SOUL SURMISE

Surmising Scandalous Grace Pt 4... Grace In The Mirror

Grace in the mirror! That is where I am going to concentrate for a moment to show that Grace has been confined to a doctrinal sentence rather than a living reality. When I worked as a Chaplain I became aware of the pressures on how students looked, particularly the girls but not exclusively so. It became very obvious very quickly that girls were taking a lot of time with hair straighteners and doing make up before they left their rooms. I don’t mean leaving the Hall, just their room. To go to the communal areas of the Residence where I lived with them meant as much work on how they looked as going to some formal event. When this effort was the same before we went on to a township building site on cold South African winter mornings while working with Habitat For Humanity. Why? My wife challenged my female students by asking that for the 24 hours before they came to a Girls Group they wouldn’t use straighteners or make up. No one made it! We haven’t even got on to fashion labels which adds more pressure and higher bills!

It is into this kind of world that I believe Grace should ease the pressure, liberate and turn the world upside down. When a young, or middle aged, or old, woman looks in the mirror in the morning does grace come out of its sentence and live in ways that change her life. Loved as you are!? Do we believe it. Magazine editors around the world and fashion houses and the cosmetic industries will bully us into what they want to define as “culturally” beautiful. Can grace interrupt such a pressure? Can we see ourselves as beautiful the way God made us and be content in the unconditional love that he lavishes on us. I know it is a huge ask but Jesus didn’t bring grace as just an idea or just a ticket to heaven. Jesus spoke and acted about this grace in such a way that the world and individual lives in it would be set free from the pressure of a first are first order of things! The psychologists tell us that our basic human needs are love and security. God’s grace brings us a love that is secure. It is not fickle like the world’s love. From its foundation a confidence will grow which will allow people to be part of the world transformation that God ultimately wants.

Grace is a scandal. It is also scandalous that Christians are walking around captive to a first are first world when liberation has been won and is at hand. Let’s set grace free to be part of every aspect of our living.

SURMISING SCANDALOUS GRACE Pt 3

(this is part 3 of a series called Surmising Scandalous Grace... reading part 1 and 2 might be helpful...) 

Surmising Scandalous Grace Pt 1

Surmising Scandalous Grace Pt 2

Last Sunday as I was preaching on this idea of scandalous grace I had two Scripture readings. The first was well known words from Ephesians 2: “But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, ⁵ made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. ⁶ And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, ⁷ in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. ⁸ For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— ⁹ not by works, so that no one can boast.^”  These verses are inspirational words; Paul’s most concise précis of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We can be reconnected with God not by our own religiosity, karma balance or good works. It is God’s unmerited favour, grace, that changes who we are.

My other reading was Jesus most imaginative parable that has become known as The Prodigal Son. In this story a son takes his chunk of his father’s inheritance and goes and blows it on “wild living.” Having wasted it all he found himself eating with the pigs he was looking after, the last place a Jewish boy would want to be, and thinks that his dad might give him a job as one of his servants. Heading home he must have wondered how his father would react; he deserved a darn good thrashing. When he saw his father running down the road towards him he must have expected the worst and yet his dad throws his arms around him and gives him a party. This is not as it should be. It is scandalous. That’s what his brother thinks who has been loyal and faithful to his father down the Prodigal’s wasted years.  

Ephesians is a concise theological explanation of grace. Jesus story of the Prodigal Son from Luke chapter 15 is a wonderful story of grace.  The entire Bible is obsessed grace from Genesis through Revelation. What I believe to be a scandal is that we have trapped grace in these readings. We have reduced it to a doctrine; perhaps the most important doctrine in the history of Protestant Christianity but doctrine all the same. We have reduced it to a story, even if the most magnificent story. As I pastor of a Church I am amazed that, although almost the entire congregation could define and even preach on grace, very few see it vibrantly alive in their everyday lives.

Grace is much more than a ticket into a relationship with God, important and all as that is. Grace is the key into the kingdom but also the energy of the Kingdom. It is grace that fires a different way to live; it is not a statement but a force. Grace is also the new life lived. We treat everyone in our lives the way God has treated us by his grace. Grace is not a fictitious story but the story we write in lives lived in this radical way. Every relationship and every decision is under the authority of God’s grace.

(part 4 will look at Grace as a living breathing life force...)

