SOUL SURMISE

3 SONGS, 3 STEPS TO 10:10 LIVING in 2015 - Part 1: LET IT FALL

(This is part 1 of a 3 part series that is based on my New Year sermon on January 4, 2015... The sermon was inspired by 3 songs and then rooted in Philippians 3...)

Have you been trying too hard

Have you been holding too tight

Have you been worrying too much lately

All night

Whatever we've lost

I think we're gonna let it go

Let it fall

Like snow

‘Cause rain and leaves

And snow and tears and stars

And that's not all my friend

They all fall with confidence and grace

So let it fall, let it fall

This Over The Rhine song has been lingering on my ear and in my soul for weeks. I am not one who listens to music just for the sound. I am always listening for the spiritual, the transformative and, as a pastor, the pastoral. 

As a pastor this song is a tender balm. It stings the wound but is important in the healing. As I read it, and I might be wrong, this is Over the Rhine’s take on Jesus’ Sermon on The Mount illustration that the lilies of the field and the birds of the air don’t worry the way we humans do but look at how beautiful and cared for they are. They trust their Creator. And so, in this  song, the rain, leaves, snow, tears and stars all in trust that all will be well.  

As a new year begins we need to let the failings, disappointments, hurts, grief and pain of 2014 fall. We need to trust God. Now I do not expect that falling to happen by the time this blog is read but I gently suggest that it is what we should be aiming for. Trust. Letting go. Grace for the healing.

Our motto/logo in Fitzroy, where I am minister, is 10:10 from John 10:10, “life in all its fulness.” We believe that it is what God wants for us and why Jesus was born, lived, died and was raised to life. Pastorally, as a community, we are all about helping the each other overcome those things that would prevent 10:10. 

In Philippians 3 the apostle Paul lets it fall. Yes, for Paul in this particular passage, it is his self righteous attempts to reach God that he is letting go of. He lets go of his legalism for grace and trust and confidence in God’s grace in Jesus. Yet, I don’t think it is a wrong reading of the passage to bring it together with Over The Rhine’s Let It Fall. Paul says of himself, “Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on…”

When we hold on to failings, disappointments, hurts, grief and pain, they can become our identity. They can hold us back. The first step to fulfilling the potential of 2015 is to let it fall.

SOUL WIPE OR MULTI LAYERED SALVATION?

It has been a recurring theme for me to dangle myself over the firey pit of heresy. For many there will be no surprise there! So…I begin tonight’s end of year address by stating that I am disillusioned by our evangelical theology of salvation! To immediately redress such a shocking confession I am actually more disillusioned that the great theology of salvation that we have is so poorly worked out in our lives, Church and society. Indeed I believe that the problem has been that we have concentrated all our efforts on salvation on the theology rather than its implications. Tonight as some of you leave us to enter another chapter of your lives, another step up in your development, the rough and tumble of the real world I want to look at where our belief about Christ’s salvation will affect the lives you are going to live.

But first let me untangle my disappointment with salvation; or our outworking of it. I read the biography of a rock star this past month; a member of the Rock ‘N Roll Hall Of Fame who is now a Christian. It was a fascinating book that I enjoyed immensely but the outworking of his salvation in Christ left me feeling a little short changed. It didn’t seem a robust enough transformation. He did have an awareness of the emptiness of his fame and fortune and his need for Jesus and the salvation he came to bring. He prayed the prayer and turned his life around, leaving the music scene to become a pastor. It held his life together, gave him a new sense of morality and led him towards Bible Study, prayer and witnessing to his friends. It was in so many ways the salvation that I found, and that so many experienced, in the seventies but it left me feeling disappointed. There was nothing in his biography about the challenges Jesus would throw at an American living through war and globalisation and consumerism and an encroaching environmental apocalypse. He admitted that he never wrote political songs or songs of social concern or cultural critique but even if they are not issues to write songs about surely they are crisis that our faith should be engaging with. Salvation, in the age of modernist definition, seems to have become a liturgical procedure and a nice clean life.

