Revising Reform

Collections of thoughts for a future blog post

noreply@blogger.com (Revisingreform) — Wed, 06 Dec 2023 21:54:00 +0000

In short, I had always believed that the world involved magic: now I thought it perhaps involved a magician. – G.K. Chesterton

The horizontal and the vertical

noreply@blogger.com (Revisingreform) — Thu, 02 Jan 2020 16:58:00 +0000

As I was writing this sermon this week (Nov 2019), my husband and I began our traditional and seasonal debate about the atmosphere:- not extinction rebellion heat but a little verbal heat generated over the lack of heat. My husband, Henryk, is always warm and I am always cold, so as I sat writing this in thermals with the fire on and a woolly jumper, he sat over the other side of the room with a rosy glow saying ‘it’s so hot in here.’

“But I am cold.” “But I am hot” and so the traditional, seasonal (because not summer) debate about the atmosphere begins in my house, and will continue til about March. But I had been reading Romans 12 so I switched off the fire at his request – he looked surprised that I had given way so quickly… he didn’t realise I’d been reading Romans 12...

So let us pray, holding a moment of silence, before I read God’s word to us, that we would be so captured by Paul’s words about sacrifice and unity, that Christ, through us and in us, might change the atmosphere of our worship, as we offer ourselves to Him in praise and he offers himself to us through his Word. Pause.

A reading from the New testament and Paul’s letter to the church in Rome, chapter 12: verses 3-8.

3For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you. 4 For just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, 5 so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. 6 We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us. If your gift is prophesying, then prophesy in accordance with your faith; 7 if it is serving, then serve; if it is teaching, then teach; 8 if it is to encourage, then give encouragement; if it is giving, then give generously; if it is to lead, do it diligently; if it is to show mercy, do it cheerfully. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

And of course, I would say, following on from how I began today, something about a function to keep warm, lacking in me (“more grace, Lord – more of your distribution”!) given in abundance to the person I am married to... and I began today sharing with you a little about the sacrifice I made in switching the heating off for him.

In Luke’s Gospel (9.23), Jesus talks about how we are to take up our cross and deny ourselves. ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. And then Paul, our writer today, echoes that command in verse one, just before our reading, saying present yourselves to God as living sacrifices (12.1) … this is your spiritual worship.

I wonder what you imagine when you think about self-denial and sacrifice. Perhaps you don’t think about worship. Perhaps you don’t think about switching the heating off. On Monday we commemorated all those who make the ultimate sacrifice – at 11am on the 11th day of the 11th month.

Today, those who sacrifice everything for Christ, are our modern day martyrs for the faith and we hear about them through organisations such as Open Doors.

But ours will more often be a ‘living sacrifice’ - Verse one of chapter 12 of Romans asks that we present ourselves as living sacrifices because this is our spiritual worship.

My children, who are 17 and 15, were deeply moved a couple of years ago at the New Wine summer gathering, hearing from Hea Woo who spoke to them about how whilst she was in a North Korean prison, worshipped God in the toilet block, in a place so foul the guards would never come. The pleasing aroma of spiritual worship, when the place utterly stinks. How good is God that something so beautiful rose up to him? He can see our hearts.

And perhaps we imagine her on her own, in the few moments she is not observed by prison staff, grabbing five minutes on the loo to connect with God; to sing his praises, to cry out to Him in prayer but no – she invited as many people as she could into that toilet block and planted a church there.

You see a problem we have is that when we imagine ourselves caught up in the spiritual heights of worship, sometimes we imagine ourselves alone or think preciously about those moments of real God-centredness, guarding them from being interrupted by other people.

There have been people in Christian history who decided that self-denying, sacrificial worship looked like isolation – looked like not inviting other people into the loo block.

In the 5th century, after Christ, there were individuals like Symeon of Antioch who lived high up on a small platform on a pole in the sky which he would make taller year on year as he further removed himself away from ordinary people, and particularly women, whom he’d shout at from his great height. Ironically, in his attempt to get away, he attracted bigger and bigger crowds and often won after him other pillar saints who thought this the best way they could worship Christ. (5 mins)

Then there is Anthony who took himself off into the desert, washing only at Easter. You see whilst Hea Woo had smelly conditions, the people she welcomed into that small space were a pleasing aroma before God – a living sacrifice but Anthony (well, some write well of him) but in keeping others far away, did not really live out what Paul describes here In Romans 12 as sacrificial, spiritual worship.

You see what Paul tries to teach us is that worship is as much about the horizontal axis (the one another) of the cross, as it is the vertical (and God). We need to restore our understanding of the word spiritual because the culture these days also tells us that being spiritual also looks like removing yourself from the ordinary things and ordinary people of your life. I would even put it to you that mindfulness, very popular, is less about Paul’s renewal of the mind and overly focussed on what’s on our minds – not as ‘other focussed’ as it might be in terms of Paul’s teaching here about our focus on God and our focus on others.

Paul comes to tell us today that our sacrifice of praise; our spiritual worship is all about other people and far less about any solitary, though well-meaning spiritual pursuit. Sacrificial worship, truly spiritual worship is about the local church and coming together with the smelly and the lovely; the ordinary and the glamorous; the pained and the painful and worshipping together. And that calls for self-denial and sacrifice.

And that is what we find so hard; I find hard.

This (points up) is not so hard, after all. He accepts me completely, loves me so much he sent his Son to die for me, like the father in the parable, runs after me, hitching up his robes to come and get me when I am prodigal, even before I say sorry. He leaves the 99 to find me – but you – will you do that for me? And will I do that for you? Will I give up my preferences, my taste in worship music, my means of encounter. And will you give up that for me?

Because, brothers and sisters, this is what the Lord asks us to do and it is not easy. This is worship.

The first 11 chapters of Romans teach you your doctrine, but you know, you can learn that from books and podcasts and study; you can learn a lot of that on your own but when Paul talks to us about worship – how we please God; how we worship God - it’s all about how we relate to Him and to others in relationship. And relationship with others in the local church at worship.

And yet how many times, do we go home muttering: “The band – I wasn’t sure this morning – and the sermon – too long, too short, too serious, not serious enough... the biscuits - soggy, the coffee luke-warm and there were crumbs on the seat I was sitting…”

But the biscuit meant a lot to the mum of a toddler. It was an act of mercy. The coffee less hot because a significant conversation took place before it got to the counter; a much needed word of encouragement. And the preacher’s message at that meh moment for you, spoke in ways to another, the weight of which the preacher could never have seen coming; in fact was prophetic in a way only God and that person knew.

Paul wants us to understand, as he writes to the Corinthians too (with a simple sentence that has spoken hugely to me over the years (1 Cor 11:33) :- “Brothers and sisters, when you come together….wait for one another” because we know we need each other really, deep, deep down, we know it and so Paul writes to teach us how to worship with one another, alongside one another, giving thanks for one another as the local church at worship and waiting, being patient with one another; waiting because we wait to encounter God in one another; waiting because we have grace for one another; waiting because we have learnt not to think more highly of ourselves – waiting because it’s God altogether we are worshipping and God knows our hearts.

Paul has spoken to us before this passage today about the renewal of our minds; the renewal of our thinking and, as we know, we have to welcome the Holy Spirit for our thinking to get changed – the Holy Spirit even the medics will confess, with their studies of the brain in prayer, God can literally change the synapses– not just your heart and your character but your mind. This is the true mindfulness we are to cultivate (10 mins) that’s what helps us to welcome one another.

Paul’s words to us rewire us if we let the Holy Spirit teach us. Everything begins at the level of your thought-life and that is what makes the Gospel such very good news – God can change our very hardware and make us new. And so Paul begins at verse 3 talking about our thinking. How we are to think of ourselves and really he says with much repetition of the word “think”, as if to underline the point – think of yourself not more highly than you ought to think but think of yourself with sober thinking.

Think, think, thinking because Paul prays our thinking is renewed – our minds our renewed – and to what is our thinking to be aligned – one another! As well as God. Paul reminds us that we belong to the body of Christ but shocking, I think, because I don’t think it had dawned on me til now -in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.

In our liturgy after breaking bread at the table we say: We break this bread to share in the body of Christ and the congregation reply. Though we are many, we are one body but I think we are all imagining, still, that body that is Christ’s and being one with him rather than being one with each other. And this again, is difficult, Christ’s perfect body, sacrificed for you and for me, brought to radiant life in resurrection on the third day but your body and my body and perhaps you, like Anthony, or I, only have an annual bath and being part of that one body with you and you with me and caring for the health of that body, that means for me and for you a little self-denial and sacrifice, right? It means my acknowledging your gifting and you acknowledging mine, your measure of grace and my measure of grace and thanking God for it even when it doesn’t suit my preferences and taste.

Paul’s words also help me take my place in this body to which I am joined as a member – this body that is the local church that is also the body of Christ – it calls me to acknowledge that God knows exactly what he has done with us all – he has given us all gifts, every single one of us - and the gifts are neither something to boast about, as if they came up from within us somehow independently of Him, nor are they something to hide in a kind of mock humility because each of these attitudes takes glory away from the giver.

God gave you your gifts – and you are not to hide them or you hide him - you are to use them for the benefit of the whole body - prophesying in relation to your faith; ministry in all sorts of ways; teaching and preaching and encouraging and counselling and guiding and giving and helping, each in your own unique way. Everyone here has a grace given; faith given to serve the church. God has assigned you your gifts – measuring them out as he sees fit.

Tim spoke a while back about how everything you have been given belongs to the Lord and took you to the image of the field and how a margin was to be kept around it because produce grown there belonged to God to give away. Out of your farmland, your income, your abundance (for we all have something) God, through each of us, gets to give away – ‘blessed to be a blessing’ your strapline – is about this giving of yourself away.

With our worship, the stakes get even higher – it’s not just a margin – it’s the whole of you offered to Christ and offered to your neighbour too – both axes of the cross.

And this can happen as we welcome the renewal of the mind and think right – think about the body to which we belong and give up some of our preferences for the sake of our neighbour and remember that our worship is as much about the horizontal axis and one another as it is about the vertical and God.

It is about coming together and honouring our neighbour and speaking well of one another and our leaders and those who serve because each person does so with the sincerity of their function being gift, grace, a measure of faith given them by God. When we dishonour them, we dishonour God.

CS Lewis, in his essay The Weight of Glory’ writes about how ‘The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbour’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it...’

In the church where I worship, as in yours, are we carrying that burden of our neighbour’s glory, in our worship of God? Are we able to lay down our own preferences so that our neighbour might meet with God? (15 mins).

C S Lewis goes on to say, ‘Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses.’ And so, it is striking because it has to be, that Paul should underline for us, that we are members one of another. You might not worry too much about sharing the body that is Christ’s but are you making room, am I making room, for every member to play its part in the body that lives when we come together – are we comfortable being a body?

Are we waiting; are we prepared to wait for grace to continually change us and change our neighbour, are we at peace that it is God who should so measure out his grace that some serve in one way and some serve in another and not everything is always to our taste?

B B Warfield, an American theologian and academic helps me to communicate this paradox at the heart of Romans 12:3-8 – yes, we are to make room for our neighbour but this is not at the detriment of ourself and our gifts. I often speak of the image of a candle lit, which when lighting another, doesn’t cause the first candle to be put out – both can burn together.

Warfield writes to correct any strange notion we might have attached to our offering a living sacrifice: ‘it is not to mere self-denial that Christ calls us… not to unselfing ourselves (you get to be you, don’t hide), but to unselfishing ourselves. (Let me read that again: it is not to mere self-denial that Christ calls us… not to unselfing ourselves, but to unselfishing ourselves.) Warfield goes on to say, “Self-denial for its own sake… narrows and contracts… may make monks and stoics (like my Symeon of Antioch on his precarious pole and Anthony in the desert) - it cannot make Christians’ Warfield says.

I think then this American theologian of the last century helps. The body of Christ when offering spiritual worship offers worship attentive to God and attentive to neighbour and so reflects the greatest commandment of all to love God with heart, soul, strength and mind and our neighbour as ourself.

May we be those so carefully attentive to the atmosphere of worship, renewed in our thinking, so we might not think too highly of ourselves; may we give thanks to God for the gift and gifts of one another and trust that God is pleased by this, our spiritual worship. Amen.

Counter-counter cultural Mothering Sunday

noreply@blogger.com (Revisingreform) — Tue, 13 Mar 2018 11:22:00 +0000

Proverbs 3:1-12, 21-24 1My child, never forget the things I have taught you. Store my commands in your heart. 2 If you do this, you will live many years, and your life will be satisfying. 3 Never let loyalty and kindness leave you! Tie them around your neck as a reminder. Write them deep within your heart. 4 Then you will find favour with both God and people, and you will earn a good reputation. 5 Trust in the Lord with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding. 6 Seek his will in all you do, and he will show you which path to take. 7 Don’t be impressed with your own wisdom. Instead, fear the Lord and turn away from evil. 8 Then you will have healing for your body and strength for your bones. 9 Honour the Lord with your wealth and with the best part of everything you produce. 10 Then he will fill your barns with grain, and your vats will overflow with good wine. 11 My child, don’t reject the Lord’s discipline, and don’t be upset when he corrects you. 12 For the Lord corrects those he loves, just as a father corrects a child in whom he delights. 21 My child, don’t lose sight of common sense and discernment. Hang on to them, 22 for they will refresh your soul. They are like jewels on a necklace. 23 They keep you safe on your way, and your feet will not stumble. 24 You can go to bed without fear; you will lie down and sleep soundly.

Ephesians 4:4-7, 11-16 There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, 6 one God and Father of all, who is over all, in all, and living through all. 7 However, he has given each one of us a special gift through the generosity of Christ. 11 Now these are the gifts Christ gave to the church: the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, and the pastors and teachers. 12 Their responsibility is to equip God’s people to do his work and build up the church, the body of Christ. 13 This will continue until we all come to such unity in our faith and knowledge of God’s Son that we will be mature in the Lord, measuring up to the full and complete standard of Christ. 14 Then we will no longer be immature like children. We won’t be tossed and blown about by every wind of new teaching. We will not be influenced when people try to trick us with lies so clever they sound like the truth. 15 Instead, we will speak the truth in love, growing in every way more and more like Christ, who is the head of his body, the church. 16 He makes the whole body fit together perfectly. As each part does its own special work, it helps the other parts grow, so that the whole body is healthy and growing and full of love.

Matthew 28:16-20 The Great Commission: 16 Then the eleven disciples left for Galilee, going to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. 17 When they saw him, they worshiped him—but some of them doubted! 18 Jesus came and told his disciples, “I have been given all authority in heaven and on earth. 19 Therefore, go and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. 20 Teach these new disciples to obey all the commands I have given you. And be sure of this: I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

Happy Mothering Sunday. (All Together worship 11.03.2118)

How inclusive is the church? How radical? How counter-cultural?

The world marks Mother’s Day and perhaps rightly so, mothering over the centuries has failed to receive the attention it deserves; it’s a tough vocation but today the church enlarges our view of family; is boldly radical where a Mother’s Day is not.

Ultimately, we all know the brokenness and the nurture of wonderful and also very imperfect earthly parents (I am a an imperfect mum to my two) but God fathers us with a perfect love and the church will nurture us, like a mother, into His love, if we let her, if we, as church, pray for the discernment and common sense of the book of Proverbs; as we show loyalty to our church here and are kind to one another. I love the lines about wearing loyalty and kindness around our necks like a necklace in Proverbs; about how common sense and discernment are jewels we can add there. This is why as I speak today there is an activity for the children who are invited to thread the beads you have been given so they might become reminders of today's message; that we are to build family here sure that God's love is perfect but the church, full of human beings, will often be a very imperfect kind of parent. We are the church. We are not perfect. May those beads also remind all of us that we are to simply apply here - loyalty to our church (we speak well of her and one another), kindness (which we can show to one another) and that as we grow and seek to fulfil God's mission through us, we are not being asked to do anything more, really, than use our discernment and common sense; that when the vicar seems to have a good idea, it's right to challenge that idea, that we adapt, take risks and listen to one another as we venture into the new.

Mothering Sunday comes to re-tune our ideas about family. Jesus came to challenge our conventional views about family – kept blood family waiting outside when they made demands of him and exploited their kinship bonds. "These, who do the will of my Father, are my mother, brothers and sisters," he said and he continued to sit with the crowds.

In that most famous of scripture for Mothering Sunday he hands John to his mother Mary and Mary to his beloved disciple John and creates a new kind of family.

Jesus challenges convention so that our definition of family here as church might know no bounds.

The book of Proverbs educates us as children. If you haven’t read it, it is full of wise guidance in pithy sayings which can be applied to your daily life, better than any parental help book as God nurtures us, his children.

Today, then, we are invited to think about the mothering of the church and the fathering of God. How here together as family, loved by the Father and trained by the mother church we can all grow in kindness and loyalty, in common sense and discernment. These seem like quite ordinary gifts but in many ways they are the making of a community: loyalty to our church here, kindness to one another, common sense as we journey forwards and discernment as we work out who God is calling us to become.