SOUL SURMISING A SCANDALOUS GRACE... Part 2

 

We live in a Graceless world. It is a world where the first are first and the last are last. And so it should be. It seems so sensible and rational and logical. If we score 95 in an examination and are given a fail we will take it to a tribunal and fight for justice. The first should be first! The cool are affirmed and accepted. The beautiful are sought after. The talented go far. If you are none of these things then, what are you expecting? A nerd fronting the world’s best rock band! Two left feet replacing Sergio Aguero in the Manchester City attack! A failure at GCSE getting accepted for a post grad in nuclear physics at Oxford! Come on! No, it is a world where the first are first and the last are last. So it should be. We love our graceless world.

Unfortunately such a world leads to inferiority complexes, insecurities, stress and anorexia, depression, self abuse, addictions and suicide! These mental illnesses are all a result of our failure to win in a world where the world are first. Even when the rare few reach first place many of them end up messed up because of the struggle to remain there. The rest of us, without a hope of first, end up in failed attempts to impress and a fakeness and shallowness that is hoping beyond hope that people never get to know what we are really like. We will struggle in the darkness of a world where everyone lives a constant struggle to be the first and avoid being the last; first are first screws us all up!

What if? What if there was another way; a very different way. What if there was a world where the last were first! What if there was a world where you were loved as you are; completely. What a revolutionary idea. What a radical concept. It is almost scandalous, there very thought of it; the scoundrel would get the prize. This other way is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. God loved us as we were and loved us so much that he demonstrated his love for us in this that while we were sinners Christ died for us. It will be very difficult place to get to with the default button that we humans begin with. It doesn’t seem how it should be. Yet, it is our only hope. It is our salvation. It is called Grace, it means unmerited favour and Jesus was born, lived, died and was raised to life in order that such an idea could become a reality. Loved as you are and loved in such a way that you can be made into who you could become. Wow!

SOUL SURMISING A SCANDALOUS GRACE – OUR ONLY HOPE... Part 1

It was on a recent night out in Belfast’s Cathedral Quarter that my heart sank in realisation at the tragic job that the Church has done with the Gospel Of Jesus Christ. I had been at a lovely meal with parents of the children in my daughter’s class at Primary School. I knew my half of the table very well but as I was leaving stopped at the other end to say hi. As it was a Saturday night and we were first to leave I explained what I did for a living and had to work the next morning. What do you do was a natural question and I answered, “I am a Presbyterian minister and I hope you are behaving yourself!” There was a ripple of laughter and then someone asked How I’d happened to get myself such a lovely assistant – I am used to these “how did someone like you get such a babe for a wife – and I answered, “Grace!” Within seconds I realised that that word would not demand immediate laughter. Attempting to leave this group with a chuckle and a one word précis of my entire Creed would largely fall on deaf ears as people asked what I meant by grace. I left not only deflated that my quick answer hadn’t got the laughing response but also gutted at the task before those of us given the responsibility of looking after this great truth.

I have the privilege of speaking at the weddings of many friends who are not “churched.” Having a Presbyterian minister as a friend means you can have someone who knows you in this most special of moments in your life. I always find it a challenge on such occasions to be true to my calling, which isn’t a City Hall Registry Officer, and to find ways to share my faith with friends of my friends without them wishing that they indeed were in the Registry Office. I always start such occasions with an apology for the plethora of reasons, acknowledging that many of them are legitimate, that have caused the guests to dismiss the Church as most of them have. I then ask them to patiently allow me to share a truth at the heart of Christianity that is worth hearing about. Applying it particularly to the couple getting married I give a few moments to the idea of Grace. People love it. They want it. They know they need it. The receptions afterwards are usually filled with people who want to chat about their experience of Church and the wonder of what I was talking about. More often than not at some stage of the conversation they say, “I would love to go to a Church like that.” Is there another kind? Sadly, yes!

It is hard to believe that we could have taken such a magnificent thought, that you are loved unconditionally just as you are, and have encrusted it with so much gracelessness that the world has turned its back on the very place where lies the secret to what the entire world is striving for. It is a truth that is pretty difficult to mess up but boy have we done a cracking job on doing just that.  