The Old Testament theologian Walter Brueggeman has said that “The gospel is thus a truth widely held, but a truth greatly reduced. It is a truth that has been flattened, trivialized and rendered inane.” I believe he is right. Let me use an illustration of what I think I mean. At communion I am always pondering on the power of the blood of Christ. It seems that in this inane nice clean life the wine of communion is merely used to wipe our faces. It is a cleansing but quite a superficial cleansing like a wipe by a diluted substance. The same with the Church. It is like a nice gloss top coat of paint. Look at us, we are good. And we try to do the same to our society. Less smoking and swearing and drinking and society will be more Christian. It is all a watery soul wipe.

When I am in the communion zone, seeking the transforming power of the bread and the wine I often pray to be marinated by the intoxicating, dangerous sin killing power of Christ’s body and blood. And for society I pray that it drips then soaks and seeps through the pavement cracks and the grouting in the walls to reinvigorate, redeem and renew our society and culture. Christ did not live and die and be resurrected to fix our petty habits. He came to utterly turn around and make upside down and transform our entire world. As the world heads in a direction driven by the devil and evil of a deeply rooted fall so salvation is about a repentant revolution that will see God’s kingdom come and his will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

At the end of those hippy Christian seventies when slogans were all the rage there was a phrase that went “Jesus is the answer… now what is the question?” I used to ridicule this by asking why the world is evil. Oh Jesus is the answer! Yes, it is a naive cliché but I want to use it tonight to get to my question. What I want to ask is “what is the main question of your generation and how does Jesus help us answer that question. Where is your generation lost and how does salvation look as the power of Christ’s cross impacts it.

In the Gospels, Jesus spoke of someone building a tower or a king going to war. Before they began the task they considered the task. As you guys head out to follow Jesus it is important to sit down and ask what the obstacles are. What the dangers are? What you are going to have to overcome. I guess there are various crises but the one I think is over riding, the one that is going to grow up like thorns alongside the seeds of the Gospel to choke the potential transformation. On a trip to Cape Town I once asked my students what they were not looking forward to back at home one answered “the relentlessness.”

Consumerism is the relentless god of the age. Many who are keen to make us a secular society, religion free seem blinded to the fact that it is not a religion free world they are creating. It is a new religion – consumerism is a religion. Let’s face it, it is what drives our culture, the engine of all our decisions and values. It is the bottom line… it is God… full allegiance… our identity… our worship… our consolation… our trust. The delusion for you is that the effectiveness of your life will be measured by the wage you earn. Houses, cars, exotic holidays and gadgets become a reason, the main reason for your life and work.

This is the context of our salvation; the habitation that we attempt to follow Jesus in. I don’t think the diluted liturgical proceedured nice clean life needs to care what the context is. Soul wipe Christianity is cosmetic and can ignore the multilayered salvation that Jesus was really about. Some even think that having a soul wiped Christianity running alongside consumerism negates the seduction of it. But alas no… and the Bible warns against the corrosive power of money. In the Old Testament there were times when there was the same sense of luxurious living as we enjoy now. It always led to exploitation and a prophetic battering from God. Their big houses, expensive fittings and their lush vineyards will be destroyed in God’s judgement.

Jesus spoke about it in the Sermon On the Mount. "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness! No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money.”

Paul prophesied against it in 2 Timothy 3 “But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— having a form of godliness but denying its power.”

This is what as a follower of Jesus we wrestle with. Is the pay check more important than time with your children? Is the next promotion what fires your vocation? Is your post code worth the stress? Is your comforts and luxuries worth causing a vast part of the world to be living in unforgiveable poverty, pain and death? Or is there another way to live? Is there an upside down kingdom where dirty straw, a homeless mentor and a wooden cross are the revolutionary symbols?

So what does this mean? Well in the soul wipe version of salvation I would tell you to tithe and that would salve your conscience on the surface. If only Christianity was so formulaic? It is what I would call a dynamic of dilemma? It is taking care not to get sucked in. It is making sure that your treasure is not on earth. It is making sure your investment is in eternal things. It is making sure that the subtlety of the advertisers does not suck your soul dry of the transforming power of Christ’s blood. It is decisions in your home. Decisions in your business. Decisions in your vocation.