We are invited after Jesus to yearn to grow family, in whatever configuration we find it, by calling it home to mother church and into the love of the father and the disciples shared this yearning with us. In the New Testament Paul describes his discipling of others in terms of becoming a parent to them (1 Cor 4) – I became your parent in Christ Jesus. In Galatians 4 he speaks of being in labour awaiting our development as Christians; addresses those growing in God as my little children. In the first letter to the Thessalonians he describes how he will bring the gospel to these Christians gently as a mother might nurse her children; at other times, perhaps with a little human impatience he describes how some still need the message as formula, first foods or breast milk when really by now they should be on solids. I think if we are going to join with God in his mission to make more disciples for himself there are various strategies required, different approaches depending on the people we hope to win for him.

We continue to think through as church how we grow people new and old in God here and want to always hear your ideas. As we hear from our gospel today the first thing we do is baptise. Verses 19 and 20. This I where we understand that rather than ‘blood being thicker than water ,’ which is often what we say to sure up our familial connections with one another, instead, and to the contrary, ‘water’ might be said to be ‘thicker than blood’ – or in other words family is formed in the church by our shared 'dying to the old self and rising to the new' under the water (sprinkled over us in our denomination at baptism and usually when we are infants). Family is formed in the church through our connection, our being flooded; our sharing in the waters of life; the waters which are the life giving waters of the Holy Spirit. We all swim in the same stuff, drink from the same life-giving streams and so are connected.

The prophet Isaiah pictures Zion as a mother and Paul describes the church as a mother in Gal 4. If the church is our mother and disciples us this lifts the pressure off our each going and discipling in our own sometimes erratic and ebbing strength and it encourages us to seek out the church; this mother and help her in her purpose. We let All Saints be our discipler, our source of life – there are still places on our discipleship course The Creed course and the Alpha course – you might think of signing up.

A Christian Mothering Sunday, unlike a secular Mother’s Day, celebrates that the church is our source of nourishment; a place intent on our flourishing.

Is church a central part of your life; your mother?

Is this a very distinct kind of family for you, not first and foremost because of your relationships with others here, which are important but because you come here to seek nourishment and then participate in your own discipling and are nurtured into the perfect parenting of God? Can you think again today, after Jesus, about what family means in God? We are going to be helped to think this through in our prayers today too.

We are not supposed to be detached from our mother or grow up and away from this mother? We don’t leave home; the learning is ongoing because knowing about and knowing God is a lifetime process. The church will never stop being our mother until we come to the full measure and stature of the fullness of God as Paul tells us in Ephesians (4) and that will only happen in glory and so this is life-long. This family and this relationship, though it changes because its people change and you change, is one of constant nurturing.

St Cyprian of the third century said “You cannot have God for your Father if you do not have the Church for your mother....”

If that’s how Christ configures the church then we become family to one another here.

And remember you are church; you are this imperfect parent. You are ministers in God's church - this is not left to those of us robed this morning - you are also each an apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor or teacher - some of you have many of those gifts and why because we are each called to equip the saints for the work of ministry - we are to school and be schooled; to shape and be shaped; to nurture and be nurtured and to disciple and be discipled. We are each to play a part to build the rest of the church up as Paul reminds us in his letter to the church in Ephesus.

Today the church thanks you for the part you’re playing in this family to befriend and to nurture. There is nothing like the church on earth, this mother that she is, this church of Jesus Christ growing God’s family. Today we give thanks for the church, our mother, and we thank her for one another: for her unique family here in God and we pray that we grow in love for her so that she might change us and shape us for the continuing adventure here at All Saints. Amen.

New Wine Leadership Conference 2018 "Be apostolic" by Kris Valloton

noreply@blogger.com (Revisingreform) — Mon, 05 Mar 2018 11:48:00 +0000

At the New Wine Leadershop Conference Harrogate 2018 Kris Valloton (here with wife Kathy, also Associate leader), is our keynote speaker.

He is a Senior Associate Leader of Bethel Church in Redding, California and co-founder of the Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry (BSSM).

APOSTOLIC
He begins by unpacking our call to be apostolic. He explains how Jesus didn't call his followers priests, prophets or fathers but apostles and this word has its origins in the Greek which is why we do not hear of apostles in the OT.

An apostle is one who is 'sent' and the word has its locus in the Romans wanting to take over the world by conquering cities to culturise them; sending their military generals to do this. Accompanying the military were philosophers and teachers and artists and various others so that the Roman system was replicated where ever the Romans went. Jesus takes this title for the generals and he transfers it to his disciples. We are sent to replicate Kingdom culture where ever we are sent.

DON'T LAMENT THE DARKNESS OF THE WORLD, ENLIGHTEN IT
Later Kris will expand on this point by challenging us to see that we are hiding our light under a bushel when the church grows but the light is kept within the church; the light is little use if kept within the church because it was supposed to enlighten and transform the world. True light transforms the culture around us. I am reminded of my own prayers over the years for the transformation of the cultures of the churches I serve; for God to mould us so that as we are sent we are ‘apostolic’ and witness well and bring Good News. As I reflect I realise too that our Friday group in the church I currently serve is beginning to attract a good number and that there are the beginnings of some testimonies there as regards the values we are transmitting. People are encouraged and gaining confidence in who they are. Kris helps us to see that if from within our churches we simply lament the darkness of the world but are not agents of its restoration, we are not fulfilling our purpose. Kris is quite adamant that building a church does not necessarily build up the community around that church unless that church is apostolic. Pastors gather. Apostles, on the other hand, train, equip and deploy. Pastors measure success by how many come to church but apostles by how many people become the church.

CHANGED TO BRING CHANGE
Kris uses the idea of the pool of Bethesda in John 5 to flesh out his idea of a pastorate: where people need healing and deliverance and salvation they come to church but Ezekiel’s river, in contrast, is an image for the apostolic church where the water gets deeper the further out you are from the sanctuary and where everything which meets the water is healed. You come to the pool to be healed in Bethesda but the further you get from the church and turn outward, the more change you see when you are sent by the church confidently into the world, discipled and having an impact. We need churches made up of saints who are equipped to heal their communities. These kinds of churches create a culture where everyone has a ministry and are not communities made up of those who minister and those to whom ministry happens because this is a misnomer. All Christians are in ministry. We are sacred and our ministry goes with us where ever we go because we can do nothing without Jesus and Jesus goes with us and so where we go, we take the Kingdom. In business, in the service sector, where ever we work, people encountering us there, encounter the Kingdom if it lives in us and we apply its values. I feel encouraged that people where I do church are committing to their own discipling; attending gatherings in increasing number to learn together about what it means to be a Kingdom people; a people who take Christ with us.

CO-WORKING WITH GOD
Kris has already reminded us about what it means to bring heaven to earth based on the Lord’s prayer petition ‘Your Kingdom Come on Earth as it is in Heaven'. He unpacks this further in his book “Heavy Rain” which is a reworking of “How Heaven Invades Earth: Transform the World Around You.” See Ian Paul's analysis of Vallotton's message from that text in his reflections on Kris's presentation at New Wine. Kris Vallotton reminds us that we are seated in the heavenly places with Christ and so we are not apostolic unless we are all about bringing heaven to earth and transforming culture. Kris explains that we are not to concentrate on getting people to heaven but instead we are to spend time getting heaven into people.

Much of the secularised, inherited Christianity; the Christianity which warps and wefts with the culture, presents us with a version of Christianity which is all about individualised salvation plans for transference to heaven and away from earth at the point of death and this is the kind of thinking, which, as an Anglican minister I have frequently encountered. There is always the opportunity in funeral ministry, particularly, to carefully and gently hint to the far more transformative reality of living in the earth God is transforming now. People where I am might have even heard me use that terrible aphorism, but not without its truths: 'It is not pie in the sky when you die, but steak on the plate while you wait.' This 'waiting' is now ringing with a clunky sound.

Kris unpacks how in Rev, Chapter 2 the new Jerusalem comes down from heaven and this new creation, where God takes away every tear and there is no pain, is the new earth and we have to be a part of making that happen. God co-works with us to achieve this. The Lord’s Prayer is not about getting people into the Kingdom but about getting the Kingdom into people. I am reminded of one of the highlights of my own ministry, when using a film clip from the Bible Project about ‘God space’ and ‘Our space’ and after a 6 week summer break, my young people in church were able to remember my central point of teaching in the sessions we had had pre-vacation – that their task was to bring heaven to earth in their families and in their classrooms. It was so encouraging to hear them explain to me ways that they were doing this very consciously and with self-awareness.

Kris really wants us to understand the mandate we have been given and expands, explaining that God planted two trees in the garden and one was of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the other was the tree of Life. It was the tree of Life people were intended to eat from so that they could live forever on earth, not in heaven. He challenges us to grapple with the idea that God is not in Heaven, in actual fact, heaven is in God. The heights of heaven cannot contain God, Psalmist David reminds us. All of this he shares to reframe how we think of heaven and earth and our purpose.

OUR POSITION
There is also more to understand about heaven – that there are three heavens. There are no principalities and powers in God’s Heaven but there principalities and powers are in the heavenly realms where battles happen but this is not where we sit as Christians. We sit where Paul explains he dwelt, in the third heaven and this is the territory into which we are born, with Christ, above the heavenly places and this is not where we are going but where we currently are.

He then encourages us on a specific trajectory and that if we can only configure a move from earth to heaven we will live a reactionary life but if, on the other hand, we can live from heaven and towards earth, then, we gain a heavenly perspective from this eternal seat where our prayers become prophecies and our prophecies become worlds and so we, with the mind of Christ, foretell and forth-tell the future.

BRING LIFE. BUILD UP.
Kris seems to want us to understand the gravitas of the spoken word and to use words for life and not death and not to complain about our communities but transform them. Repeating a hopeless commentary on your community is not prophetic but pathetic, he tells us. This appeals to the Barnabas spirit living in me, which people have always identified, that I live to call people into their potential. We must see ourselves. to use a much used phrase, as 'becomers.' I think David Runcorn first introduced me to this idea of becoming.

We must call things that ‘are not’ into what ‘they are’. There is some encouragement from Kris to name the becomers and the becoming as already manifest in the present. This is very winsome – it is that propensity in us to see tomorrow with God’s eyes and to see ourselves perfected by Christ; to see the potential which lies in everything. Kris shares a story of a heroin addict over whom he prophesied ‘You are a Holy man’ and in that moment his addiction to heroin was broken and he began to live towards that new reality. I have had a dream the night before Kris speaks in which my uncle, who is in a difficult place, has broken free from everything holding him back: his face is clean, his spirit is gentle, his voice is warm and he stands in my dream holding out his hands and speaking over and over again the same sentence of warmth and welcome until he is happy with how he is configuring and expressing it – he ‘becomes’ right in front of my eyes. I dream this dream twice over those few days. I return home and dream dreams to which I have become accustomed – houses with expanses of water, houses near the sea, houses with expanses of sand and sea in the near distance and the water is good, very good. At church on Sunday we seem to be more obviously pushing into the new. I listen to someone else preach and a testimony is shared. I sit at the back to think about how our church feels, we are interrupted by a heckler and minister to him, offering him welcome but are rejected, for now - ministry has more of a holy disorder about it like God is shaking us up and indeed the next day work begins to modify the interior of our church so that we can become more fit for the purposes I have heard about last week. Now, is a good and expanding kind of season. People are exploring their futures and discipling courses are filling up.

Kris proposes that we do not grow churches but have to plan to grow our communities and that the difference between people who do things and people who do not do things is that people who do things, DO THINGS. There is laughter. He reminds me finally, preacher, teacher and pray-er that I am, that there needs to be far more than the message and the prayers and we are to form a strategic plan. If we only send missionaries to foreign nations, our own communities are not going to change. We are then asked to stand for a commissioning. I have much cause for reflection.

Next up and coming soon: Kris Vallotton part II....

Great expectations Matthew 20:1-16

noreply@blogger.com (Revisingreform) — Mon, 25 Sep 2017 16:42:00 +0000

We have to remember something about Matthew, ex-tax collector as he was, he knew a thing or two about money. His gospel reflects this: hidden treasure, a pearl, and last week we were shocked by a debtor cleared of millions who was just beastly to some one who owed him only five months wages. We learnt something about a God who doesn't want us to live with unforgiveness. He wants us to be as lavish as he has been in setting us debtors free with the life of his very Son. He wants us to live free. Unforgiveness, even psychologists will tell you isn't healthy; isn't good. As Nicky Gumble reminds us in the Alpha course - “It's like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” We learnt something last week of the power of the Spirit as experienced by Corrie Ten Boom who had watched Nazis murder her sisters and go on to forgive one who became a Christian as he asked for her to forgive him, how it wouldn't have been something she could have done, unless the power of the Holy Spirit had not in that moment come over her and run like a current through her arm, causing her to reach out her hand to shake hands with him.

This week, then, workers called in shifts – first thing, at nine, at noon, at three, and five but the latest to work (working the shortest of time) given exactly the same salary packet as those labouring first thing. Page 22 in your Bibles (New Revised Standard Anglicised version NRSV), please. “The first is last and the last is first! at chapter 19, verse 30.

What is Matthew trying to tell us, here, about God?
How can it be that those clocking up such little time are paid the same as those who do so much?
Well, you might already have had a good go at working this out.

Let's look at the simplest reading.

To an extent it is about those who came later to a living faith in God? The Gentiles would be as loved and provided for as those Jews who had always known the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and then come to Christ in full faith. Applicable today? Yes. The church does not ordain, licence or give responsibility to its members on the basis of the years they have clocked up. You can be in church for decades and only later invest in your own discipling. Yet, the newest converts can turn around their whole lives for Christ.

Let's look at another simple reading - you work harder for God than someone else but receive the same reward as them from the Lord of the vineyard. Is God unfair? No – he's just all grace.

This parable does teach us something about “works” and efforts and how righteousness isn't ours because somehow we have earned it or tried so hard. The Gospel, instead, tells us Jesus earned salvation for us through his work – his work on the cross to clear our debt (wiping our slates clean with his blood) so that God sees you and I perfect before him. There is nothing we can do to make God love us any more. There is nothing we can do to make God love us any less. So this parable is a reminder that we do not earn God's love. Those first labourers aggrieved and in rumbling complaint would have boasted of their hard work in the scorching sun – wasn't there something more that they deserved and they thought it was, mistakenly, all about them.

So we learn God loves the new people just as much as the old.

We learn I cannot clock up brownie points with a Christian God.

But learning this there are some dangers. If the first will be last and the last will be first, I can delay my discipleship and perhaps instead give my life to God in the last ten minutes of my life, we might be tempted to think.

Or alternatively – if there's nothing I can do to make God love me any more or any less and Jesus earned my salvation – well, perhaps then I will just live as I wish.

No. This parable squarely confronts these temptations in our thinking.

Let's look to the context on page 22 (one of the reasons for the bibles in your pews). You see, Peter wonders why giving up everything doesn't earn him salvation – “Who then who can be saved- we've left everything for you?” The parable was always Jesus' way of answering that question. It's never about what I must or mustn't do. Peter is asking entirely the wrong question. And very often it's the question we ask too.

Peter is in as lamentable a place as the Rich young man who went quietly away before him (Chapter 19:vs16-26) because he was asked to give up his wealth and realised he had so much.
So - the rich man “What must I do? – I can't give it all away.”
and the poor man Peter: “What must I do – hey, I gave it all up!”
These are the responses from which Jesus comes to shake us free.

Jesus wants you to know that it is all about living with a different set of expectations about the goodness of God! It was never about you!

The first workers in that vineyard needed to have their perspective shifted because unfortunately like Peter and just like the rich young man, they had worked it all out beforehand with God, set the terms, brokered a deal and were 'all control': - “I will give you a full day's work and expect a danarius in return.” 'He made an agreement with them for their usual daily wage,' at verse 2.

We can be like this in our discipleship:

“I put in some hours for you God, I came to church, I listened and paid attention but left without what I had hoped for; it didn't meet me, didn't feed me, you didn't answer my prayers.”

This is what God challenges this morning and it is tough. Vicars are just as guilty. We think there might be something we have done or failed to do to create the right conditions for you to meet with God. We put in certain efforts and expect certain results when instead we must just trust you in your love for God and let God be God.

The later workers in the vineyard simply trusted God would do what was right at verse 4 “I will pay you whatever is right.”. This is the alternative put before us. When we let God be God and trust him and know him, he gives to us in far more abundance than our limited imaginings could have asked for. These later labourers in the vineyard just trusted in the Master's generosity – knew so much better the character of God – trusted the master to do what was right and 'this right' by our lavish God's standards was paying the workers far more than they actually deserved because this is the nature of an audacious God who redeems us with everything he has – even the life of his own Son Jesus Christ.

Those first workers with their smaller expectations are made to stand in line and simply watch... as the last workers are paid the same danarius. We are left with the image of the first workers' grumbling complaint.