SURMISE FOR THE DAY - A SECRET TO PEACEMAKING

 

It was one of those sentences that you know as it finishes you will never forget. It was a sentence that prophetically cut through the way things were with the key to unlocking how things could instead be. As it ended I felt that I was standing on sacred ground. We were in JL Zwane Church in Guguletu, Cape Town, and Rev. Dr. Spiwo Xapile the minister was talking to my students about the anti-apartheid movement and the process of reconciliation. Spiwo said, “Every day I wake up and I thank God that I am a Christian, South African and black... because that means that every day I get a chance to forgive my enemies.” Wow! To a group of Northern Ireland students this was almost mind blowing. In Northern Ireland we wake up every morning and thank God that we are British, white, middle class and Protestant... so that every day we can ask our Catholic neighbour to repent!

Spiwo’s morning prayer is one that gives hope of peace and reconciliation. Ours is one that perpetuates the sectarian division and hate. There is a humility about Spiwo’s and a self righteous arrogance about ours. There is a powerful verse of Scripture in the Old Testament book of Second Chronicles. The people of God are told that if they “humble themselves and pray, seek my face and turn from their wicked ways I will hear from heaven and will heal their land.” This verse was used many, many times during the Northern Ireland Troubles as a call to prayer. The humility and turning from our wicked ways were conveniently lost in the equation as we blamed the Catholics for all the problems and demanded that they repented. That is no formula for shalom or God’s Kingdom in Northern Ireland as it is in heaven. We need to humbly confess our part. We need to be robust in our repentance and then as Dr. Xapile, and so many black South Africans like him, have modelled for us to be quick in the tender forgiving of those that society has deemed our enemies.

STOCKI SURMISES PRAYER, WOODY GUTHRIE, BILLY BRAGG AND SOCIETAL PEACE IN N.IRELAND

The third Mermaid Avenue album has just been released. This is a series of records where Billy Bragg and Wilco take the lyrics of Woody Guthrie that were never turned into song and... make them into song. One of the songs on the new release is called Union Prayer and it provoked some surmising in my soul. The suggestion is that Guthrie would pray until his knees were sore if he thought prayer could change the world giving black people votes and stopping the lynchings among many other injustices of the pre Civil Rights America mentioned in the song. It seems that Guthrie is not convinced in the prayer route.

I don’t think though that the song is anti prayer or anti Christian. Guthrie’s music in songs like Jesus Christ and Christ For President showed a real reverence for Jesus and Christianity but just as Guthrie critiqued society he also critiqued Christianity. Guthrie is suggesting that prayer without action is a questionable notion. I believe that God does answer prayer, at times without our help, but I do sympathise with Guthrie’s judgement. Every time I pray “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” I believe that my life after I say Amen is to live my life to answer that prayer. My prayers need a commitment to help God answer them.

I have been having conversations about a new prayer venture to pray for societal healing here in N. Ireland. We have a political peace but societal peace is still a long way off. We need to not be complacent in our political peace but to use it is an opportunity to do something more foundational to our society. As a few of us chat about a prayer venture we are keen not to send a message out that we are piously begging God from within safe walls of Churches rather than being involved in the making of that peace. The Churches have been a poor contributor to anything called reconciliation in N. Ireland and we want something robust in missional intent as well as spiritual discipline.

For sure we should be on our knees to pray but we need to get up off our knees to be the salt and light of the world that Jesus called us to be, God’s conduits to bringing the prayers we pray to reality.

SURMISE FOR THE DAY - The Importance Of Listening

Yesterday afternoon my wife and I decided to make an appointment with the vet about an enflamed wound on our dog’s leg. She went out to make the call and then left to pick up the children from school. While she was out our phone rang. When I lifted it, it was a call back. Panicking I realised that this was Janice’s call to the vet and quickly decided what to say. The receptionist answered and I told her that my wife was trying to make an appointment for our dog but had gone out and she would have to phone back later. When my wife came in I told her about the call but she found it puzzling as she had gotten through to the vet. Then she realised that the ring back was from... the dentist! AHH!!! We laughed! When Janice rang back the dentist, the receptionist laughed!

Yet, there is a profound lesson in the succession of events that left me red faced. If I hadn’t been so concerned about what I was going to say to the vet when the receptionist answered the phone, I would have heard the receptionist tell me loud and clear that I was through to a dental practice. I hadn’t listened. In not listening I got everything I said wrong.

In the business I am in, of ministry and pastoral care, listening is such an important thing. I can prepare all the fancy theology and exegesis imaginable but if I don’t listen I might be getting it all wrong and embarrassing myself in the process. Speaking to the students in Union Theological College this morning I was sharing the importance of incarnation. Jesus modelled that the most effective way to share the good news or be light in the dark or bringing God’s Kingdom is by moving into neighbourhoods, dwelling among people; listening. As we attempt to bring God’s good news we need to listen for what the questions are, where people are, what the concerns of the neighbourhood are and then apply the Word of God to what we hear. Presence and listening the first two important steps to God’s will being done on earth as it is in heaven.