In the Old Testament there was a choice to be made by God’s people. Were they going to follow the one true God or give in to the worship of idols instead? It is best described in Elijah’s battle with the prophets of Baal on the top of Mount Carmel. “If the Lord is God follow him; but if Baal is God then follow him.” In the New Testament the gods give way to the Empire and the same question is needed. The God we face. The Empire we face is consumerism. We need to ask who we will follow.

Salvation is not a soul wipe, not a surface clean. It is multilayered… impacting deep within our culture. We need to go to be salt and light… As David Gray puts it we need you guys to make the truth sting against the consumerist lies. Into the lies ruin and disease of our society I pray God that you will let the truth sting deep.

OUT OF THE BOX MAD... BEYOND NORMAL, NICE AND GOOD...

I have used the opening gambit before. “I am praying you don’t have a good marriage!” Many will know that it comes from my old friend Rich Mullins. He used to sign autograph’s, “Be God’s” . He thought being good was easy and a lot less than what God demands anyway. I have added to Rich’s thoughts that I reckon the devil would settle for being good. At El Gruer and Stephen Mansell’s wedding I used the talk to draw this out using Jesus words in Luke 6: 27-36. That is a curve ball of a Wedding Reading, all about loving enemies and doing good to those who hate you! Yet, from it I tried to inspire El and Steve to live out of the box mad, beyond normal, nice and good and to be grace compelled interrupters.

OUT OF THE BOX MAD

Just before this passage Jesus has been rattling out out of the box phrases like “blessed are you who are poor” and “blessed are you when people hate you” before adding “woe to you who are rich” and “woe to you when people speak well of you.” That is out of the box insanity. Then Jesus goes on to say that  when you are hit on the cheek you are not only not to retaliate but to actually turn the other cheek. He calls his followers to “love their enemies”, and “do good to those who hate them”.

This is crazy stuff and why good is easy but living this Jesus life is so out of the box. 

BEYOND NORMAL, NICE AND GOOD 

This madness lives life way beyond the normal life. I always think that they devil settles for nice. There are many people who are nice neighbours but make no impact in the world at all. Jesus was keen that we would go beyond what everybody else might think is good. This is what Jesus was talking about when he says that everyone loves those who love them and lend to others expecting to get repaid. 

GRACE COMPELLED INTERRUPTERS

There is a key to all of this. It is in the last throw away lines of this passage from Luke chapter 6: 35-36… “you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”

This out of the box madness… this going beyond the normal, nice and good… is all sourced from the compelling grace of God. It is God who does that mad thing. God’s Grace compelled him and “he demonstrated his love for us in this that while we we still sinners Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8) Showing kindness to the ungrateful and wicked is the example we follow when we follow Jesus. That grace then interrupts the way the world is into how the world can be. 

So I will not settle for passionate Jesus followers like El and Steve to have “good” marriages. No way. Go for more. Out of the box. Beyond the good. I pray that God’s grace is a verb in their marriage and compels them to interrupt the world where they will live and love and serve…

Are they teaching you how to paint, my love

Suppressing the freedom of your art

Are they colouring inside the lines my love

Oppressing the love of your precious heart

Remember good is not always best, my love

There are times the Lord God deplores it

Rules are not always the way, my love

The devil will more than settle for it

So let your imagination go mad, my love

Throw shapes and shimmy and shake

Create the most seductive intrigue, my love

That no other human being could make

Yes, smash their lines to pieces, my love

Put your soul and this world’s at odds

Be an agitating provocation, my love

And the beauty of the wildness of God.”

THE COMPELLING VERB - BLOG SIZE SERMON

 

(click here to listen to the entire sermon)

Grammar is full of verbs. I googled and found:

Auxiliary verbs. Lexical Verbs. Dynamic Verbs. Stative Verbs. Finite Verbs. Non finite Verbs. Regular verbs. Irregular verbs. Transitive verbs. Intransitive verbs. Causative verbs. Copular verbs. Performative verbs.  