Now God in his mercy still loves you even when you complain – 'the hymns aren't like they used to be, I expected to meet with God but that last one was a funny song,' (say gently with a smile, Rach!)

They all received a danarius but how much greater has been the experience of the later workers, not because they had less work to do but because they live as we are to live, as we can not help but live if Jesus lives in us – they live so overblown and so thoroughly surprised by the overwhelming love of an audaciously lavish and generous God.

When God is at work in your life, you don't just expect the ordinary, you expect the extra-ordinary lavish love of God to be at work in your life and the people around you – you see the world in new ways, you come to worship him with a different grace.

Those who expect less of God and less of other people; who only expect something right in their own eyes will receive exactly what they expect.

Those who trust instead in the goodness of God, though receiving just the same, seem to receive so much more. They know how great God is and how small they are, that he will give the Holy Spirit to them if they ask; that it is only through such a baptism in the Holy Spirit's power that we can receive at all (Luke 13:11b).

The rich young man seems to think faith has so much more to do with 'man': “Teacher, what good thing must I do in order that I might have eternal life?” Jesus responds, “Why do you inquire concerning the good thing? Only one is the Good One” (19:16, 17). It is Jesus and his Holy Spirit we are to pursue: God the Good one.

It is an openness to the one who came to baptise you in the Spirit which will open up your life with God and as a result impute to you a genuine love for everyone else. (see Matthew 3:11; Ephesians 5:18; John 3:5; Acts 2:4; Acts 19:2; Acts 1:8, Acts 11:16; Luke 3:16, Luke 24:49; Acts 19:6; Acts 19:1-6, Acts 2:1-4; Acts 4:31; Mark 1:8; John 1:33; Acts 10:44; John 20:22; Romans 8:26; Acts 1:4-5; Acts 10:44-46; Luke 11:9; Luke 11:13; Acts 11:15-16; John 14:16-17.)

So...
Jesus teaches us through this parable, then, to set our sights so much higher, to bring the whole of ourselves to worship and to sacrifice what pleases us for the sake of one another.

God will meet us as our hearts become full of him, it's not in the music or a warm and floaty feeling, where you understood the sermon or found it more encouraging – it's in your openness to him and to one another; letting God be God. It's in your expectation.

So in many ways then, yes, it is the very hardest thing of all he asks of us. It's got more to do with our surrender and our letting God be God; not working it all out beforehand and setting limits on our reward. A simple trusting receptivity to the sheer goodness of God is what this parable teaches: –

“I trust you God to do what is right and that I am not to control that ... and as we learn else where from scripture and Ephesians verse 20 of chapter 3: He can do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine!

On "Vulnerability" & "Resilience" - my talk to Deans of Women in the Church of England

noreply@blogger.com (Revisingreform) — Mon, 27 Jun 2016 22:40:00 +0000

Vulnerability

Jack is three and came to my house last weekend for baptism prep. He brought mum and dad and a sister and brother. He also brought cake!

Mum and Jack explored with me their journey to the 'big cake bake,' the dessert they provided for after our Sunday Roast together. Jack had broken 6 eggs. At three years old this was no traumatic thing. Just an interesting thing. And he enjoyed telling me.

They dropped on the floor.

They broke on the floor.

Mummy was cross.

The cake we ate together was huge and delicious.

The thing is mum had broken eggs too, she had broken 6 eggs – big cake! So I guess this proves that it is what we do with our brokenness that counts because our brokenness, our vulnerability is unavoidable if we're going to risk being transformed, which is what God would have for us.

Resilience
We are told by the world that we should bounce back but I will tell you there are a couple of problems with bouncing back. Rubber eggs bounce. But there's nothing good inside of them. They are just tough. And in their tough irregularity they are unpredictable, bouncing off in all directions. We become increasingly unpredictable if all we ever do is reactively bounce back, not dealing with the things that have broken us, causing stasis to descend, freezing all that potentially good stuff inside and fixing it still.

In reading Brene Brown on vulnerability, I was most struck by her conclusion that in our numbing our pain, we numb too our capacity for joy. We are to stay porous then, keep processing the stuff inside and allowing light in through the unavoidable cracks.

Thinking about resilience, my mind is drawn to my garden, in which I sat with Jack during baptism preparation eating that cake. (The trampoline engages little baptism candidates as I fill out paper work with guardians about godparents.) My trampoline has resilience, Jack loved bouncing. I have less resilience. My body feels heavier now than it did when I was younger even if it isn't literally heavier, although it probably is. I am more fragile, on the inside, for all sorts of reasons that those amongst you who have had children can relate to. The trampoline floor flexes, my floor does not. I just don't bounce like I used to. I just should not bounce like I used to!

Bouncing back, then, dips as life makes its marks upon us and it can afford to as we learn lessons along the way and apply these lessons to the new situations we face. Locating the present moment in the experiences of the past and the promises of the future keeps perspective, which serves in its own way to bolster resilience. Life only makes sense backwards. Past difficulties serve a redemptive purpose for present realities if through them we have learned anything about God, other people and ourselves.

Kristine Culp in her book on Vulnerability (2010, Vulnerability and Glory: A Theological Account, Westminster John Knox Press) describes this prior learning as my already having been both harmed and transformed. Like eggs or as St Paul puts it, like earthen vessels, we are susceptible both to being broken and revealing treasure inside. This being harmed and this being transformed is surely part of the human condition. Jack watched harmed eggs become transformed eggs. We ate them, messily, at my house.

Fragile like an egg, can I learn to be okay about my own brokenness; my vulnerability?

I believe that in its brokenness the egg can become something that can go on to nourish others.

This incredibly creative stuff can be released and apply the right kind of heat and environment to it and somehow suddenly, or perhaps in about three minutes, depending on how you like them, there are all these different kinds of eggs.

What kind of resilience do I need to cultivate?

A resilience that is not about bouncing back - we just aren't built for constant bouncing.

Instead I have to know the kind of egg I was formed to be (self-aware, individuated).

I have to trust in God's redemptive plans for all humanity and that in our brokenness we can nourish others in sharing our vulnerability: our life experiences, weaknesses, our very messy humanity. God means for us to be vulnerable, we share his image built this way (more on that later). Trusting in God helps me to hold on to the belief that if I know myself and my identity in Christ, I can be broken but not totally shattered and my being broken can serve my own life and the lives of others redemptively.

It's not about being tough

Kristine Culp in her theological account of Vulnerability1 believes vulnerability is our 'susceptibility to being changed, for good and for ill.' 'Human creatures remain open to being damaged and open to being transformed because they remain susceptible to being changed by others...'2

The Latin root of vulnerability points to wounds or wounding.

It's about contending, anyway, with community. Zechariah knows well, the 'wounds we gather in a house of friends (Zech 13:6).' We are not to resist community because of wounding, we are to navigate it, learn to love, be loved and live through the wounding which is never undone completely in the transforming.

Look at Jacob, transformed but limping.

Look at Christ raised and yet punctured through his hands and side.

Therein behold the Glory.

Kristine Culp will not pair vulnerability with resilience, she pairs Vulnerability with Glory. She explains that we are to become attuned to the vulnerable baby-God in a manger [who] moves to glory rather than resilience.

Perhaps resilience carries too many connotations of the bouncing back that I have rejected.3 Glory better conveys the transformation possible through vulnerability. We will never bounce back into the shape we were, the shape is transformed, if through the difficulties and crises we have learned anything along the way. Even in those who seem to wound us carelessly we are to find nuggets of truth from which we can learn and transform. Finding the yolk, the good stuff gives hope the last word, turns the last word to encouragement.

An article in Psychology Today 4 called: 'I scream, you scream, we all scream for self – esteem,' describes an experiment where samples of people to whom encouraging words had been spoken over a long period of time were then exposed to small electric shocks (don't try this at home) – fried eggs!). Those nurtured in encouragement were far less susceptible to the pain than those who had not had encouragement spoken over them. By continuing to soak ourselves and others in the words God speaks over us in his love for us in our broken moments; by becoming agents ourselves of his encouraging love, we are better preparing people to bare the unavoidable shocks of life, to have the being broken become transformative. When human beings wound us, we are to hear again the reassurance of a wounded God who loves us, knows us and can transform us.

I made a commitment to myself, after experiences of being trained for secondary teaching, observing staff and the power of their words over students, and again, after reading the Alban Institute's 'Never call them Jerks' that I was going to hold myself to healthy responses to those who wound. Speak well of others because when there's not a lot I can control, I can control at least my own response.5 When the wounding comes, which inevitably it will in any form of corporate life, be not left also with a me I love less by not holding myself to this. This is all a part of the process of remaining self-individuated and not wounding those who wound you.

Maintain vision, love for God, love for His Story and love for others and His vision for my identity because it is often your very identity that is being measured by those same members of that community you have been called to love. They each have their own recipe card and ideas for what you're supposed to be. It would be completely impossible to conform yourself to everyone's taste and you would lose yourself in trying to be.

Be the egg you are supposed to be: know yourself

The interesting thing about eggs is that they are best cared for in a shape that fits them. Put into a shape too hard to adapt to and shaken around always, the egg will not last, the creative stuff will become so mixed up with the broken stuff that there will not be a lot that you can do with either. Eggs have rope-like strings called chalazae which act to anchor the yolk to the centre of the white.

Even if we do not break completely, if we find ourselves in environments where the centre just can no longer hold, whether that be our belief in who we are or in who God is, if these become so shattered and set adrift, it is time to get out of the box.

When the centre holds, you can go on to hold that delicate and messy collection of unique people as a Christian leader. It takes time and not everyone is going to hang in there as you work out the shape of the container, its contours, weak points and strong sides.

All the eggs in the box have their own lives and stories of how they came into being. Shell and yolk; some with centres anchored and some just hanging in there. Let time take care of the collection of eggs. Separating broken stuff from good stuff is not our job as scripture tells us elsewhere with wheat and tares, take away the broken bits and we lose something of the egg too. 'Tis always so when I pick bits out of the mixture at home! God has all the time in the world.

Know more about who God is

In all our explorations of vulnerability and resilience we say something about God.
Does a theology of God being affected, being malleable and affected; does a theology of God being vulnerable lend itself better to a theology of our own vulnerability as those made in his image?

Elizabeth Gandolfo in her book The Power and Vulnerability of Love - captures our preoccupation with the need for a God who suffers with us, with her paraphrase: “How can a loving God remain unaffected by or invulnerably controlling a history' shot through with human suffering?6 She builds, in answer, a case for the invulnerability of God as offering vulnerable humans a necessary stability of identity.

An invulnerable God can maintain that unchanging love from which we draw in the face of life events that would otherwise break us. He's our chalazae.What human beings need from God, says Gandolfo, is not just compassion and responsiveness but a God invulnerable to the very horrors we suffer.

With a developed theology of the Trinity we can suffer this God who doesn't suffer, because the second person of the Trinity condescends to mix himself up with the very egg of a woman, Mary, to be born in blood and pain, to be born and to die in vulnerability: Christ. The second person of the Trinity is vulnerable enough for us.

Gandolfo explores how the Christian God comes to earth the way the rest of us do - “The bloodiness of [Mary’s] labor (sic) could have ended differently. Love incarnate did not pass into the world through Mary’s womb like a ray of light.” If ministry is also about our being perpetually born anew to the wonders of God and bringing others to birth in a similar way, why would we think that it is similarly not going to be experienced through some suffering and pain. Moses' desire had been for an encounter with the Glory of God, when that Glory comes fully it comes in the fullness of Christ in his vulnerability on a cross.

God’s invulnerability can hold within it the incarnate Lord’s necessary vulnerability. Christian resilience is found then in drawing strength from the unchanging essence of an eternally loving God, vulnerably experiencing my wounds in the woundedness of Jesus Christ. Perhaps capturing a sense of this Trinitarian invulnerable but 'oh so vulnerable' God is found in a letter written to the editor of Christian Century.

'Both the manger birth and the cross express that truth... that the "essence of God is power directed by vulnerable love....The danger of our modern… culture is the division between those who see God as loveless power, which has given us… 9/11 [and atrocities ever since] and those who see God as powerless love, which has given us a rapidly shrinking... church. The God of the New Testament is hardly powerless, as the story of the resurrection proclaims. [We have a] God whose essence is power directed by vulnerable love to wipe away every tear. A powerless God cannot do that.7

Over the years, reading the scriptures, I become more attuned to my own naïve idealism and how this is not supported in the scriptures by the stories of human dealings. Christian resilience is bolstered too in meditating on the stories of the human condition in the Gospel, the sheer grittiness, the simple displays of human weakness and error and God's faithful and loving pursuit of such unendearing beings. Conflict is very much at the heart of scripture's converting and transforming narrative and peace is not the absence of trouble but the presence of God. An over-realised eschatology might not serve me or others well. The Kingdom is really not here yet and there's much work to be done – God has work to do in me. Kristine Culp says 'Christian' (and I would say human) 'communities are necessarily ambiguous mixtures of creativity and destruction, holy and demonic, good and ill, true and false.'

Egg shell and yolk.

'Faith emboldens us to resist diminishment and to persevere against fear, to enjoy and share life as a gift of God, to dare and dwell in a sturdier justice and a widening love. Forgiveness releases the burden of failures and faults, enabling us to straighten our backs, as it were... Love lifts us, binding us to God and one another, to the well-being of neighbors (sic) and strangers; it turns us around in reverence...'8

And so the bible tells us: But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed and you know the rest (2 Cor 4 vv. 7-12).

Developing self and other awareness, praying more keenly for relationship with an invulnerable but oh so vulnerable God can prepare us for a life poised somewhere between vulnerability and resilience as we 'are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory (2 Cor 3:18).

Written by priest, Dave Bookless, when he was at theological college, Dave used this poem he wrote which I believe to be poignant to my writing here:

Cracks

There are cracks in my world
I noticed them one day and now they are everywhere:
Sinister hairline cracks that start and finish out of sight
cracks that grow and gape and laugh at my certainties
My world has been declared unsafe

I have tried to paper them over,
paint them out,
move the furniture to hide them,
but they always return,
cracks that hang like question marks in my mind.
And now I begin to think:
why do the cracks appear?
from where do they come?
They have made my room unsafe
BUT

They have thrown it open to new horizons
drawn back the curtains
raised long closed shutters.
One day I looked and crack had become a window.
Step through it said, what have you to fear?
Do you wish to stay in your crumbling room?

And then I remembered a childhood dream.
Watching the egg of some exotic bird
oval and perfect, spotted blue and cream
I wished to hold that egg and keep it on a shelf
BUT

As I watched it, cracks appeared.
Tiny fissures spread like zigzag ripples.
It broke in two and life struggled to its feet,
Wet and weak and blinking at the world.

Without those cracks that egg could hold
no more than rotting stagnant death

without its cracks my world would be
a room without a view
Cracks maybe uncomfortable, disturbing gaps
BUT

Could it be that I need them?
Do you believe in cracks?
Because I keep searching for God in the room
and find he is hiding in the cracks.

Dave Bookless

1 Kristine A. Culp, 2010, Vulnerability and Glory: A Theological Account, Westminster John Knox Press.
2 Kristine A. Culp, 2010, Vulnerability and Glory: A Theological Account, Westminster John Knox Press, p.120
3 Culp supports my wonderings here proposing that in much of the literature in the field 'definitions of vulnerability point to the risk of harm from hazards, epidemics, and disasters; [and] the contrasting term is resilience. In other words, damage has a force of inevitability, and the main questions are how to prevent it and, if and when hazards are met, whether persons, communities, and environments will be able to resist and rebound from it. p.2
4 Psychology Today. Mar/Apr 93, Vol. 26 Issue 2, p22. 2p.
5 Never Call Them Jerks: Healthy Responses to Difficult Behaviour by AP Boers, Alban Institute, 2000
6 Elizabeth O’Donnell Gandolfo, The Power and Vulnerability of Love: A Theological Anthropology, Fortress. p.188
7 Kristine A. Culp, 2010, Vulnerability and Glory: A Theological Account, Westminster John Knox Press.
8 Kristine A. Culp, 2010, Vulnerability and Glory p.104 - 120

Vocation and the Church of England

noreply@blogger.com (Revisingreform) — Thu, 12 May 2016 13:10:00 +0000

The day when the Church of England takes down an advert advertising for a Young Vocations Adviser from any belief background, Willesden clergy, on Inset, listen to Jane Williams on vocations. Surely, a Vocations Officer for Christian Vocations needs to be a Christian. They have since created a new advert.

Vocation at the beginning

Jane asks that we see the church as carrying the human vocation: we are made in God's image. Being made in God's image is an unusual word to apply to the whole of humanity. Ancient near Eastern literature might have held this as possible only for kings etc.

Genesis paints a picture of the human shaping of the potential hidden in the earth. We are to work with God to bear fruit, to promote flourishing. Interdependence is written into the story of creation in that the productivity of one day is grounded in what has come before. Human beings are an extension of God's care of the universe and are to respond to God as they 'image' God.