A CITY FAN THE MORNING AFTER; TRYING TO FIND HOPE

My sermons over the last few weeks have been looking at hope. One of the many threads has been that before you can hope for something you need to have something to hope in. That in essence is the problem with supporting Manchester City. When you have not been used to winning for forty years and, worse than that have been used to snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, it actually ruins your enjoyment of current success. Last season when we took the lead against Manchester United in the FA Cup semi-final I couldn’t get excited. I was used to excitement turning to utter misery and the feeling is so painful it was better not to cheer. Of course I stood up more relieved than elated at the Final whistle but I couldn’t get over excited as we still had to play Stoke City in the Final and again we could snatch defeat... As a result that FA Cup success, long waited for, kind of passed me by. And so last night. Kompany’s goal only added to the possible disappointment and when we move into the inevitable FIVE minutes of Sir Alex’s injury time, even though United haven’t had a shot at goal, I was just waiting... Nights like this should be full of exuberant exultation but it is caught up in deep pessimism. It is hard to hope for something when history gives you nothing to hope in.

Part of me wishes for the old days when if we were mid table just now and had beaten United twice in the season we would be chest out and head held high. That was all we used to hope for. Now we have beaten them, are above them, and still with two games left we can easily lose it. Newcastle away has always been the game that I think is the biggest test. Smarting from losing to Wigan they will want to do something against Chelsea on Wednesday and us at home on Sunday. United have two easy games against two teams who are on summer holidays. Even QPR will be trying harder in that last game with Barton, Onuoha and Wright-Phillips, never mind ex-manager Mark Hughes, trying to keep their team up and prove a point. Objectively it is still United’s to win and subjectively it is a nightmare for those of us with our forty year history.

However, last night saw a huge change in City’s history. We might still lose out this season BUT there will be other opportunities. We are getting too close to not cross the line soon. What I am hoping in is Sir Alex Ferguson’s face and his decision making last night. I have never seen him look so nervous, almost so adjusted to defeat. The team he chose was also a sign that Mancini’s mind games caused the mighty Sir Alex to blink first. I said on another blog that United’s strength at the moment is the number of match winners they have but their weakness is a midfield that is dependent on their late thirty somethings. Packing the midfield last night at the cost of the match winners meant that United didn’t have one shot on target. If it was a battle in midfield then I am sorry but last year’s battle with Scholes proved that Ya Ya is at this stage maybe the best midfield player in the country and a man who retired last season was not going to dominate him. Giggs was never a threat and Gareth Barry was superb. To play Park and Smalling was a risk I’d never seen Sir Alex do; the great manager played into City’s hands. It sends a positive message out across the city and it noisies up the neighbours!

So United have blown it until now. Can they blow it in the last two games. City’s run in is tough but we would hope that next season we will have a Premier run in, an FA Cup Final and a Champions League Final (against United would be nice). To win the treble you need to win three big Finals. City have one down. If they win the next two and we do win this title it could set in motion a few years that might allow me to enjoy a triumph. We might build something to believe in. I will cautiously watch from behind the sofa!

THE TITANIC; A PROTESTANT OR CATHOLIC STORY?

After the intensity of all of our Titanic commemorations I am still mulling over the vast array of stories that I took, and continue to take, in. One of the things that has lingered with me has been the Titanic’s lesson of pointing out the error of Northern Ireland’s too simplistic caricature of our green/orange divide.

A Catholic priest friend had been sharing with me how difficult it was for him to excite his parish to attend a City wide commemoration in St. Anne’s Cathedral. The sense was that this ship was built by Protestants in Protestant East Belfast so why would Catholics from West Belfast be interested. This came out again a couple of days later on local TV news when someone from West Belfast was campaigning to have a street named in commemoration of a bomb that went off there in the Troubles. His argument was that this was to West Belfast what the Titanic was to “the other side.” The Caricature is simple. Titanic is a Protestant story.