And I thought that it was simple - a verb was simply a “doing word”. 

My family are used to me making up words. Many conversations and I will just create my own adjectives or verbs. Some linger. I think some of my old staff still use “shadongadin” on eof my made up exclamations! 

This last weekend I created a new theological phrase - Grace; The Compelling Verb. At a recent Tearfund event I used John Mayer’s lyric “When you show me love/I don't need your words/Yeah love ain't a thing/Love is a verb/Love ain't a thing/Love is a verb.” I also used the tumble turn of the swimmer bringing out the double reflex of grace. As soon as you receive God’s grace you tumble turn into becoming a grace giver. (read that related blog THE DOUBLE REFLEX OF GRACE here...)

My current sermon series is based around Mark Greene’s book Fruitfulness On The Front Line. Greene has 6 Ms that he feels will make the Christian effective on the front lines of our lives. The third M is ‘ministering love and grace’. Greene points out that Jesus din’t have to give sight to the blind or heal the lame or feed the 5,000. He didn’t have to but grace compelled him. God didn’t have to be born in a manger, live among humans, die on a cross or be raised to life again. God’s grace was a compelling verb. 

So with the follower of Jesus. The double reflex, the fruit of the Spirit… we don’t have to… but grace is a compelling verb. Grace conjures two words; generosity and forgiveness. On our front lines, in family, work, neighbourhood and society we are connection with grace compels us to be generous and forgiving to all we meet and engage with.

Philip Yancey’s new book seems to me to be an important work for the time. He is suggesting that Christianity’s decline might be as a result of our lacking generosity and forgiveness. Here’s the blurb -  

How can Christians offer grace in a way that is compelling to a jaded society? And how can they make a difference in a world of such wrenching need? Vanishing Grace: Whatever Happened to the Good News is a milestone book for all those who are striving to make sense of their faith and live it out amid the changing landscape of our day. Philip explores how Christians may have contributed to hostility toward them by presenting the gospel in ways that come across as strident and judgemental. Then he explores what kind of news is good to a culture that thinks it has rejected the Christian version. And finally, he offers illuminating stories of how faith can be expressed in ways that disarm even the most cynical critics - through pilgrims, activists, and artists rather than through preachers, evangelists, and apologists. 

I will blog much more about Yancey’s book in the coming weeks. In the meantime let us live out the compelling verb of grace in all we do or say. Desmond Tutu has said, “Do your little bit of good where you are. It’s those bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.” Let’s do it! 

 

10:10 WORK; WORK IN ALL ITS FULNESS!

(This is a shortened form of last Sunday's sermon 10:10 Work, part 3 of a series called Fruitfulness On The Frontline based on Mark Greene's book of the same name... listen to my 10:10 Work sermon here)

If you haven’t seen the movie To End All Wars, I suggest you seek it out. Made about 2001 it starred Robert Carlyle and Kiefer Sutherland and was set in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in the latter half of there Second World War. It is a violent film but through humanity’s inhumanity to humanity there is another story of radical living that transforms that humanity.

The movie was inspired by the biography of Ernest Gordon who would later become Dean of Chapel at Princeton University. Gordon went into the war as an agnostic but left as a believer. He was influenced by two fellow prisoners, one a Methodist and the other a Catholic. With nothing other than the Bible the men start to read it and as they read it decide that it is a book that needs to be lived. As a result they decide that to love their enemies should mean that they work faster in their hard labour to build the Burma Railway. They finish it early and their putting their faith into their work transforms those who are being brutal to them. The movie ends with Ernest Young himself visiting a war memorial with one of the guards Takashi Nagase. As a result of the prisoner’s radical living, Takashi Nagase became a devout Buddhist devoting his life to missions of atonement to the River Kwai. 