We are the descendants even of the heavens and earth with the same word being used here to describe generational relationality.

Genesis 2 builds on the big picture of Genesis 1 and takes a closer focus on humanity. Differences are now seen, God speaks everything into existence but human beings are made out of God's breath and out of something that already exists: the dust; the earth. We are earthly and heavenly; a bridge.

Genesis 2:15 tells us we are to til and keep the earth. Earth is not in a state of perfection, it is dependent upon our care. Til and keep are those farming words also extended to our care of the temple in later scriptures. They are vocational activities. Holy work and daily work interconnect. Tilling and keeping is at this point, a joy. Only after rebellion does it become a challenge.

The animals are brought to the human creature to be named. The human creature is naming and more importantly defining the creatures, exercising dominion, helping to create the creatures' reality.

The human creature becomes two human creatures. No return to the dust but an act of recreation to form Eve, coming forth from Adam there is that sense of dependency again: connectedness. (Jane does not use the names Adam and Eve, she uses instead 'human creature, human being from which come two beings.)

"One creature broken into two to make a partner."

This is a theology of interconnectedness. The Fall breaks connectedness. All things were able to delight in their interdependence but after this 'relationship' breaks. This brokenness manifests itself in idolatry.

'Turning created existence into an ultimate point of reference, is the form that the fall takes, but what lies behind it is that man refuses to refer created being to communion with God. In other words, viewed from the point of view of ontology, the fall consists in the refusal to make being dependent on communion.' (J Ziziolas Being as Communion p.102).

Disconnected from God we become discouraged with one another. The fall is that state of broken relationships.

At the Fall we have the cunning and uppity animal (the snake). People in the image of God should not be told what to do by an uppity animal! They named it and therefore made it what it is. Now it exerts dominion over them. The order is cascading into reversal and now the God who calls the human creatures to walk with him in the communal walk through the garden, hide from him. They notice now their differences from one another which were once perfect in complementarity. The differences between them are now so frightening they are to be hidden. Tilling is now not delighted in, neither is procreation. "This is not God's punishment or curse." It's the story of the reversal of the good order; a descent into ignoring that we are 'gift' to one another, out of God's gift of communion. Babel highlights a mass disordering of peoples; a mass disordering which Pentecost comesto undo, setting us into good order again through the power of the Holy Spirit.

Vocation through family

God calls Abraham.

God begins to restore human relationships. Abraham has to return to dependence on God who will create Abraham's new reality. Abraham had created a reality for himself and that is sacrificed now and given over to God. The word for land is 'earth' - synedochal. Abraham is 'type.' Here we have scripture working on its figurative and literal levels.

Moses has to take people into dependence again on God. It took 40 years to have this people become community and depend on Him again.

We now have to be told in the ten commandments how to live with each other because we've lost the original vocation through the Fall. The prophets then call people back to their original imaging in God.

Our truthfulness in terms of our identity is inseparable from our loving one another and our attention to those weaker members amongst us. This is holiness. God renames people as he reconfigures them. It's God's invitation. You are to take your time over it. Human calling is to relate all things to God through our own relationship to God.

Vocation through the Church

The church, as we hear in Ephesians, is to be the new humanity. To be those who know ourselves to be gift and to gift ourselves to others is the purpose of Church. Jesus' vocation is to demonstrate utter dependence on the Father, he is the beginning of the new creation, this is what the 'Our Father' prayer makes us - brothers and sisters and children. "Church is a school for the new humanity." it's hard work because we have to til and keep our relationships, community is hard work because community is broken.

Jesus is always going to insist on his relatedness to the Father. The disciples are encouraged to find their relatedness to the Father. Jesus is the true human being so that even the miracles show that order is coming back again, a right interrelatedness begins to break in through him (the Kingdom). Through human vocation (and divine intent) the miracles occur, nature cooperates again with humanity.

Vocation through the Spirit

The vocation Christ gives to us through the Spirit is that reversal of Babel: community. We are chosen before the foundation of the world and destined for adoption. The mystery is revealed: the intent to gather everything together in Jesus, restoring interconnectedness. There is the bringing together of all peoples. How we are to be family needs instruction (one of Paul's aims in his letters). Building the bond of peace through the unity of the Spirit is essential God-work because unity is not natural to us any more.

The Spirit calls us to be brothers and sisters. He prays in us, adopts us.

"The Holy Spirit makes you a connecting place for the people of God, to restore human beings into relationship with one another and with God."

The Church is to help people discern vocation. We accidentally assume that vocation is built in church but it is to be nurtured in the spaces God places people. People crave connection and community, but are often passive about it, this is problematic - why? Because we were built to til and to keep - this is our great purpose.

"The ordained vocation is to serve this greater calling of helping others find their vocations."

Churches are to be places where we learn how to be 'gift' to others and to the world.

We are to delight then, offering praise, proclaiming the Gospel. We are to delight in the beauty of the church. "Creation was quite weird too!"

We are to sustain others through the ministry of Word and Sacrament.
"Not your flesh but Christ's flesh."
"Not your words, but God's words," (else you exhaust yourself).
We are to always point away from ourselves.
By this too may we be sustained. Amen.

Ubuntu

noreply@blogger.com (Revisingreform) — Mon, 09 May 2016 16:56:00 +0000

I don't know which operating system you run on, and yes, perhaps I mean that technologically and metaphorically but Henryk and I are not Windows people or Applemac people, we are Ubuntu people.

There is a community of people who write software just for the fun of it.

We download it free.

Their joy is in the creating.

Ours in the receiving.

Ubuntu is an ancient African word for community. It means 'I am what I am because of who we all are'. Desmond Tutu speaks on Ubuntu Theology and how we only know who we truly are in relationship with others.

There is no commonly recognized Hebrew word for 'self'. In the Bible 'self' is conveyed instead with words like לב (heart/mind), נפשׁ (soul), and רוח (spirit). The Bible is more interested in communal life not individual life, in communal salvation not individual salvation. It is not possible to truly know yourself devoid of the nexus of people who remind you who you are.

In John 17 (23) Jesus' prayer explores community: ‘I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.’

Next Sunday we read about Philip. As we know Jesus has been appearing to his disciples over these weeks between his rising and his ascending: in a garden to Mary, in a room to Thomas, at the beach for Peter, on a certain road called Emmaus.

Whilst Jesus was still with them, Philip, whom we don't know so well, only that he had wondered if anything good could ever come out of Nazareth, said to Jesus, ‘Show us the Father and we shall be satisfied’.

Jesus says exasperated: ‘Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. (John 14.8-10).

Christians know God the Father. We know God.

Is that an arrogant claim?

It can seem so in a post-modern world where it is fashionable for everything to be uncertain.

The scriptures tell us we know who the Father is because the Son has revealed him to us. We have seen the Father through the relationship lived between the Father and the Son attested to in the scriptures. We know who God the Father is, as we see him in relationship with his Son.

Similarly, we only know who we are in relationship with others. At the beginning of the Bible we hear that it is (Genesis 2.18) not good for man [humankind] to be alone.

We need one another to know who we each are. In a network of relationships we love one another into shape.

As the saying goes, if you want to know how a man will treat you, just look at how he treats his mother. This is a little cliched but what it scratches at is some truth about how we reveal who we are through the way we live our closest relationships.

In Christ's high priestly prayer, he takes this a step further. He tells us that in our seeing the relationship lived out between the Father and his Son, we see God.

Jesus will go on to say – love one another because that is how people will know you are my disciples.

Ubuntu: I only know who I am in relationship to you.

Holy Ubuntu: I only know who God is in the relationship he lives out with his Son.

So church?

Why should church not just be another community venture?

Ubuntu: community is good, right?

Why is our strapline here at All Saints: Expressing the love of God in our community?

Why is it not just Expressing love in our community.

Well, because belonging to a God-centred, Jesus worshipping, Spirit filled community as we are, not only do we better come to understand who we are. We better come to understand WHOSE we are.

We are in horizontal relationship with one another and a vertical relationship with God.

G K Chesterton describes people who live in a small church community and how they actually live in a much larger world than those in large communities who can afford to join themselves to people just like them. That will only ever form, at best, a clique, or a club. In small communities, like this one, our companions are chosen for us.

So church – more than Ubuntu.

Church - also a body of people who study the scriptures to know God; to see there the relationship between the Father and the Son.

But Ascension and Pentecost challenge us, also, to be more than this.

Just as Philip demanded: Show us the Father and then we will be satisfied. It is often so for us. We read about Jesus, we read about God, we come to love one another with a godly love, we come to know ourselves, both 'who' and 'whose' we are in community together.

We might similarly cry: Show us the Father, show us Jesus and then we will be satisfied!!

Well, the godhead has.

Today we think more over about how Jesus has ascended to the Father. The early church is in a period of waiting for the coming of the Spirit.

Come Holy Spirit is the most important invocation of the church. It is only because of his arrival at Pentecost that the ascension can be any good news at all.

For if the Son has returned to the Father then what are we to do?

We are to receive the Holy Spirit whom they send in their place.

It is through the power of the Spirit that we are brought into all truth.

It is through the power of the Spirit that when we doubt who we are, he can gently remind us again.

It is through the power of the Spirit that we can love those who are hard to love in a community where companions are chosen for us.

Tertullian quotes the pagans and their reaction to early Christians: their common shocked response was ‘See how these Christians love one another.’ They were amazed but had no frame of reference for this power of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit makes Christians Christian – makes Christians distinctive more distinctive than other bodies of good people gathered with intentions philanthropic.

This love is love 'so the world may believe' as we hear in this morning's Gospel. Pagans became Christians so intrigued were they by this love. Richard Burridge, Dean of King's College London, scholar of John's Gospel, says ‘In the End, we love each other not for our own sakes, nor even so that the world may believe, but because this is how we share the very life of God and come to be with him and in him for ever and ever.' (Burridge, R. (1998, 2008) John: The People’s Commentary, Abingdon: The Bible Reading Fellowship, p202). The Ascension is good news because we were given the Holy Spirit, the Spirit brings even our ascension too into the community of God. We ascend as we share in the very life of God: ‘I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one. Holy Ubuntu indeed! Amen.

I am

noreply@blogger.com (Revisingreform) — Thu, 14 Apr 2016 11:38:00 +0000

Acts 8.1b-8That day a severe persecution began against the church in Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered throughout the countryside of Judea and Samaria. Devout men buried Stephen and made loud lamentation over him. But Saul was ravaging the church by entering house after house; dragging off both men and women, he committed them to prison. Now those who were scattered went from place to place, proclaiming the word. Philip went down to the city of Samaria and proclaimed the Messiah to them. The crowds with one accord listened eagerly to what was said by Philip, hearing and seeing the signs that he did, for unclean spirits, crying with loud shrieks, came out of many who were possessed; and many others who were paralysed or lame were cured. So there was great joy in that city.

The Gospel is written in the book of John 6.35-40 Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. But I said to you that you have seen me and yet do not believe. Everything that the Father gives me will come to me, and anyone who comes to me I will never drive away; for I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. This is indeed the will of my Father, that all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life; and I will raise them up on the last day.’

I am the bread of life.

We are told by John that after Jesus has said this many of his disciples turn away and no longer walk with him. But Jesus says to them and perhaps to us all, “Do you want to go away as well?” Peter replies, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life...”

Where else do we go? There are so many worldviews, religions and ideologies competing for our attention these days – but Christianity offers not a world view or an ideology, neither moral system nor life-improvement plan – Christianity offers us a person – Jesus, to live in us by his Spirit and to guide us by his example. Jesus offers us himself.

We could so easily be those who eat loaves and fishes forever and who do church because of what it gives us: comfort, company, places at a good school, morality, purpose and it could be that God has attracted you to himself with those things – this is just his clever way of getting your attention – what he really wants to give us is the gift of himself. We are challenged to leave the feast with Jesus after he has fed us. Five thousand watch him leave for the other side of the lake. Just as the manna ran out in the wilderness, we can not sit to simply be fed – Jesus asks that we follow him to the other side and be about his mission to the world beyond us, he doesn't give us security, he is our security and he asks us to join him in securing it not for ourselves but for others.

He says to those who sit in the grass and love him because he sorts things: you are looking for me ... because you ate your fill of the loaves. He knows this can be our tendency – to look to him for what he can do for us rather than to be in Him because of what he can be in us and through us. Jesus is an end in himself. Jesus doesn't just give bread, well, he does for a while but the people love him for that and not for him in himself and he is on to that. Jesus doesn't therefore say he will continue to give bread, he says instead that he is bread. Jesus says I am the bread of life. He says Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life.

Like him our mission too must be to the other side, to pick up our cross know that He is enough. When we have been fed with him at the table we are to leave the feast nourished and become bread for the world. I first met Jesus at the Eucharist when I was seven years old with the words 'We are not worthy so much as to gather the crumbs from under your table' – I didn't understand then what I understand now – I had to journey into the painful but liberating truth that there is nothing I can do to make me worthy of God, that it is all his action – that he makes me worthy by becoming my living bread, by inviting me into relationship with him, to believe that he died for me, to believe that when God looks at me he sees me covered in Christ because of Christ's work on the cross for me and therefore pleasing in his sight – that I can not gather up the crumbs of my life and present them worthy to him but that he can gather up the crumbs of my life and present them worthy to the Father because he, Jesus, is worthy.

Following Jesus, this living bread – being Christian – being in Christ, is to know him in the joys and to know him in his sufferings, it is to leave for the other side of the lake and follow. It is in this following that we then hear him say I am the living bread. I am your enough. It is not about what I can do for you, it is about my being in you by my Spirit. This living bread is Jesus himself. And so what now – we are those who are fed and if this is so we are to go on to feed others, our God is always a missional God, leaving the comfort of the sun and green grass to travel a lake to the other side, to face the authorities and have them take offence at him, to push boundaries and to shake things up a bit, to bring challenge. Here we are gathered just a few, a sunny day, grass outside and not really one of us hungry – how are we to be like him - bread for the world – let's continue to pray in God's renewal through us. Amen.

Risen Christ, you filled your disciples with boldness and fresh hope: strengthen us to proclaim your risen life and fill us with your peace, to the glory of God the Father.

Exposure

noreply@blogger.com (Revisingreform) — Tue, 05 Apr 2016 22:30:00 +0000

John 3.16-21 ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. ‘Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgement, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.’

We are living in interesting times and I have had cause to think about these gospel verses in recent months: all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.’

The Ashley Madison Agency, catering for people who are in a relationship yet want to date, with its slogan: "Life is short. Have an affair" was hacked last summer and names and addresses of its users were released into the public domain.

This week the Panama Papers leaked 11.5m files from the database of the world’s fourth biggest offshore law firm, Mossack Fonseca, showing the ways the rich exploit secretive offshore tax regimes. Twelve national leaders and 139 politicians, Vladimir Putin, Cameron's father, Pakistan’s prime minister; the president of Ukraine and the prime minister of Iceland, who resigned yesterday are amongst those exposed.

The problem with the world-view which operates behind such dealings is exactly that which Ashley Maddison is bold enough to declare: Life is short. For Christians life is not short, it is everlasting, Jesus, as we hear in the verse John 3:16, the most quoted scripture in the Bible and the founding synopsis of our faith, came to bring us eternal life, this is a quality of life in Him that does not end when our earthly life is over, in Christ, we live for ever in God's presence and living this quality of life that the Bible describes as everlasting or eternal life begins the moment we give our lives to Christ and then continues on in him without interruption.

The problem with the Ashley Maddison claim that life is short and you should have an affair is that is completely forgets that there is something sacred about marriage, about commitment, about unions that are in fact parables of the relationship with Christ and the church, where Christ is the bridegroom and the church is the bride who will one day be presented to him spotless and then there will be the wedding feast that we hear about. Betrothal language is everywhere in describing God's relationship with his people. Marriage imaging this is for Christians life-long, in sickness and in health, for better and for worse, which is why we make vows based on our wills not just our fleeting feelings – when asked whether you take your betrothed to be your beloved you will have answered I will rather than I do – you will to love for ever even in the times when you fall out and don't like each other too much.

Those who hide their wealth so that it not leak away on taxes forget that they are a part of the body corporate, they are that society, those citizens for whom those taxes provide hospitals and schools and pavements and sewers. For Christians our interdependence is everything and makes us distinct from the world, we are one body and when one part hurts the whole body hurts, we engage in reciprocal relationships and we honour the weaker parts, our more vulnerable members.

Our transparency as Christians, our honesty and our levels of commitment to one another and to the comon good are where we can be distinctive within a world that lives for the moment, accumulates for the moment and gratifies the moment, let this be not so for us those who will live in Him eternally. Amen.

Collect: Risen Christ, for whom no door is locked, no entrance barred: open the doors of our hearts, that we may seek the good of others and walk the joyful road of sacrifice and peace, to the praise of God the Father.

