was also reminded of how, in his letters, Paul seems to have recognised the gap between God’s ideal and what was achievable in the circumstances of his day. In a moment of lyrical rhetoric he proclaimed to the Galatian Christians that ‘there is no longer slave or free,’ but several years later, when he writes to the Ephesians and Philemon, he appears to be much more pragmatic on the issue of slavery. He is still a voice for change, in that he calls on masters not to threaten those they own, but his thinking also seems to be grounded in the realistic understanding that the abolition of slavery would have had catastrophic economic consequences at that point in history.

What has also struck me as I’ve reflected on these passages is the room for manoeuvre offered by many of the rules and regulations. For example, Exodus 21:12 instructs that a sentence of death for anyone guilty of deliberate murder, but the following verse offers the potential for leniency, if the act was ‘not premeditated but came about by an act of God,’ a clause which seems to provide ample scope for flexible interpretation. When I read the Gospels, it seems to me that Jesus never speaks of the law as harsh or restrictive (in fact he says he hasn’t come to take away one letter of it), but he is at his angriest when he finds the Pharisees applying the law with no flexibility, no willingness to look with compassion on what lies behind people’s actions on certain occasions.

I wonder what lessons there are for us from Exodus 21. It seems to me that one of the basic assumptions behind these rules is that you will never guarantee perfect behaviour. People will sin, people will make mistakes. But Israel is given a set of guidelines for knowing how best to minimise the impact of the mistakes on individuals and the whole of the community and we might want to think in that light about our own commitment to Christian standards. So often, it feels like our default option when relating to the world is to throw the rule book at people. We think we have the right to control others, and we forgot our calling is to model something more attractive, and to lovingly help when things go wrong.

A helpful resource on Exodus and violence

A question which has come up a couple of times in recent months, as we’ve been exploring Exodus in Yardley Wood BC, is the issue of divine violence in the Old Testament. I noticed today that Greg Boyd, whose writing I’ve found to be tremendously helpful, has promised a series of posts on this topic on his excellent ReKnew website. You can find out more at: 

http://reknew.org/2013/02/reflections-on-divine-violence-in-the-old-testament/

God, Egypt and nature... some follow up thoughts

Time off this week has offered a welcome opportunity to catch up on viewing and reading, and a couple of items have caught my attention, provoking further thought about a subject we reflected on in YWBC a few weeks ago.

One of the concerns expressed by a number of people in our discussion on the plague stories of Exodus was the suffering experienced by nature and animals during the sequence of afflictions which befell Egypt. For example, animals, as well as humans, are afflicted by gnats and boils, the land is ‘ruined’ by flies, trees and plants are ‘shattered’ by thunder and hail. And, of course, even the firstborn of all the livestock, as well as humans, are struck down.

When we discussed this in church a few weeks ago, I made the suggestion that nature is caught up in the suffering which results from Pharaoh’s intransigence, but also as part of a process by which God will eventually secure for it a better future under the protective care of the people of Israel. At the time of the Exodus, Egypt was regarded as the ‘bread basket’ of the world, a thriving economy that provided food to the surrounding region. It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to think about the intensive farming methods that would have been employed by Egypt. In contrast, the new order planned by God for Israel is one where the land lies fallow for recovery every seven years and donkeys get to rest on the Sabbath (Exod 23:10-12).

I’ve been reminded in recent weeks how we read the Bible from a very human-centred perspective, which can blind us to the bigger story God is unfolding, a story of freedom for all creation, for which it longs, groaning as if in labour (Rom 8:22). Over the weekend, we spent an hour enjoying the ‘last chance to watch’ the BBC’s wonderful documentary Africa, on iPlayer. One of the most moving lessons of Africa was the way it demonstrated the terrible hardship, a daily battle for survival, which is experienced by so many animals in our world. Watching Africa, and its account of elephants and zebras walking for days on end in a search for water, I was reminded of God’s words at the end of Job 38:

³⁹ ‘Can you hunt the prey for the lion,
   or satisfy the appetite of the young lions, 
⁴⁰ when they crouch in their dens,
   or lie in wait in their covert? 
⁴¹ Who provides for the raven its prey,
   when its young ones cry to God,
   and wander about for lack of food? 

It seems that part of the lesson God is trying to teach Job is that there is work that he is doing in our world, a work of care and provision for his creation, that humans are often oblivious to.

A second point which emerges from Job is the way God is portrayed as wrestling with his creation, seeking to bring order to a world which is beset by chaos. This is an issue which has wider implications for how we understand God’s relationship to our world. Is creation perfectly ordered, a clockwork universe which has been set in motion by a God who now regulates every tiny event of every life, or is God still seeking to lovingly assert his authority on our world, a process only to be completed at the eventual moment when all things are made new? This brings me to the second article I came across this week, the news that the cosmos may be ‘inherently unstable.’ You can read the full story here, the suggestion that research on the properties of the Higgs boson is reviving an ‘old idea that the Big Bang Universe we observe today is just the latest version in a permanent cycle of events.’ Reading Scripture, in light of these new scientific discoveries, seems to me to provide further support for the idea of viewing creation as untamed, and God as one who is lovingly working to bring about its deliverance, as well as ours.