Our human vocation as found in Genesis was to work for the flourishing of God’s creation - The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it (Genesis 2:15). While our human vocations were distorted in what Christianity terms The Fall Jesus came to restore it. The apostle Paul describes this in his letter to the Colossians: For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross (Colossians 1: 19-20).

The Christian’s vocation is now to be a resource for God to reconcile all things. later in that same letter to the Colossians Paul writes, “And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.”  Colossians 3: 17) The Christian’s vocation is  to do all of our work is a front line for the Kingdom breaking in. I call this 10:10 Work; a paraphrase of John 10:10, "life in all its fulness". It fires the imagination to see that work is not just a toil to get to pay day but is a vocational calling to reconcile the world to God. This should not only inspire our work but should make us a valuable resources to any workplace as we serve a higher calling in our everyday ordinary tasks. If it had an impact in a brutal prisoner of war camp, it can have an impact where we all are.

OFF TO WORK WE GO... EXCITED? ALERT TO THE POSSIBILITIES?

How keen were you to get up this morning? What did the day, or indeed the week, laid out ahead of you make you feel? Is work a chore or somewhere you were racing to get to? Where you head off to today is your front line or at least a major one in your life. 

I started a new series in Fitzroy on Sunday. I am keen to have a look at Mark Greene’s book Fruitfulness On The Frontline and bring into the congregation’s psyche Greene’s 6 Ms to fruitfulness; modelling Godly character, making good work, ministering grace and love, moulding culture, being a mouthpiece for justice and being a messenger of the gospel. There is a holistic nature to this that I really like.

Early on in his book Greene looks at where our front lines are and opens up the story of a young slave girl who is the cause of her master Naaman healing from leprosy. The story is found in 2 Kings 5 and is a story I remember from my childhood. Greene made me reassess it. Here is a young teenage girl who is literally taken into slavery in a foreign culture. She had every right to be angry and hostile to her captors. However, in this her front line she brings redemption and transformation. 

So wherever you are today? However you got there? Whatever you are doing there? Whoever it is you are with? Whatever the struggles within yourself? Even if it is not a place you were keen to go. It is your front line and is probably a much more positive scenario than this teenage girl, whose name we don’t even know, was in.

As I reflected on the story Greene opened up afresh to me, I found three words. How encouraging for the preacher to find one of our University students had written them on her hand during the sermon. Her mum thought she was being disrespectful doodling on her hand during the sermon. Instead she was being very respectful. Anyway, the three words, or Presbyterian points which I am not in the habit of modelling, are FAITH, GRACE, COURAGE. 

This teenage girl has enough faith to believe that her God could make a difference. She then showed incredible grace to love her captors who had taken her from her home and family to use her knowledge to bring healing to them. She then needed the courage to make the suggestion.

Today on our front lines, whether that is in work, among family, friends, in Church, volunteering or where the the day finds us, let us be alert to the opportunities to use our faith and God’s grace with courage to make seemingly ordinary contributions that heal others and leads them to an understanding of our God.

click to listen to the full sermon here

INTERRUPTIONS OF GRACE (Pt 2) - OUTSIDE OF KARMA

(part 2 of a series of blog size sermons from a series I did in The Cathedral Of The Advent in Birmingham, Alabama during Lent 2014 and repeated in McCracken Memorial, Belfast - you can listen to it at the bottom of the blog)

In Part 1 of this series we looked at Bono’s idea of interruptions of grace and how Jesus birth in Bethlehem was a grace interruption in the history of the world. In part 2 we see how Grace for Bono is an interruption of his very own life. 