What a bloody mess!

noreply@blogger.com (Revisingreform) — Mon, 22 Feb 2016 11:42:00 +0000

We have that curious reading in Genesis 15; animals feature across our scriptures. Animals cut in half in the Old Testament... and foxes and hens in the new.

What's going on?

Abram in the Old Testament has a unique encounter with God which establishes truths about the relationship we all have with God. Relationship entails risk. Jesus teaches us to go to the enth degree for others even to the point of laying down our lives. When the stakes are this high we all need to hear 'Do not be afraid' – God's words to Abram. Jesus strikes us this morning as very unafraid, as he faces Jerusalem and Herod, that fox – out for his blood.

Do you sometimes think about how costly your relationship with God is? You have sacrificed so much, maybe your reputation, possibly your friends, certainly some of the world's offerings because you are obedient and compelled by the Spirit to remember the promises spoken over you by God.

Do you know what God promises you?

Last week we saw Jesus overcome temptation in the desert from the devil who offered him everything. Jesus resisted. This week then this same Jesus, renewed and determined, turns his face towards Jerusalem to meet his fate, to lay down his life for us so our sins are swallowed up and we can enter into covenant relationship with God.

Abram has just given up the offer of riches from a foreign King and is now asking God what this is all about, this following God. Was he right to make that sacrifice? He can't see the reason at this point with no future before him; no heir and no land.

Have you ever despaired like Abram? Wondered what it is all about? Lived in that time before you knew God's promises of the glory that lies ahead.

Maybe you are still in that time or have forgotten the promises of God.

The Lord asks Abram to count the stars because there is an almighty huge project that God is going to begin in Abram. Do you ever stop to remember you're a part of the God project too? Jesus' death and resurrection secured your status as an adopted child of God, filled by his Spirit, empowered by his love, you are part of his project to reclaim his world back from the foxes.

Are you joining in?

Abram and Jesus are both obedient out of faith to the God who makes covenants in the very life-stuff of blood. This ritual in Genesis this morning points forward to the covenant that Jesus makes with us through his blood on the cross which is remembered at the Eucharist – Drink this, all of you; this is my blood of the new covenant, which is shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.

Blood carries life, there is no life without blood. The animals laid down, broken in Abram's ritual point to Christ's broken body on the cross. The torch and the fire-pot that pass down these halves, that mediate, that 'go-between' the carnage in Abram's vision is that same Shekinah glory of God that appeared as a star to guide wise men, as cloud and fire to guide God's people to their Land of Promise, that appeared as a rainbow in the sky in a covenant made with Noah.

In Jesus the divine is a 'Go-between' God.

In verse 18 the word 'made,' 'made a covenant' is cut. You would cut a covenant. This is perhaps similar to our cutting a deal. In the Ancient Near East, agreements were sealed with the cutting of animals, to say, in a very graphic way, if I do not keep my word, may this happen to me – death and judgement – as horrible as this. God takes this on in Christ on our behalf, pays dearly for the relationship he initiates with us, enters viscerally and really with everything he has into a relationship that cost him the lot, the life of his son.

God, in his shekinah Glory, walks through the shadow of death that descends on Abram – we are told that as the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell on Abram and a deep and terrifying darkness descended. God commits himself even in this moment to the later moment of the cross, to entering that terrifying darkness to secure for us what we can not secure for ourselves, to send his Son to secure life for us, everlasting life, to send his Son to be savaged by a fox, savaged by all the cunning and crafty work of the devil: sin and death though he, Jesus, is the hen who seeks to protect his people, you and me, and shelter us under his wings, which he achieves with our freedom.

God passes through the pieces, the dead animals, in the Old Testament, God himself comes down into the muck and the mess then, in Genesis, in this bloody and messy ritual with Abram, just as he does in Jesus, taking on flesh and entering our messed up world as a baby born for a cross, our mucky every day, which he fills with His Spirit though it's still savaged by foxes. God will go through death to secure life for us as Jesus, mother Hen, saves us chicks from being being hunted down by cunning sin and crafty death.

Sin and death are conquered by Christ's mockery of them in his resurrection from the cross. In Colossians we hear that 'he disarmed the powers... and made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.'

Jesus tells the Pharisees, “Go and tell that fox [Herod] for me, ‘Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work. Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.’” Jesus knows the stakes, understands the deal, anticipates his cut.

If you are familiar with what happens when a fox gets into a hen house, you know the mother hen herds her chicks under her wings for protection and bares her breast so the fox must kill her first before it can get to the chicks.

This is the image that Jesus chose to bring us, God’s very son bore his breast for us. Jesus walked for us into the terrifying darkness which descended, but only for a while, over the whole of the earth, at his death. But by being raised from the dead, he overcame death and promises that we will too.

What is it that Jesus promises anyway?

Why have you become Christians?

It isn't the way to a comfortable life!

That was never the deal. Foxes exist but death and sin are undone.

God fulfilled his promise to Abram, taking on darkness and sin and death for us and did so again in his Son, Jesus Christ.

These are the greater promises he covenants to, for you.

So this is how broken animals and foxes and hens make sense.

When we received the cross of ashes on our forehead on Ash Wednesday, we were reminded of our vulnerability to sin and to death.

As Christians, we are made for more than just deals that gain us fleeting assurance. We are called to covenant and to sacrifice after our very earthy God, to putting our faith in him who has secured everything for us, who has walked out all our pain to secure our resurrection, our outwitting of the fox.

We are to trust in a God who fulfils his promises, who entered all our bloody messes, so that he could secure us the promises of Covenant love.

‘Do not be afraid,' he says again today, 'I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.’ Amen.

Mary and Jesus and Good Disagreement

noreply@blogger.com (Revisingreform) — Sun, 17 Jan 2016 18:11:00 +0000

I preach this sermon today after hearing the scriptures afresh this morning and so beautifully read, caught up again by the imagery in Isaiah of the Bridegroom and his Bride. I can not help but explore John's Gospel and that Wedding at Cana, in the light of what God is saying to us after a week of conversation on such topics in the Anglican Communion.

If you were with us a few weeks ago, you'll remember Jesus in his childhood, as a twelve year old, staying behind in the temple and missing to his parents for three days. We heard of Mary's anxiety.

Here now, eighteen years later, and at a wedding with anxiety over missing wine, there is much to learn from conversation, where two people: Mary and Jesus seem again at odds with one another.

When Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, he had been unapologetic to his mother. Here, as a man, in response again to his mother's fears, he uses words we find quite puzzling.

If Jesus had been more the middle-class Anglican – in response to Mary's, “Son, why have you done this? Your father and I have sought you anxiously,” he might have responded: “Oh I do apologise, I became so distracted at the temple I lost all track of time. I'm so terribly sorry.”

And to the situation in Cana and his mother's whisper about the lack of wine, he might have responded, “Good grief, how appalling, thank you so much for bringing this to my attention, let me see what I can do.”

But Jesus doesn't respond like this on either occasion. When wine runs out, he responds with “Woman, what does your concern have to do with me? My hour has not yet come.”

In the temple, when 12, his response had been, 'Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house.'

The truth can not be compromised by the desire for politeness.

Mary would not have known what we know by the phrase 'My hour has not yet come.' We know it points to the hour of his glorification on the cross but she would have thought he was declining her invitation to immediately sort the wine.

What she does in response, though, is to trust that Jesus will act. She instructs the waiters at the wedding to do whatever Jesus tells them; made confident by her faith in him (though she knows not quite what he will do) she tells waiters to, “Do whatever he tells you.” These, her last recorded words in the gospel of John.

What are we to learn from these passages this weekend of all weekends, when the news has explored decisions made by the Anglican Communion in the recent meeting of the Primates of the Provinces? One decision reached was that the Episcopal church, who last year, without consultation, changed their doctrine of marriage, will become unable to take part in communion decision-making for three years, as a consequence.

The love between Mary and her Son was, of course, without question and yet in the two conversations we have explored briefly this morning, opinion was not harmonious. Jesus travelled back in silence from the temple but we're told lived in obedience to his parents.

Jesus told his mother his hour would come later and yet made the wine flow in response to the faith she placed in him.

There's lots of give and take when we're living in relationship.

Perhaps what Jesus and Mary model for us then is that as Mother of God and Son of God there can, for a while, be good disagreement and yet unimpaired love and certainly holy communion; that we trust that both Jesus and Mary acted for the good of God's people.

After them, people everywhere are to seek together, as best they can, the will of the Father.

Jesus chooses his Father's House over his mother's home as he stays in the temple; is obedient to the Father though it pains his mother; and in this points to the hour that will come when he does similar, and she stands at a cross to witness his surrender.

Mary asks waiters at a wedding and Christians today and everywhere: 'Do whatever he tells you.' The problem will be that this 'doing' is interpreted differently, that we can not, just like Mary, for-see, always, what Jesus will do. We must trust, though, that in his actions, he reveals the glory of the Father, not always in ways we'll understand or are necessarily easy, his greatest glory being revealed on a lonely hill and on a cross at Calvary.

On both occasions Jesus acts.

In the first story, becoming lost to a Mother temporarily, but right at home in his heavenly Father, in asking questions at the temple, Jesus grows in wisdom and the Holy Spirit, surrenders other priorities to the authority of his Father.

And here at that wedding with wine fast becoming lost down the throats of gathered guests, Jesus will make more again and grow the faith of his disciples, who begin that day to know him better from this first demonstration of his authority.

Perhaps ultimately from this story, then, this morning, we are to be those who here ask questions of our faith together, so we might grow in wisdom and in the Holy Spirit and trust in God's authority.

Where we come to different conclusions, (and we're bound to do so temporarily) despite this we're to continue loving one another and learning from our diversity, as we travel in communion to catch glimpses of his glory. Amen.

Out of Sorts Interview with Sarah Bessey

noreply@blogger.com (Revisingreform) — Thu, 03 Dec 2015 19:50:00 +0000

Sarah Bessey, author of Jesus Feminist, has released her latest book, Out of Sorts. I had the great privilege of putting some questions to her. Please find the interview below. Order her book: poignant and timely, a very real wrestle with questions of life and faith.

Sarah Bessey is author of OUT OF SORTS. Her book has been published by Howard Books. Quotations from Sarah's book are in italics.

QUESTION: 'At some point, we all have to let people live their lives, even if that means they want to live them far away from us.' You use these words to describe the choice that your uncle made to live in independence from family. This approach towards people's personal choices perhaps has helped you to enter deeply into the lives of other people whilst at the same time differentiating yourself from them, their stuff is their stuff and yours is yours – can you say some more about this?

ANSWER: I see it more as respecting each other’s choices and narratives. The truth usually lies somewhere in the middle, of course, but in the end, I’ve found peace in releasing expectations and even demanding certain outcomes. In our particular story, I continue to hope for reconciliation but even if that doesn’t happen, I have to be willing to release people precisely because I love them and to trust that God is at work with or without my involvement. Sometimes it’s an act of love to let people walk away, but I will say that it’s important to keep the door to return always open.

QUESTION 'I wonder if we’ve forgotten that the Church isn’t simply an institution. It’s us. We’re it. We are all standing in our own homes, looking at all the boxes and the junk and the treasures of our inheritance, and we are thinking to ourselves, “God, what a mess. Someday I really need to do something about all this.”' Your synopsis of the thinking of Phyllis Trickle helps the church to understand the cyclical nature of change and struggle, you speak of this tendency to pattern in your own family, 'we're all just corkscrewing around the same issues.' You describe your own return to the same truths as a corkscrewing – it would seem that there are healthy returnings and less healthy returnings to familiar patterns – can you say somehting more about this? In what ways do you think the church can benefit from becoming more aware of the corkscrewing?

ANSWER: I think it’s quite precious how I thought that I was so unique and original in my struggles and awakenings! Bless. It’s like a university student who goes away from home for the first time and comes home after one course of philosophy with all the answers and all the ways everyone else is doing it wrong, you know? There really is nothing new under the sun. It’s a necessary part of our formation, absolutely, but it’s also part of the story that we need to live into the rest of the story. Even in our spiritual formation, we find some amazing new thing or idea but then we discover that the new thing is actually an ancient thing and there are a lot of people waiting for us on the other side of our shifts and changes. For me, if I had tried to write this book ten years ago it would be an entirely different book because I hadn’t lived into my formation enough yet - it’s likely that is still the case and I’ll look back on this as a snapshot of one moment in my development as opposed to the definitive work. But regardless, I suppose I’ve just grown more comfortable with the tethering roots of our stories and our legacies. We like to think we can cut ties and be autonomous but the very thing that formed us then continue to form us now - we can either recognize and work within it with agency and thoughtfulness or we can be victims of it.

QUESTION: You describe the conversion of your family to faith and are unapologetic for it saying 'Maybe I’m tired of finding other ways to say it, to make it more palatable and reasonable and logical. What is this life in Christ like if not a bit of disorderly resurrection?' Do you think it requires a particular kind of vulnerability to tell our testimonies?

ANSWER: Absolutely. I think that’s why it’s such holy ground, so precious to me. Even now at our church’s baptism services, they make space for each person to share their testimony with the community and it never fails to make me cry. I think there is something so powerful and inarguable about a story of how we encountered Jesus. And to speak our deepest truths - I was lost and then I was found, I was lonely and then I found family and friends, I was blind but now I see, I was broken but now I am whole - those are points of connection and their healing ripples out into the lives of those privileged to hear it or witness it.

QUESTION: 'Church became a social club at times, then it became a burden to bear. I’ll write more about Church later in the book, but for now, I’ll just say this: I lost Jesus in there. It seemed one could be a Christian without being a disciple of Jesus.' You describe the domestication of your faith as you moved into mainstream church? Were there any redeeming features to those churches that you experienced?

ANSWER: Absolutely and I hope I gave equal billing to that very thing in the book. At the time that I was walking through this season, I was quite prideful and purposefully isolated myself. I know I was also hurt and burned out and other legitimate things as well as having actual worthwhile questions and push back. Now years later I look back with tremendous gratitude for each church and community that was a part of my development.

QUESTION: You describe reading the gospels in your return to faith and how 'Jesus was not what I expected. Not what I remembered. I had expected a comfortable wise man, someone saying nice things about being nice and kind to people. I think I expected a version of Jesus I had tricked out of my memory: comfortable, safe. Clearly I’d blurred the Jesus of my childhood with the real one of the Gospels ...'

What was it that you found most shocking about Jesus?

ANSWER: I had this idea of a comfortable and safe and nice Jesus. Instead I found Jesus was a bit wild and challenging and cleansing and healing all at once. Instead of a placating moral guide, he was curing everything that was sick in us and healing everything that was broken and bringing the dead in us to life. It’s bracing and reorienting. And I think I used to think of Jesus as just another character in the Bible and then I was reoriented to the truth that Jesus is the point of the Scriptures, the axis, and so I needed to reunderstand the rest of Scripture through his teaching. As an example, when Jesus tells us that we used to be servants but now we’re his friends, that is wild to me and completely changes how we read so much of the Bible.

QUESTION: You describe your own wresting with the Scriptures. 'And let’s be honest: being a Christian is sometimes almost at odds with what we read in some parts of Scripture. We can be entirely “biblical” and yet be far from being a disciple of Jesus Christ.' Can you expand on this? In what ways have you encountered this?

ANSWER: We can pick and choose Bible verses and so we are technically “Biblical” but we aren’t being true to the teachings of Jesus. For instance, we can quote things from the Levitical laws such as “an eye for an eye” but then Jesus teaches us to forgive our enemies and turn the other cheek and to love and pray for our enemies as we would for our brothers. So if we throw away the teachings of Jesus in favour of something else we find in the Bible, then we might be “biblical” but we aren’t a disciple of Jesus.

QUESTION: 'It started with those clobber verses—anyone who has been on the receiving end, you know the ones—2 Timothy, Titus 2, Ephesians 5, and so on. I did my research long before the day came to write, but as a refresher, I dug out the commentaries and books again. Responsible author, I wanted to make sure I had my hermeneutical ducks in a row. But as I worked my way through the passages of Scripture that I used to hate, I began to see Paul more clearly, to understand Scripture even better. I began to see his wisdom, his subversion, his heart.'

I have a similar journey to you and finding the plain reading so provocative here I then applied a close reading which began a close reading of the rest of scripture which cemented for me both call and discipleship: ordained ministry would be my shape for living out discipleship – to grow churches where people are not afraid to ask questions. How do you conceive of your call?

ANSWER: I think I’m still living into my calling. By vocation, I know that I’m a writer. That’s my sweet spot, for sure, but I’ve been surprised at how following Jesus has lead me into writing about the things I write about in particular. And so much of my calling has actually been articulated and affirmed first by the ones I trust and by my community. For instance, I didn’t think that preaching or speaking would ever be a part of my life but my husband and my family and my church community identified that gift in me and gave me opportunities to learn and practice and empowered me to step out into that gift. I probably wouldn’t have ever done that without their affirmation and empowerment. Now I believe a big part of my calling is perhaps a bit outside of the gates - I’m not ordained, I’m not formally theologically trained etc. - and to shepherd people who are there, too. At the core of everything I write and everything I preach is one thing: you are loved. That’s it. If I had one last breath in my body, it would be spent speaking of the overwhelming welcome and love of God towards us.