I would argue that our divisions are much messier and blurred and indeed less divided! Fair play to the Irish Independent newspaper for highlighting the messiness of this particular caricature with a wonderfully produced Titanic supplement last weekend. The Irish Independent’s magazine concentrated on the Irish who were lost or who survived the disaster. What this did was make me realise that though the Triumph of the building of the Titanic was mainly an Ulster “Protestant” thing, the Tragedy of the Titanic was mainly an Irish “Catholic” thing. As I trailed through statistics trying to find Belfast people caught up in the ship’s sinking I came up with very few names; not many more than the nine from Harland and Wolff all there on business. The island of Ireland’s Titanic, story after it left Thompson Dock to sail to Southampton, is a different story altogether. It is a century’s old Irish story; immigration. When the Titanic docked at Cobh, County Cork to take on passengers, on April 11, 1912, 113 Irish people boarded the ship, most seeking a new life in America. Of those 73 perished.

As Ulster Catholics dismiss the Titanic as a Protestant story on the north east edge of the island, the Irish President is commemorating the Irish loss on Titanic in the south west edge of the island. One of the issues that everyone on the island of Ireland needs to come to terms with is the messiness of our history. It is not as easily divided as the caricature would like to prejudice. The Pope celebrated King Billy’s victory at the Boyne, Presbyterians were vibrant contributors to the United Irishmen, Presbyterians kept the Irish language alive when it was in danger of dying and the All Ireland Gaelic Football Cup is named after a Protestant! Like the Titanic story, most of the stories of the last 800 years are not divided neatly into the stories of one side or the other. Most of Ireland’s history is “our” story. It is messier and more mongrel-like than the thoroughbreds of sectarianism would want us to believe.  It is a riddled with injustice, violence and deep pain. It is a history that needs contributions of repentance and forgiveness. Most of all we need to peek out over our caricatured history to gain a truer, more honest perspective.  

SURMISING THOSE WHO GAVE UP FACEBOOK FOR LENT

Last night saw a quere clatter (Ulster Scots for alot) of people signing off Facebook for Lent. Such a decision has written right through it the idea that Facebook is bad for your soul or a waste of time, time that could be spent doing more Christian things. For those who took that decision I would like to say, gently but with real conviction, “BAD DECISION!” Indeed, I would suggest that it is spiritually a bad decision. In essence it is cutting yourself off from a friendship with me and your other Facebook friends. I feel snubbed by that decision. Hurt almost. I don’t think it helps our lives to be even more cut off than a busy modern world already makes us. Facebook is an avenue for friendship, relationship and conversation, like the workplace, Church, the golf club, the cafe or the pub. Facebook for me has been a rich source of joy, fun, lol, news about mates new and old, interesting information, provocative quotes and stimulating conversation and debate. If everyone gave it up for Lent my life would be spiritually impoverished. We all play our part.

To me, giving up Facebook for Lent is a sign that its real identity has been mistaken. Facebook is not some computer gadget, gimmick or game; it is a means to communicate. The people who are giving it up for Lent are saying that they will still be available on email and phone. That suggests that Facebook is the newest fangled fad and we’re going back to the more authentic forms of communication. But few are giving up the phone for Lent or conversation with other humans. Thus I conclude that people do not see Facebook as a conversational resource.

You can tell that I love Facebook. I do. It has given me the opportunity in a very busy life to stay in touch with a vast array of people that I would never otherwise been able to stay in touch with. I have been able to find friends who I haven’t even seen for thirty five or forty years and had some serious conversations with them. I have been able to stay in touch with people all over the world that I could never have stayed close to. I have been able to just hang in to friendships that would have been long lost. I have picked up new songs and new books. I have been pointed to great articles and stimulating quotations. I have had some real banter about sport. I have been able to congratulate people and see friends’ new babies and wedding photos. I have been able to pastor hurting friends. I have been able to get involved in some great debates. I have just been able to say hi now and again.  It also gives me the chance to multitask. I can prepare a sermon and be in touch with friends as I do so. I can be at home watching a soccer match and chat away to friends. I can use the unfriendly hours of the day around 11-midnight to have meaningful discussions. Facebook is an amazing resource to do what humans are at their most human in doing; communicating.

I hope those who gave this conversation up for Lent gain more than they have given up. Unlike chocolate, drink or Football Manager you lose something special, if not to you then to others, and if the benefits gained outweigh the benefits given up then fair play! I and others will sit here feeling rejected and cut off in the meantime!

for more serious surmising on Facebook check out these articles from a Conference address I gave on the benefits and how to use Facebook..

ECARNATION PT 1; The Need For Heightened Discipleship

Ecarnation Pt 2; Making The Most of Every Opportunity