That interruption is as a result of Jesus actions on the cross that first Good Friday. Bono has been singing about it for years. On 1981’s October album in a song called With A Shout (Jerusalem) - 

“I want to go, to the foot of Mount Zion
To the foot of He who made me see
To the side of a hill blood was spilt
We were filled with a love”

And again on 1987’s Joshua Tree in the song I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For - 

“You broke the bonds
And you loosed the chains
Carried the cross
Of my shame
Oh my shame
You know I believe it”

Then on 2001’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind there is a song actually called Grace -

“Grace

She takes the blame

She covers the shame

Removes the stain”

The cross of Christ is crucial to Bono’s belief about himself. This is where grace actually interrupts his own life. As he sings on that song Grace “she travels outside of karma.” To Michka Assayas Bono said,  “I really believe we’ve moved out of the realm of Karma and into one of Grace…You see at the centre of the all religions is the idea of Karma. You know, what you put out comes back to you: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, or in physics – in physical laws – every action is met by an equal or opposite one. It’s clear to me that Karma is at the every heart of the Universe. I’m absolutely sure of it. And yet, along comes this idea called Grace to upend all that, “as you sow, so will you reap” stuff. Grace defies reason and logic. Love interrupts, if you like, the consequences of your actions, which in my case is every good news indeed, because I’ve done a lot of stupid stuff…I’d be in big trouble if Karma was finally going to be my judge.

I’d be in deep shit. It doesn’t excuse my mistakes, but I’m holding out for Grace. I’m holding out that Jesus took my sins onto the cross, because I know who I am, and I hope I don’t have to depend on my own religiosity.”

That realisation that he shouldn’t depend on his own religiosity is identical to the apostle Paul’s understanding of himself and his need of a grace interruption. Philippians 3 particularly comes to mind - 

7 But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. 8 What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ 9 and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in[a] Christ—the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith. 10 I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, 11 and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead.

Paul like Bono came to trust God’s interruption of grace to make his relationship with God right again. Another rock star theologian, Marcus Mumford, has put this radical idea of grace succinctly in his song Roll Away Your Stone - 

“It seems that all my bridges have been burned,
But you say that’s exactly how this grace thing works
It’s not the long walk home that will change this heart,
But the welcome I receive with the restart”

Grace is not something you earn but something you are gifted by God.

There is more. Let us stay in this Philippians 3 passage and compare it to I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For. In that song after a succinct definition of redemption - 

“You broke the bonds
And you loosed the chains
Carried the cross
Of my shame
Oh my shame
You know I believe it”

Bono goes on - 

“I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”

That was a controversial phrase when Joshua Tree was released. How could a Christian claim he hadn’t found what he was looking for. Well a closer look at that Philippians 3 will tell you - 

“12 Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. 13 Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, 14 I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.”

Christians believe that Grace interrupts at the cross. It interrupts the Karma. It immediately changes our standing before God. We are welcomed at the restart. But it is only the restart. Grace interrupts our positional place before a Holy God. Grace also fuels the practical turning around of our lives. Grace then becomes the very constitution of the news Kingdom. 

“What once was hurt
What once was friction
What left a mark
No longer stings
Because Grace makes beauty
Out of ugly things.”

Listen to the sermon here...

 

INTERRUPTIONS OF GRACE (PT 1)... IN HISTORY

(part 1 of a series of blog size sermons from a series I did in The Cathedral Of The Advent in Birmingham, Alabama during Lent 2014 and repeated in McCracken Memorial, Belfast.)

Readers to this blog will know that I wrote a book on U2 (Walk On; The Spiritual Journey of U2 and have been quoting the band, and particularly their lead singer Bono, for thirty years! There is a resigned raised eyebrow every time I do! I used to apologise for such actions but more recently have come to acknowledge that I no longer quote Bono to grab attention but because he is a fine theologian; perhaps an amateur theologian but a theologian all the same.

I have become particularly fondness of his idea that grace interrupts. The poet or the songwriter have that way with words that can often just open up a concept in ways that are so insightful. In a book Bono In Conversation With Michka Assayas Bono says, “Grace defies reason and logic. Love interrupts, if you like, the consequences of your actions, which is in my case very good news indeed.” I want to connect that phrase with three big moments in the Gospels, three of the biggest moments in history in my opinion, and develop Bono’s phrase. 

In the first three chapters of Genesis we read an explanation for the default position of our world. The story goes that humans reached to be more than they are… and ended up less than they were created to be. They thought they could be God and ended up less than the fullness of their humanity. They lost their place, their purpose and their intimate relationship with God. 