QUESTION: 'He even gave me the extra measure: his blessing to explore my struggles and ideas and weaknesses in a public forum through blogging about it or talking about it. He was not threatened by my honesty. We each let the other be wrong for a long time.'

I had this time too, blogging at Revising Reform – because I was literally 'revising' swotting up on what this organisation in the Church of England thought regarding the cross, mainly and women's roles in the church. I could only blog about it because friends at school and nursery pick-up didn't 'get it' or had already too quickly made up their minds. How important do you think it is to find safe places, places where you can be heard and engage and listen? How do you think church might facilitate such places?

ANSWER: I think it’s deeply important! A safe space is deeply important to our spiritual formation. I think that’s part of the reason why people are connecting with the book - they feel less alone and less scared, a little less isolated in their questions or changes. And even though the research shows that these seasons of our lives are entirely normal and healthy, we don’t usually shepherd people well in that season. If anything a lot of our churches are structured around a very literal and early stage of our spiritual formation, they function best if we don’t question and don’t push back or begin to embrace curiosity and complexity. It’s important to be accessible for people in the early stages of their journey, absolutely, but it’s also important to create the space and conversation and companions and guides for all the stages of our faith journeys.

QUESTION: 'My experiences in church ranged widely over the years. But when my husband left ministry and we were both limping home to Canada—burned out, burned up, exhausted—one thing was sure: the reality was pretty far from the ideal. So even though Brian still refused to give up on the Church as an ideal, in reality I opted to stop going to church. For six years.'

You write with great candidness about being 'burned out, burned up, exhausted' and leaving ministry with your husband. What advice would you have for leaders of churches?

ANSWER: My advice would be to walk closely with Jesus, to lean into his rhythms of ministry and life because in Matthew 11:28, he promises that it is a rhythm of grace, it isn’t a burden. So much of ministry can feel like striving and making things happen instead. I’d also recommend that pastors get ahold of everything written by Eugene Peterson on pastoring and start reading there.

QUESTION: 'I think the Church is one of the weirdest ideas and one of the best ideas. If church were just a sanctified social club, I’d be out. If it were just about singing songs or listening to a great sermon, I could do that at home—thanks to the new worship movement albums on iTunes and free podcasts. If it were just about staying busy, I’ve already got that handled rather nicely. So I’ve done my best to figure out the essence of the Church.'

Can you describe the essence of the church is a sentence?

ANSWER: It’s a God-centered and Spirit-breathed community sent to continue the life and ministry of Jesus.

QUESTION: 'We have these moments of transcendence, like the veil between heaven and earth is fluttering. We can’t breathe for the loveliness of the world and each other, and just like that, we remember something. Our skin is made of dust, so we often catch the perfumed scent of the Garden in the cool of the evening, and we know, somewhere inside, that we’re supposed to be walking with God, unashamed still. I wonder if that’s really what happens when we meet Jesus. It’s not that we meet Him or that we believe in Him or that we “invite Him into our hearts” or that we mentally assent tosome nonnegotiable truths that will govern our best life now. No, I think it’s that we recognize Him. I think that part of our souls, our spirits, our bodies, our minds, locks into focus. It wasn’t a dream, no, that is what’s real. When we cross the threshold of faith, we enter into an awareness that the Kingdom of God has already come.'

Your writing is very beautiful and vulnerable and yet uncompromising, who inspires you to write this way?

ANSWER: I’m not sure, really, this is just my voice, I suppose, my way of wrestling and telling stories and talking. I think I can probably credit influence to a few places though - a deep and abiding love of Scripture and my reading habits lean more towards poetry, literature, or spiritual writers whose work makes me weep with the beauty like Madeleine L’Engle or Barbara Brown Taylor.

Thank you, Sarah Bessey!

Hope beyond hope or 'figs when the figs have gone'

noreply@blogger.com (Revisingreform) — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 23:32:00 +0000

Rachel Royster artist

I am struggling lately to walk two dogs quickly enough through the allotments for the school run because figs have fallen from overhanging trees there and puppies think pudding is being served and will not walk on.

One of the ancient signs of hope is the fruitfulness of fig trees. Fig tree leaves provide cover for Adam and Eve on the discovery of their nakedness, perhaps a fig tree shelters Jonah as he sulks at God in Ninevah. The Old Testament prophets speak of their hope in terms of the plenty, the abundance, of grape vines and fig trees. Fig trees can live hundreds of years and seem to provide for us in all sorts of ways.

The idea of waiting for something to bear fruit is one we are all familiar with, literal and metaphorical. At Advent we are encouraged more especially to develop a propensity for waiting, to cultivate holy patience, a vision for a God who has all the time in the world and yet at any minute might return as Christ the King just as he once appeared as a refugee baby, taking that same world by surprise.

Jesus speaks of fig trees several times in Luke’s Gospel. In Luke 13, he tells us of a man wanting to cut down his fig tree because it's not produced fruit in three years. The man decides to wait a year longer, tend the plant and its soil and if it still proves unfruitful he will then cut it down. We are always encouraged to push beyond our natural ability to hope, to be patient, to press on into a kind of hope that is almost supernatural. It is by the Holy Spirit, we can cultivate a truly Christian hope. It can be as many as five years before a fig tree begins to bear any decent kind of fruit.

In today's parable, Jesus uses the fig tree to teach us to be patient for the things of God. Those things for which we long, do not come quickly. We are to be watchful, tend the soil, trust the promise, watch for signs, God is still at work, bringing forth the fruit.

Jesus says, “Look at the fig tree and all the trees; as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that the kingdom of God is near.”

Jesus helps us to cultivate hope where others would give up.

There will be times when “people faint with fear for what is coming upon the world.” But as Jesus-people we are told that when “these things take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” How opposite this is to the posture that's so usual to assume, to take cover, look for shelter, choose the fig leaves and not the fruit. Just like Adam and Eve and Jonah, the first couple obsessed by shame and resorting to blame and the latter Jonah, cross with God who hasn't wiped out his enemies, we too can hide and cower rather than sharing our vulnerability and trusting that something good can come from the biggest, most difficult messes; that the brownest sludge of soil and dung can grow the healthiest tree.

When others faint with fear, we lift our heads and it is from a posture such as this, that we better see the coming Kingdom.

Jesus helps us to cultivate hope when others would give up.

As Resurrection people we are told “Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life.” We are not to cultivate anxiety or anaethetise with wine. Again a common panacea for the stresses and strains of life can be the tiny fixes that become sedation, self-medication, distraction and compulsion, those things which dull the senses to the signs that God is near.

It is Advent, time to be vigilant then, wide awake, don't miss the light as it bursts into the darkness, be dressed in readiness, Be like those waiting for their master.

Come out from under fig leaves, look up higher and see the fruit coming!

We will light our first candle this morning, and over three more weeks other small flames will join it.

Where we see a little light we are to tend to it and nourish it.

Where we see a little soil we are to pray that it's receptive.

Where we see the good beginnings of something somewhere it is God who will cause the growth of it.

Let Christ cultivate in you his patience by the power of His Spirit.

God's got all the time in the world you know for his is the world and everything in it.

He sometimes even serves up good stuff when the figs have fallen from the trees and there's not a leaf left for shelter, when we feel a bit impoverished.

It took puppy dogs to remind me that next time I'm in a rush again, it might just be I miss the good stuff being served up all around me.

The future can not be predicted – no one knows the hour, not even the Son of man but in the meantime we are to look about us, left and right and up and down again and point out to one another the good things God is doing.

Let him stop you in your walk with him.

Slow down for him this Advent ...

....on the school run, the work run, the moments when tubes are leaving, there's bound to be another one.

Pause a while and count your blessings.

Feel his hand of healing on your head again...don't miss the good stuff on the way.

Let advent be a journey which makes Christmas more than a destination, let this be the preparation for the coming of God's Kingdom.

I challenge you to let God turn sticky moments into something very good for him.

Look up and see the fruit and that perhaps the path before you, littered as it seems to be with all sorts of inconveniences, might just be good things on the road as you travel this Advent season with him.

Amen.

REFORM RENEW THE C of E

noreply@blogger.com (Revisingreform) — Sat, 21 Nov 2015 23:41:00 +0000

We read in The Observer that there are likely to be divisions over the value system behind a radical programme to make the Church of England “fit for purpose.”

Martyn Percy, the dean of Christ Church, Oxford, is one of the loudest critics of the Reform and Renewal Program. Fulcrum heard Bishop Pete Broadbent describe the Reform and Renewal program this April at one of its Pivot^Point evenings.

London clergy are hearing about the values that underpin such thinking in the diocese's Riverside Leadership Program hosted by St Milletus college, Kensington which was opened by Richard Chartres and his challenge to be 'Vision Ied and not problem obsessed.' There is a need to 'look at the clutter and simplify.' We need a 'clear direction of travel and improvisations are important.'

We are hearing the clarion call for change and are being encouraged to do something before it is too late and the church faces a very real crisis. Money is to be redistributed, clergy are to be better trained for vocations that require them to engage with the world as it is - health and safety, safeguarding, lone-working agreements, human resourcing, employing and equipping, we are registrars, we are managers, we are balancers of budgets and communicators of financial forecasts, we are also counsellors of sorts and teachers of the scriptures. We hear that 40% of the church’s clergy will retire in the next decade and MBA-style management courses will train the newly appointed to take on wider briefs and meet various targets. A particular kind of pragmatism is to be taught if it can't be caught.

Percy's concerns are over “the uncritical use of business principles, which are mostly untested...' In the Riverside Leadership program we learn that we are to be unapologetic about our explorations and training for 'leadership.' All agendas are value-laden and we can critically engage with secular management theories and discern consonance there with the values of the faith and so claim for God what might in business be building the markets.

I am not concerned by visions for simplification and a necessary pragmatism. I am in favour of flattening dualisms and capturing what we can for God. Reading D'Costa in College taught me to watch for the work of the Spirit in those places and people, books and theories that do not proclaim faith in God, that if it's all God's initiative anyway, then I can look anywhere for signs of the Kingdom, it is discernment we are to pray for as we spot what can be used for Him.

I trust that we will not be throwing babies out with the water that might seem to be filling the 'sinking ship.'

As Parish priests we grapple with Church Representation Rules, Churchwardens Measures, Ecclesiastical Law, Annual Parochial Church meetings and how to recruit paid and voluntary people under Diocesan Safer Recruitment processes etc. We also develop our study and practice of prayer, liturgy, Anglican Communion history and exegetical and hermeneutical approaches to the scriptures, preaching and spiritual disciplines. We disciple and are discipled, we are formed and chipped away at. We become rightly accountable, learn prophetic edge and make mistakes, we are challenged to combine theological rigour with the simplification process being championed because hopefully these things will complement and informs each other.

The church will be challenged to hold tight to its development of ‘character’ together with its approach to the accumulation of technique and approach which can be taught and nurtured. Alister McGrath believes that ‘the promotion of the well-being of an institution, and compliance with its culture seem to take priority over the gospel.’

From what I have seen of the church’s structures to this point in my ministry, I am convinced that this is not so: there is being modelled to me that vital engagement with the gospel that is surely our mission here on earth. It will be interesting to see how plans for the Reform and Renewal of the Church of England are hatched over the next five years as Synod is launched next week.

Embodied souls

noreply@blogger.com (Revisingreform) — Tue, 03 Nov 2015 20:37:00 +0000

Jesus came to "unbind" us, like he does Lazarus, in that Jesus came to release us into believing by faith the Christian promise that life really does come from death. Life comes from death - we remember today those who have gone before us, this All Saints Day: those exemplary and remembered by many. Life comes from death – we remember tomorrow All Souls Day, those more ordinary and remembered by perhaps just you and I.

All Saints and All Souls - we are never to be in denial that death is the only certainty of life but we are also to know that Christ has made possible our triumph over death. Jesus came to lead us into God's culture, a culture based on life.

Halloween seems to be an unhealthy, maybe harmless, preoccupation of contemporary culture. We have had that this weekend too. The world over, there are many customs and traditions which help people to explore death. Halloween was originally, of course, that hallowed eve before the remembering of the lives of those who have died. This once Christian festival has been captured sometimes in macabre and dark ways about which we shouldn't be naïve but mostly by young children intent on collecting as many sweets as they can, quite unaware of its deeper themes.

It would seem that this All Saints, All Souls, this hallowed weekend, we are to learn from Jesus how we are to do both life and death.

We have two interesting scriptures for this hallowed day – one from Revelation that “Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away,” and the other from John's Gospel to show us that when death comes, there is a right response: the weeping that we see is Christ's at the loss of his dear friend and another right response that is Christ's – a supreme confidence that death is not the end. A Christian confidence is a confidence in eternal life. This is hope indeed.

In the days of Jesus' culture in first century Palestine, there would have been a ceremonial wailing in public displays of grief that we see today in news broadcasts as people take to the streets and wail and beat their chests mourning their loss. There are cultural expectations that accompany death – the world over - but the word for ritual wailing (klaio) is not the one used in John's Gospel for Jesus as he weeps. This word is dakryo, the only occurrence in the NT- a word for weeping quietly, for crying in silence. Jesus' compassion is genuine, between him and God and the sisters of Lazarus: Martha and Mary.

Jesus responds with authenticity in his grief but he faces death too with that ultimate confidence in God's power of life. And so models in this a right response to death. His being greatly disturbed in his Spirit is better rendered angry because death, for the Christian never has the final word. A reply comes with a another word and that word is life. In the raising of Lazarus Jesus makes visible Christian reality of life triumphing always over death – Lazarus is bodily raised and really brought back to bodily life and will of course die again but never really again because his is eternal life. Death is forever undone through the work of Christ.

It is people's ever doubting this that also causes Jesus' anger. Freedom in life comes more easily when we do not live afraid of death.

The Christian story only makes sense if we trust Jesus that life doesn't end with death for those who are in Christ. Before our reading from John today the story was already beginning to be told: Jesus tells Martha as he arrives at the scene, "I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.' Jesus has Lazarus be a literal object-lesson of this teaching. In our creed every Sunday we say: “We look forward to the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come.” We can be confident as we say these words because of this reality proclaimed today – that as we meet to concentrate on souls and saints – souls are secure in Christ for those who believe in Him and the saints whom we mourn the loss of, whether well-known or not, share company with us with the Father – Paul's letter to the Ephesians teaches us that all Christians are saints waiting for the final victory promised in Revelation that one day this very place where we stand and sit even right now will be a place that knows no death or mourning or pain for the old order of things will have passed away and Christ will have finally and completely made all things new. This is our hope that we celebrate today so that as we commit this day to those who have died we can be assured and filled with peace.

The Saints today are those of Christian history, Spencer Perceval of passionate evangelical faith and those dear to us who have died in the reality of Christ. They know a life already to which we are all headed. Those souls which we will remember this afternoon are at rest but if we believe the doctrines of the church, they will one day be raised, given resurrection bodies and the New Jerusalem will come. This is the faith of the church that we profess. So let's today revisit this faith – for it is a faith based on life after life after death (read Tom Wright if you want to know more about that) – yes there is heaven – a place of rest with Christ but there is also one day that which we profess in our creed – the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come – this is that world described in the book of Revelation – God sets the bounds for eternal life – and we read of his plans here – in this Holy Book – fifteen copies of which we will soon have in our church!

Let's be confident as Christians in the Christian Hope of eternal life. With the Saints gone before us, we will one day be reunited – yes. As Richard Baxter wrote, that Puritan divine:

Before thy throne we daily meet
As joint-petitioners to thee;
In spirit each the other greet,
And shall again each other see.

There are a few I long to meet – St Paul, my favourite apostle and Spencer Perceval, my relatives again, my friends. And so today with you I am reminded of the core truth of my faith – as Lazarus leaves the tomb, the people must unbind him, there's an unwrapping, a revealing, an uncovering to come, to reveal the life within and the people must join in.

My prayer for us all is that this weekend so hallowed, when we celebrate the lives of those gone before us and in seven days will do so again on Remembrance Sunday is that between now and then we appropriate again and with more fervency our belief in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Our Christian Hope for all saints, all souls, all bodies. Amen.

Jonah under cover

noreply@blogger.com (Revisingreform) — Sat, 17 Oct 2015 19:51:00 +0000

But this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry. He prayed to the Lord and said, ‘O Lord! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. And now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.’ And the Lord said, ‘Is it right for you to be angry?’ Then Jonah went out of the city and sat down east of the city, and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade, waiting to see what would become of the city. The Lord God appointed a bush, and made it come up over Jonah, to give shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort; so Jonah was very happy about the bush. But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the bush, so that it withered. When the sun rose, God prepared a sultry east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint and asked that he might die. He said, ‘It is better for me to die than to live.’ But God said to Jonah, ‘Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?’ And he said, ‘Yes, angry enough to die.’ Then the Lord said, ‘You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labour and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?’

Psalm 86.1-9

Incline your ear, O Lord, and answer me, for I am poor and needy. Preserve my life, for I am devoted to you; save your servant who trusts in you. You are my God; be gracious to me, O Lord, for to you do I cry all day long. Gladden the soul of your servant, for to you, O Lord, I lift up my soul. For you, O Lord, are good and forgiving, abounding in steadfast love to all who call on you. Give ear, O Lord, to my prayer; listen to my cry of supplication. In the day of my trouble I call on you, for you will answer me. There is none like you among the gods, O Lord, nor are there any works like yours. All the nations you have made shall come and bow down before you, O Lord, and shall glorify your name.

Luke 11.1-4

He was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.’ He said to them, ‘When you pray, say: Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread. And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us. And do not bring us to the time of trial.’

In our gospel Jesus teaches his disciples to pray – to pray to God that they might not be brought into a time of trial and to pray that they might forgive others as they themselves have been forgiven. This must mean that God asks us to pray his mercy for others because we are those who have been shown such great mercy. We are to pray for those whom we consider, in our own view, to be undeserving of God's forgiveness because it never was about our view in the first place – and what a difficult lesson this is for Jonah – our reluctant prophet.

Jonah is a short book, just four chapters long, which needs elevating from its toddler church status to the levels of profundity it deserves. Jonah is significant for what it reveals about the human condition and for the ways in which it points to Christ. In chapter four, Jonah is so jealous that the mercy of God would fall on the Ninevites, whom he considers so undeserving of the love of God, because of all that they have done. Jonah is so angry he would rather die than watch the restoration of this people occur through God's steadfast love. He becomes depressed and God has to teach him to take the wider view. In his being provided with the cover of a sheltering bush in the heat of the mid-day sun that is then suddenly taken away, Jonah can for a moment understand a people without the cover of God who have fallen into not knowing their left hand from their right – who have fallen into such confusion because of their lack of guidance. God is willing to give this people another chance because ultimately each of them is his child, made in his image and worthy of his mercy and love.

We do not know whether Jonah ever recovers, we leave the story with God speaking and we do not access the inner thoughts of Jonah, we are only left with a prophet, angry, because his standards were not God's standards, and as readers, for that we feel profoundly grateful. We are sinners in need of God's bigger view.

We can read Jonah Christologically, in other words as a book about Christ. Jonah is a book full of reversals which point to the one who would finally reveal God's mercy on the cross for all those who give their hearts to him and hand over to him their transgressions, so that on the cross he might erase them from God's memory, reconcile us to God and free us from shame and guilt so that sackcloth and ashes can be replaced with praise.

Is it sound to read Jonah Christologically? Yes, Jesus himself does so in the twelfth chapter of Matthew: "Just as Jonah was for three days and three nights the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth. The people of Ninevah will rise up... because they repented at the proclamation of Jonah and see something greater than Jonah is here!"

Where is Jesus in Jonah? – well, everywhere. In the first chapter of the book, Jonah has taken to the oceans to escape the call of God and the storms whip up and the crew protest – "What are you doing sound asleep, Get up, call on your god?"Familiar? Another crew of another boat in the gospels of Jesus will call Jesus awake from his sleep and he will call on God and the waves will settle as the storm is stilled. In the story of Jonah the significances roll on, Jonah will sacrifice himself to placate the wrath of God just as Christ will pay the price for the sins that separate us from God and lay down his life for the sake of us, his friends.

In Jonah the crew have exclaimed 'Do not let us perish on account of this man's life' and of Christ, John will tell us in chapter 3 and verse 16 that God so loved the world he gave his one and only Son that whoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life. What Jonah couldn't do, Christ will do and secure the safety of everyone who puts their faith in him.

In our psalm today, the prayer therein echoes the cry of the Ninevites as they put on sackcloth and ashes as a sign of their hopes in God: For you, O Lord, are good and forgiving, abounding in steadfast love to all who call on you. It is echoed by Jonah: For I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing

God came in Jesus Christ to show this ultimately on the cross, relenting from punishing us and taking justice upon himself in the form of his Son. As the Father turned his face away, Jesus dealt with this for us – we are those from whom God's cover is never taken away, we exist every day underneath the shadow and in the shade of his provision so that even when we sense life's scorching rays (for there are times in life that burn) we are never without the steadfast love of the Father through the Son, there is nothing we can do that will turn the Father's protection away from us. This has all been made possible because one man was sacrificed for Ninevites everywhere, those even to this day, those whom we might consider undeserving, even every single one of 'undeserving us.'

The story of Jonah teaches us that it never was about what we consider anyway – the book of Jonah is God's way of asking us to be careful how we pray. Are my prayers to you, my Father, overly concerned with what suits me? What is God's perspective? You can bet that it is always bigger than mine will ever be. Amen.

Almighty and everlasting God, increase in us your gift of faith that, forsaking what lies behind and reaching out to that which is before, we may run the way of your commandments and win the crown of everlasting joy; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

Inner circles and salt

noreply@blogger.com (Revisingreform) — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 20:37:00 +0000

Mark 9.38-50 John said to him, ‘Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.’ But Jesus said, ‘Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterwards to speak evil of me. Whoever is not against us is for us. For truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward. ‘If any of you put a stumbling-block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea. If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire. And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life lame than to have two feet and to be thrown into hell., And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into hell, where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched. ‘For everyone will be salted with fire. Salt is good; but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.

Mark describes how the disciples come to Jesus one day to 'tell tales.' They tell their rabbi that some people are ministering in his name, people they do not know. These people are not part of Jesus' inner circle.

Should Jesus be concerned about this?
No, of course not.

The disciples are effectively limiting the inclusiveness of Jesus.

The disciples are misunderstanding; seeing enemies where there are no enemies. There are others ministering in Jesus' name and this is okay, they are for us, not against us, they might not be like us but they are us, they are a part of the body and, of course, St Paul expands on this image of the unity of the body and how all parts of the body are essential for the health of the whole.

Jesus wants the disciples to understand that our greatest enemies are not outside, beyond, other than ourselves, our enemies are our issues within.

It is what comes from within, Jesus has told us, that can destroy, not what comes from without.

We are being taught by Jesus that we are not to worry too much about measuring or assessing the ministry or lives of others. We are instead to concentrate on what it is Jesus is requiring of each of us, not what he might be requiring of our neighbour. Our neighbours will each serve God in ways that are unique to them, there are as many callings as there are people.

Like Paul after him, Jesus talks about the body as he spends time with his disciples, because he wants them to understand how this body – this unity of all members, all ligaments, all parts – this harmony of 'all aspects allowing for the other' is essential to health.

This is why then with hyperbole he talks about how it really would be better to remove an offending part than lose the whole body. There are sometimes attitudes that need to go in order for the whole to remain healthy.

This is why he can talk about taking care about not putting stumbling blocks in the way of the little ones, and in the Greek the word is scandalising – we are not to set perimeter walls that are too high for people to climb, we are not to ask people to fulfil their life in Christ in a particular way in order for it to be recognised by a human audience – only God will judge.

It is God and not these disciples who is to judge the lives and ministries of these 'others.' Those here about whom the disciples are concerned and towards whom they direct Jesus' attention are not against them. They are likely for them, says Jesus, or, in other words, 'Forget about them and concentrate instead on your own journey with God.'

In order to finally sharpen the disciples' minds again Jesus puts before them an ordinary referent: salt – a condiment essential medically for bringing healing, a condiment essential also for preserving, for preserving food.

Jesus wants the disciples to understand that it is their own holiness to which they should attend before they turn their assessments outwards.

They need to ask God to preserve what he has placed in them, it is this faith, this call, this task to which each has been called that must not become stale. It will stale if attention is focussed on setting up competition and rivalry with imaginary others. Their misplaced but very human desire to keep their group pure from outside influence is brought sharply home as Jesus focusses their attention on their own purity. They are to not lose their saltiness, their distinctiveness: mined salt from the Dead Sea in Jesus' day would deteriorate eventually, lose its flavour and become worthless.

We are reminded as Christians, then, by this passage that we “are the salt of the earth" (Matthew 5:13).” If we cease to share the gospel of Jesus Christ by which we impart God’s preserving salt to others, we will become effectively useless to God.

As is characteristic of Jesus, he requires us each to consider our own lives before we consider, before we scrutinise, the lives of others. It is then that we will be far better placed to live at peace with one another.

Feeling a bit dry and dusty?

noreply@blogger.com (Revisingreform) — Wed, 23 Sep 2015 09:19:00 +0000

Collect for Wednesday 23rd September, 2015

O Lord, we beseech you mercifully to hear the prayers of your people who call upon you; and grant that they may both perceive and know what things they ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to fulfil them; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Ezra 9.5-9 At the evening sacrifice I got up from my fasting, with my garments and my mantle torn, and fell on my knees, spread out my hands to the Lord my God, and said, ‘O my God, I am too ashamed and embarrassed to lift my face to you, my God, for our iniquities have risen higher than our heads, and our guilt has mounted up to the heavens. From the days of our ancestors to this day we have been deep in guilt, and for our iniquities we, our kings, and our priests have been handed over to the kings of the lands, to the sword, to captivity, to plundering, and to utter shame, as is now the case. But now for a brief moment favour has been shown by the Lord our God, who has left us a remnant, and given us a stake in his holy place, in order that he may brighten our eyes and grant us a little sustenance in our slavery. For we are slaves; yet our God has not forsaken us in our slavery, but has extended to us his steadfast love before the kings of Persia, to give us new life to set up the house of our God, to repair its ruins, and to give us a wall in Judea and Jerusalem.

Luke 9.1-6 Then Jesus called the twelve together and gave them power and authority over all demons and to cure diseases, and he sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal. He said to them, ‘Take nothing for your journey, no staff, nor bag, nor bread, nor money—not even an extra tunic. Whatever house you enter, stay there, and leave from there. Wherever they do not welcome you, as you are leaving that town shake the dust off your feet as a testimony against them.’ They departed and went through the villages, bringing the good news and curing diseases everywhere.

Why is it okay for Jesus to say 'Wipe the dust off your feet as a testimony against them'?

On Sunday I was speaking about how it is interesting always to see that Jesus' teaching was something he followed through on; he wasn't frightened of challenge and conflict but he sought to bring everything out onto the light and to face it head-on. He challenges the Pharisees, he calls the woman caught in adultery to sin no more, he turns tables in a temple.

It seems to me that just as we can not define God by a definition of love that is outside of God and to which he must conform, we can neither create our own definition of 'mission' and ask Jesus to conform to it either. Neither the Father not the Son will capitulate to definitions outside of themselves, which are, if we really admit it, created by man. When we define love, it must look like God. God is love, God authors love and Christ is 'mission,' mission in the flesh, Mission incarnated, born for us. The purpose of mission is so that God's reign and rule come to earth. God in Godself is love and mission. What do love and mission look like? They look like God. What does God look like – like Jesus : the exact image of the invisible God and what does Jesus look like: the Bible tells us so. And so... the Bible defines love and the Bible defines mission. God is mission. The Triune godhead is all about sending: the sending of the Son, the sending of the Spirit and then our being sent ( the actual meaning of apostle ) 'sent one.'

And so it seems, therefore, that Jesus can advocate that sometimes we are to wipe the dust off our feet ! We can move on. Our own dogged determination is perhaps sometimes just that: too dogged and too stubborn.... when perhaps God is saying to us – "Hey – I do the saving – not you, move on, it isn't their time yet, or they can't see me or hear me through you, but you are not to worry, I have just the person, who will reach them, all lined up!"

In my life, God used a teacher, a gentle woman, even of similar height to me. Through her, I first heard God in a real way, in a heart way, in an experiential way. Even on shaking her hand for the very first time, I knew! I was supposed to meet this curate of a former church, she had amazing things to tell me about God. She did.

This is then why Christ can say 'Wipe the dust from your feet,' - there is a right perspective gained when we get our eyes on God, when we know that it's his Kingdom that we are invited to build with him, that in the end it isn't up to us who chooses faith and following and who does not. There is a master builder and we are just his staff-team, there is a greater power and we are just the percussion, there is a greater plan and we play a tiny part.

St Paul wipes the dust from his feet time and time again, speaking out to all God's people, knowing some would prefer him dead. He escapes stoning, shipwreck, persecutions, personal injury, abuse, misunderstandings and it finally cost him his life but he pushes on with purpose and in the greatest of humility with an unshakable confidence in Christ.

Unshakable confidence and all other confidences are shaken down and then this finally helps us understand Jesus' command to shake the dust off our feet, to not let the dustiness cling to us from those rejecting the message of Christ.

Dust is very significant in the bible – the serpent, the Satan, the deceiver is punished by becoming cursed in his creatureliness to a life of crawling in the dust: “upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life” (Gen. 3:14)”. Adam whose name means ground creature, (Adamah in the Hebrew) the first human came from dust and to dust he will return at the end of his life. "Dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return."

Dust is an indication of our rejection of the Kingdom of God. And life in the Spirit and eternal life indicative of the life we know instead in Christ. We bear the image of the first Adam, we have this dustiness but we bear the image of the second Adam too – the life we know in Christ and so dustiness reduces as Spirit meets our flesh.

Shaking off the dust then is as symbolic as it is practical. Yes, the disciples would have dirtied their feet as they travelled preaching and bringing news of God's reign and rule but they would also have needed to move on to bring the message to those who could receive it; to not continue with the dust but to find those who were receptive and spend their efforts there, on those open to the Spirit.

And what to do about those who we might need to leave in their own dust for a while? Keep loving them anyway, love those who test you, pray for them and wish them well, but know your limits and remind God they are HIS business and give him time to do his job and as he completes his work in them.

We are that amazing combination, all of us, of Spirit and dust.

Remind yourself every now and then. When water and dust mix we get the malleability of clay – we are lumps of stuff becoming … in the potter's hand – keep praying for the Spirit when you sense you're getting dry, let God rebuild you and remake you. Keep praying for the living streams when you walk through clouds of dust. It's okay to shake a little dust from your toes every now and then – you remind God and yourself that he's in charge... not you!

Amen.

Disputes and Conflicts

noreply@blogger.com (Revisingreform) — Tue, 22 Sep 2015 16:49:00 +0000

These conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? James 4:1a

But they were silent, for on the way they had argued with one another... Mark 9:34

Friday just gone, the 17th September, students across our country began their university educations again after the summer break, some will have signed up for the two year Masters degree course in Central London costing £6,500 in the department of Social Sciences and Humanities Westminster Regents campus to study Conflict prevention and Dispute Resolution. James, Jesus' brother was teaching this too over two thousand years ago, along with St Paul and Jesus himself. The Westminster course describes itself thus: The course content is not explicitly concerned with 'peace studies', but the processes of prevention and the processes of resolution embrace the concepts of securing and maintaining peaceful cooperation.

It is the university of Oxford that is appealing for sponsors for its creation of a course called Peace Studies, so Peace Studies exists - this stuff is big business in a world dominated by what James describes as 'disputes and conflicts.' Both James, Jesus' brother and St Paul talk powerfully to believers in God about their conflicts and their disputes. In Corinth believers have brought one another before the secular law courts and Paul is amazed they couldn't find a single person from within their own community to help settle issues. He believes that in asking the secular world to judge their religious tangles there can be no winners – Christian has turned against Christian and this brings the church into disrepute with the world, the world who already thinks the church foolish for preaching the death of God upon a cross and that weakness and vulnerability are the real power in this world.

James believes that the conflicts and disputes that have arisen in the church he writes to, have a much deeper source and he anticipates the teaching that St Paul gives the Roman church, as St Paul describes the human condition with “O wretched man that I am, I want to do the right thing but there is another law at work within me, fighting against what are really my honourable intentions.” It is as if sometimes we just can't help ourselves because we are human. Disputes and conflicts are everywhere and the church is not immune to them because like the rest of planet earth it comprises fallen human beings. Psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists know that conflict is even in some ways a healthy part of human and social development.

Professors of Masters degrees like the one I described earlier, explain the difference that exists between a conflict and a dispute. A dispute, they say, can be resolved, agreements can be reached because there is often something over which a compromise can be made – we have all have these kinds of disputes commonly on those holidays where we bargain for a souvenir. We are in dispute with the seller and usually peaceably and even with a wink, suggest prices each side, until one settles and we walk away satisfied we might have won, of course, the other side might have equally walked away the winner too, if we never knew the original price.

Conflicts are different say the professors of these degree course. Conflicts are about non-negotiables. Conflicts are about ideologies, beliefs, deep underlying values and world-views. Conflicts are harder to solve and can be made up of many disputes along the way.

Interests in a dispute then are negotiable. But conflict is based on non-negotiables. You can study all this for six and half thousand pounds and then maybe learn to negotiate for the second degree you take in the subject unless the price of the course is a non-negotiable.