Bono unpacks the implications of this event known in Christian theology as “the fall” by saying, “the idea that God says: ‘Look, you cretins, there are certain results to the way we are, to selfishness, and there’s mortality as part of the sinful nature, and, let’s face it, you’re not living a very good life, are you? There are consequences to actions.’”

History goes on with such implications and then grace interrupts. Bono tells a story about being back from a tour and going to a Carol Service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. In his tiredness he focuses on the events of the nativity in order to keep himself awake and gets a fresh perspective on this interruption of grace. He says, “The idea that God, if there is a force of Logic and Love in the universe, that it would seek to explain itself is amazing enough. That it would seek to explain itself and describe itself by becoming a child born in straw poverty, in shit and straw…a child… I just thought: “Wow!” Just the poetry … Unknowable love, unknowable power, describes itself as the most vulnerable. There it was. I was sitting there, and it’s not that it hadn’t struck me before, but tears came streaming down my face, and I saw the genius of this, utter genius of picking a particular point in time and deciding to turn on this.”

The word advent comes from the Latin word adventus, meaning "coming". It seems to me that Bono’s translation of the Greek as “interrupting” works! I have two images of that coming that describes the deeply felt impact at the core of the world when the baby hits the straw. The gentle meek bundle of baby arrives having flown across two terrains. 

The first is the hurtle through history. From a hint in Genesis chapter 3 that something would happen down the line The Word has been rocketing through all the millennia of history to become flesh. The second is that idea that in Graham Kendrick’s hymn, “from heaven you came helpless babe”. From somewhere way far out there God arrives in skin and bone like a heavenly meteorite hurtling!    

When the God of all the universe landed wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying softly on a bed of animal straw we should not be fooled by the gentleness of his arrival. In that moment the world shuddered. It was as if the God who filled the entire Universe squeezed his vastness into a tiny little piece of semtex explosive and hurtled it from the far end of the Universe like a meteorite that crashed into planet earth knocking it from the way things were to a hopefulness of the new way that it could be. 

Here, in the nativity we see this absurd almost crazy revolution; King of the Universe in some backstreet manger; the humility of God becoming a servant of his creation; a God of justice loving and welcoming in those whom he was at enmity with; the blessedness of the poor. 

The King of the day felt the tremor and sent his death squads to kill it at birth but on and on down through history this explosive thud has drawn people to turn the way things are on their heads and attempt to interrupt the status quo of the first being first and the last being last with a strange concept called grace. Suddenly there arrives this insane notion that no matter who we are or what we have done we are like the shepherds and Magi, welcomed, forgiven, redeemed, adopted, loved. It seems crazy but this grace interruption to history is our only hope! Remember the way Bono put it, “Grace defies reason and logic. Love interrupts, if you like, the consequences of your actions, which is in my case very good news indeed.”

Listen to the sermon here

 

THE PRAYER AND THE GLORY - JOHN 17

(in this series I blog size a sermon...this was last Sunday's...you can listen to it all in a link at the end...)

John 17. Jesus has done the final team talk before the big event to come. He now looks to heaven and prays for himself, the disciples around him and those of us who would believe in the future.  

There is one word that dominates this chapter and indeed is a crucial word in the entire Biblical canon - glory! Jesus is seeking to glorify God, be glorified, seeks that the disciples would finally see his glory. 

In his commentary on John, The Light Has Come, Lesslie Newbigin writes:

“Glory” is plainly one of the fundamental words of the Bible. It expresses that which is - so to speak - constitutive of God’s being and nature, and at the same time it denotes the honour which ought to be paid to God. BUT - and this is what the whole Gospel tells us - these two meanings are mutually bound together…”

So, from Newbigin’s exposition glory is a revelation of God and also the praise and honour we give to God.

Psalm 19 tells us, “The heavens declare the glory of God”. In Chronicles 16: 28 we are asked to, “Ascribe to the Lord, all you families of nations, ascribe to the Lord glory and strength.” Yet, the phrase that struck me most here in John was when Jesus says in verse 22, “I have given them the glory that you gave me… 

This is a sensational phrase. Jesus passes the glory that is the revelation and manifestation of who God is on to us, his followers. Jesus gives us the glory! Goodness! It opened up for me with clarity and power the most famous phrase in the Shorter Catechism, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever”. 

Humanity’s vocation is to live the image of God. That is the original intention of Eden and now that Jesus is glorifying God in his life, death and resurrection humanity can once more be displayers of God’s glory. Hence Paul will tell the Corinthians,  “So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God” and Jesus will tell his disciples, “In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.”

Jesus is not a prophet giving some advice about how to live by some middle class behavioural pattern. He is not just saying be nice to your neighbour. This is about the right to become children of God (John 1). Jesus is on about living life in all its fulness (John 10) about a new life from above (John 3). It is about having the glory of within us, living lives that reveal his grace and holiness and justice to the world. 

Listen to the entire sermon here...

 

 

 

 

 

FITZROY 200 - THE 4 KEYNOTE ADDRESSES

Last weekend Fitzroy celebrated 200 years of since its genesis and as we gave God thanks he hurled us into the future with like a full force gale, to quote the Van Morrison song sung at my installation into this history. There were four key note addresses over the weekend and I would love to recommend that you give all four of them a listen. They were challenging, inspiring and encouraging, all leaving us believing but aware of the correcting we all need to do!

I led off on Friday night and afterwards someone said it was the best they had ever heard me. I am not so sure but I certainly was challenged in my own soul as I looked at Jesus the Way. Yes, we reminded ourselves that Jesus life, death and resurrection is the way back to God, to salvation and ultimately heaven. There is much more though as that way is not something we wait for until we die. It begins now. In following Jesus. We took a little audit at what Jesus might say in our prayer meetings, BT addresses etc and how we connect with this generation and neighbourhood to guide them onto the way. What most challenged me was perhaps a too familiar verse, “But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” I have been wondering how much energy we are all spending on all the things that will be added and how much we are spending on the seeking God first. More to come on that.

hear Steve Stockman's Jesus - The Way here

On Saturday evening took on Jesus - The Truth. David is a world renowned academic with a marvellous mind and gift at communicating Christian truth amidst the intellectual challenges of the real world. David took on the two worldviews that are trying their hardest to shape us; scientific arrogance and postmodern anything goes. With well read knowledge, brilliant illustrations and a command of the Biblical context where Jesus said he was the truth David brought out that truth of Jesus as intellectual, incarnation, ethical and beautiful.

hear David Livingstone's Jesus - The Truth here...

On Sunday my predecessor Ken Newell opened up the idea of Jesus as the life. Ken is a wise spiritual sage who has in his own life prophetically lived out his faith on the streets of his city. He shared much of that journey, soon to be available in his Memoirs, and showed us what a life on fire is all about. It was a great challenge to live out the passion that God gives us. Northern Ireland has too many people with small ears and clenched jaws he said. How do we live Jesus peacemaking now. Again we were drawn back to two recurring Fitzroy themes these days - “word made flesh” and “life in all its fullness”.

hear Ken Newell's Jesus - The Life here...

Last, but far from least, Alain Emerson, pastor in Emmanuel Church in Lurgan and a leader in 24/7 Prayer. He is the new generation of young Church leaders, making Jesus as relevant today as he was down 200 Fitzroy years. Alain was my choice to take us out of celebration to the future, with particular reference to our youth. His Sunday night keynote was simply astounding. Alain came into a context he knew little about and set us on the next part of the journey with real Biblical insight and spiritual wisdom. How encouraging for the pastor when Monday morning’s Facebook was alive with quotes from the Sunday night’s talk. Alain took Numbers 13 and inspired us to be Moses, Caleb or Joshua, all generation running alongside each other as we build on the legacy of our past towards God’s desire for our future. “We can certainly do it!”

hear Alain Emerson's Building On A Legacy here...