But why study a secular degree course when you have all the teaching you could ever want from the scriptures? In Matthew 18:15-20 Jesus teaches the church about how it is to deal with the messy relationships that exist between human beings. His logic is all there for the unearthing and it is the original premise in which our justice system is surely based. Thankfully in our country there are systems that will uphold the innocence of parties until proven guilty, although of course, we all know of times when the system has miserably failed. I was very moved on Saturday morning listening to Radio 4 as it interviewed the families of the Birmingham 6 who were imprisoned for 16 years in 1974 for crimes they did not commit.

Henryk and I are 80s kids and we grew up learning the theme tune of a popular television program that you might have heard of, called the A Team, whose protagonists had suffered a similar fate: the lyrics which we are both a little embarrassed to have learnt off by heart go like this: In 1972, a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire the A-Team. I will spare you my singing as the adrenalin-stirring music takes over from the dramatic voice-over prologue.

It was an exciting show and we always cheer for the under-dog, don't we and so viewers cheered for the A Team, these misunderstood and honourable heroes, the victims of a corrupt system. And indeed the film industry is built on this stuff and really conflict is at the heart of every grand narrative. Conflict is at the heart of the gospel too – Jesus' biggest triumph over the powers was in his defeat of them by coming back from the dead – defeating the biggest powers on planet earth – sin and death. It was hugely costly for him as we know.

It is interesting always to see that Jesus's teaching was something he followed through on – he wasn't frightened of challenge and conflict but he sought to bring everything out onto the light and to face it head-on. He challenges the Pharisees, he calls the woman caught in adultery to sin no more, he turns tables in a temple. It seems to me that just as we can not define God by a definition of love that is outside of God and to which he must conform, we can neither create our own definition of Peace and ask that Jesus conform to it either. Neither the Father not the Son will capitulate to definitions outside of themselves, which are, if we really admit it, created by man. When we define love – it must look like God – God is love, God authors love and Christ is Peace, Peace in the flesh, peace incarnated, born for us. Peace is God's Shalom – God's reign and rule on earth – God is love and what therefore does love look like? – it looks like God - and what does God look like – he looks like Jesus – the image of the invisible God and what does Jesus look like – the Bible tells us so – and so the Bible defines love and the Bible defines peace and if we here want to be better by ever increasing degrees at this conflict and dispute business, that seems very fashionable these days, as Christians, we had better begin with the guidance set out here and learn a thing or two from God himself. In Matthew 18:15-20 Jesus says that if someone sins against you, you are to be so wanting the restoration of that person that you will talk with them face to face, if that's just too nerve-racking you are to take some witnesses with you and try to do everything you can to restore your brother or sister.

If they will not meet you there is little you can do. At some point it would seem then we have to let them go but every time we deal with one another it is in private and face-to-face. No mass audiences and no grand hype.

And isn't it hard to do?

This is because ultimately the Bible in its teaching understands that problems are located within and without. Conflict is described in the Bible using the word “agon.” It is the word from which we get the “agony” and “agonize.” It describes the disputes between human beings –external problems but 'agon' also describes the personal struggles we all have to be more patient, to overcome temptation, to exercise control of one's emotions – to have an internal conflict is also to have an 'agon' – Jesus himself experienced agon both in his lengthy pilgrimage through the wilderness and in the garden of Gethsemene – God understands us perfectly in his Son.

It would be wonderful to end this sermon with something twee, some assurance that conflict will fade away, that there really might be some bubble that the Christian can live in, protected from such things, there isn't – with Christ in our lives, however, we are ultimately protected for nothing can separate us from the love of God in Him – the reassurance that I give then comes from theologian John Howard Yoder, (not immune himself to a little internal conflict!) who helpfully reminds us that “Conflict is normal and natural. In the context of Christian ministry there should be more rather than less of it, since truth telling, growth, change, and the demands of righteousness concur in bringing more of it to the surface. Rather than being denied or avoided, conflicts are to be processed, resolved in the light of the message of forgiveness… Conflict resolution is then a special Christian grace, but also a general Christian duty” (Yoder, Conflict Resolution, 6-7).

Let's keep studying our scriptures together for what Jesus has to say to us – not £6500 but just ten pounds for the price of a bible, if you can spare it – as we study this book here (life-long learning) we have the text book par excellence and it is the one that God left us - so let's study together. Amen.

Words are powerful and human fragility

noreply@blogger.com (Revisingreform) — Mon, 14 Sep 2015 19:43:00 +0000

Words are very powerful.

The first words we speak are celebrated.

The latest words spoken we can regret.

What was likely your first word?

What was likely your worst?

What we say with our mouths is more powerful than what we do with our hands. A small tongue hurts more than a clenched fist no matter how many times we tell ourselves sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me – it's not so, is it?

Words are not just words.

Yesterday I had a day of powerful words – there was a wedding here in which words spoken changed status – two became one, a covenant was entered into –a verbal agreement was made that powerfully changed the lives of two families.

But on the way back from that wedding party, on the number 65 bus, words became weapons as a bus driver was insulted- verbally abused by the passengers who'd missed their stop.

James tells us that words are like the bit in a horses' mouth. They have the power to control. The tongue is like the rudder of a ship. It can steer individuals, groups, congregations... nations.

We are people of the Word. Their power should not surprise us. The scriptures begin with God's words – words which bring creation into being.

God begets as the Word is made flesh, crucified, died and buried, he rose again for us.

God's words are life-giving for those who can hear him.

Human words can be dangerous as James reminds us: "How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire! ...

The power that God gave to our words and speech remains but our words can be hijacked by a power not from God. St. Paul tells us that one day every tongue will confess Jesus as Lord but until then there is a struggle over what is accomplished with our words. There's a messy mixing up in each of us of words that bless and words that curse.

“Does a spring pour fourth from the same opening both fresh and salt water? Can a fig tree, my brothers and sisters, bear olives, or a grapevine produce figs?

In an egg box from the supermarket will we find both eggs and strawberries? [as you open an egg box containing strawberries and eggs, take the strawberries out]. No - we are to fulfil our purpose and egg boxes are to contain eggs, the mouth of a Christian should build up and not tear down.

In our gospel today Peter's words let him down. Jesus comes to know there's more teaching to be done. Peter has not understood that what Jesus says about who he is, is true.... and that the consequences are... Jesus must suffer and die.

Can you break this egg into the bowl? [to older child]

Perfect – a body broken – perfect life inside. Jesus is God as well as God's Son (that perfect mystery that is the Trinity) and so broken for us he brings fullness of life. He can break and rise again with a wholeness that is perfect.

However, can you break this egg? [to much younger child, inevitably shell will be mixed with the egg]

Broken again but now messy and imperfect - there are bits of shell mixed up with the life inside here because each of us is fragile, not perfect like Christ and we will be mixtures of brokeneness and life.

And can you go to the pulpit and drop this egg from up there?

James tells us today that because of human brokenness, we must be careful with our words – now this egg bounced back because it's not a real egg – people are real and so only some bounce back and being the shape that it is in, there is no predicting this egg as it goes off in all directions. 'Tis thus, you see, with us, us – some people bounce back and some do not and some go off in directions we could never predict.

So let's be careful with our words and listen to Jesus' brother: James.

We are each of us fragile, asking for more life in Christ but we are each only on the way.

I am not Jesus and neither are you ... none of us are perfect, only Christ the Son of God. He can give the fullness of life that we need. We are foolish and fragile like Peter. Let's remember the beautiful brokenness of the person beside us and remember to pray daily for God to steer the course of their life.

On the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit appears as tongues, tongues of fire that don't destroy but set God's people ablaze. Followers of Jesus speak by the Spirit words that encourage and honour God – let's pray for these tongues of fire as we learn today from James. Amen.

All Together Worship September 13th 2015

Consecration considerations

noreply@blogger.com (Revisingreform) — Thu, 23 Jul 2015 10:26:00 +0000

Women and the Church have released the text of the sermon preached at the Consecrations of Rachel Treweek, Bishop of Gloucester and Sarah Mulally, Bishop of Crediton on 22 July 2015:

Mary Magdalene:
When Dan Brown wrote The Da Vinci Code, he was not the first writer to be attracted to the scent of Mary Magdalene, and he won’t be the last. She is one of the most iconic and enigmatic figures in the Gospels, providing down the years a rich seam of speculative material for creative minds to adorn and exaggerate.

And exaggerate they surely have. It is shameful, and deeply ironic, that the witness of Christian history – written and formulated by men – so often projects on to Mary little more than the deepest insecurities of the male psyche.

For, on any straightforward reading, the Gospels consistently witness to Mary as one of the foremost leaders in the group that surrounded Jesus. And by appearing first to her in the garden of resurrection, the early church was offered a quite extraordinary ‘join-up-the-dots’ moment, an opportunity to connect the radical inclusion of Jesus with the shape of the church that was to bear his name. That the church failed to do so was hardly surprising. It has, after all, taken us until very recently to join up some of these dots ourselves.

I have been given the delicious task of trying to draw something from Mary Magdalene’s story that speaks in to Rachel and Sarah’s ordination to the episcopate today. So I want to offer two simple thoughts about the distinctive contribution of female bishops to the question of leadership in the Church of England, as you both begin to influence the way in which bishops lead the church.

Socialise us, and subvert us.

1. Socialise us

I have some of my most profound thoughts on rush-hour tube trains. Crammed like a vertical sardine in to a Central Line tin can, nose to nose with my fellow commuters, each of us desperately trying to avert our gaze from the eyes only inches from our own, jealously guarding the smallest bit of personal space, that’s when the biggest metaphysical challenge to Christian faith rears its ugly head.

It is not, I have to say, the problem of suffering that keeps me awake at night, nor the doctrine of the Trinity; not the difficulty of squaring substitutionary atonement with the love of God.

No, it is simply this. There are more than 7 billion people in our world. And the thought that God can be in intimate personal communion with each and every one of them, stretches my weak faith to its limits. Especially on the tube.

I don’t know what it’s like in the spacious fields of rural Gloucester or the rolling hills of rustic Devon, but you simply can’t live in London without being challenged by this on a daily basis. There are just so many people …

It’s why, in big cities, no-one even looks at anyone else, let alone talks to them. The scale of the human landscape is too vast, it overpowers you. People retreat in to screens or headphones, shutting out the insistent presence of those with whom we share immediate space. Little wonder someone coined this definition of a city: millions of people being lonely together.

The thing is this: it affects the way we understand leadership. It reduces it to function and structure and bureaucracy, instrument and agency.

But on my tube journey, thundering through subterranean tunnels, 30 seconds from Liverpool Street, I have a moment of revelation. In the garden of the resurrection, whatever outward form and physical appearance Jesus had in his resurrected body, it was not immediately recognisable to Mary. She thought he was the gardener. When she eventually recognises him, it is devastatingly simple. He speaks her name: Mary.

Despite the weakness of my faith, resurrection is and always will be personal. The risen Christ is known in and through relationship.

The heart of Christianity is a relationship. Not a campaign or a project or a structure or a debate or a review or a reorganisation, but a relationship, a knowing by name.

And this gift was entrusted to a woman.

Sarah, if you will permit me one small Stepney departure for a moment, I have been privileged beyond measure to work closely with Rachel for 4 years. She has taught me more about being a bishop than I could ever teach her. She has modelled relational leadership in a way that is a gift to those around her, and a gift to the church. Both of you will both bring huge gifts to your role as bishops, but I have a suspicion that at heart you will embody a relational approach that is truly distinctive.

I’m not talking here about the rather anodyne idea of a leader as a ‘people person’. I’m talking about leadership for social transformation. The real significance of a relational approach is not so much in the sometimes rather saccharin nature of individual personal relationships – ‘hide less, chat more’ as the graffiti on one of my running routes in East London puts it.

Important as this may be, I’m more interested in the dimension of relationship we might more dynamically define as ‘communion’ – that sacramental relationship between and within God and the created order which expresses itself in social transformation and lies behind Jesus’ teaching about the Kingdom of God.

Eucharistic communion is radical and inclusive and utterly relational.

So when Florence Nightingale brought a revolutionary new approach to nursing, or Octavia Hill developed innovations in social housing, their insights were not so much about medicine or the structures of the housing market; these women placed human relationships back at the heart of medicine and housing management, humanising otherwise mechanistic systems and transforming them in the process.

The challenge to women, as we celebrate your full inclusion at every level of leadership in the Church of England, is to transform notions of sacramental communion beyond pastoral relationships and in to the very structures of society. That will be socially transformational leadership.

In the secular leadership world there is a fascinating trend towards CQ: Cultural Intelligence. Julia Middleton, Chief Executive of Common Purpose, has written a book exploring the significance of Cultural Intelligence for the next generation of leaders. CQ is just a fancy way of saying that in the emerging global world, characterised above all else by diversity and difference, the best leaders will be marked out by their ability to navigate the diversity of the cultural landscape in a relational way; as the Archbishop put it in his Roscoe lecture on Monday: facing each other.

It has taken a woman to point this out.

Socialise us. Be relational in your leadership, and help all of us to do the same.

Secondly, finally – and more briefly – subvert us.

2. Subvert us

I was directed recently by a friend to an obscure short story by EM Forster (‘The Story of a Panic’). Set in the rather crusty, straight-laced world of Edwardian society, the story relates the delightfully agitational and alarmingly disruptive intervention of the unseen figure of ‘Pan’ to strip away the stifling effects of the dominant culture and liberate an altogether more vibrant expression of life.

Pan subverts the patterns of an ordered, controlled society where a powerful elite constrains and limits the cultural norms of belief and behaviour. E M Forster’s story is a fascinating reflection on the positive effects of challenging convention and unmasking the unconscious bias of an unexamined orthodoxy.

Years later the German psychologist Erich Fromm came up with the notion of ‘anonymous authority’ – that unseen influence within the modern world which affects the way that people believe and behave, which he says is “a cultural pressure all the more effective for being invisible and source-less”.

If I’m honest, I’m a bit frightened of Pan. Perhaps we all are. Perhaps that’s the point. But the ‘panic’ that EM Forster wrote about was not a wholly negative thing. He represented it as a catalyst for positive change, both for individuals and for society.

It’s hard to escape the fact that Jesus chose the outsiders of his world to share his life with, those whose very existence was disturbing and disruptive to the accepted norms of belief and behaviour. He lived and preached a gospel of radical inclusion, and it upset the apple-cart of conventional religion.

Was this why he chose Mary Magdalene as the first witness to the resurrection? Not so much to ‘disturb the comfortable’ as to disturb the conventional. For it is in the disturbance of people like Mary Magdalene that we may learn to see the world – and God – afresh.

I hope that women bishops will disturb us. I hope they will challenge the conventions of the C of E, which continues to be led and directed by too many people like me – white, male, middle-aged professionals.

I’ve always loved the notion of the court jester – the outsider who is nonetheless welcomed in to the court of power because they are the only one who can speak truth to the King. Every society, secular or religious, needs a way of allowing non-conformity. I hope that women in the college of bishops will raise non-conformity to new heights in the way they exercise leadership among us. I hope they will disturb our conventions, and unmask the unconscious bias which constrains our models of leadership within the dominant cultural norms that are so powerful that we hardly even notice or question them.

Rachel and Sarah, you did not choose to be ordained on the feast of Mary Magdalene. You did not choose her; perhaps she chose you. So look around at this packed cathedral. It is a sign of how much we love you, of how much we value you, of how much we trust you. So be bold and courageous in how you lead us. Filled with the Spirit of the radically inclusive Jesus, and touched with the spirit of the enigmatic Mary of Magdala, please be a little bit dangerous:

Socialise us, and subvert us. Amen.

With a status in Mayfair

noreply@blogger.com (Revisingreform) — Thu, 16 Jul 2015 14:51:00 +0000

One of the surprising things about coming to London has been the price of Real Estate as my Canadian uncle would put it. We own a caravan and on the basis of its square footage, if we were to park it in central London and Mayfair moreover our caravan's 140 square foot at Mayfair's £5000 a square foot would be worth £700,000, not bad for two wheels and mock pine panelling.

I look at my caravan in a whole new light these days. Which is probably a good thing because I am about to spend two weeks in it at New Wine.

Why am I telling you this? – because Paul is telling us about the Real Estate: the inheritance that we have in Christ in his letter to Ephesus this morning. St Paul delivers it with all the speed of an Estate Agent. He is so passionate about this vision of the inheritance that we have in God that he expresses it all in one long sentence, the longest sentence of the Bible, comprising 202 words. Have you ever been on the receiving end of a sales pitch?

Now my children know there won't be a particularly good inheritance from their mum and dad, although they too are beginning to grasp the value of the only thing we have to give them: the caravan – they will have to find a way of parking it in the right place, though, to release its value.

And this is the point that I hope you will grasp today. God has this inheritance available for you – but you have to park it in the right place. You've got to get it off the drive and into first gear and ensure you have some fuel for the engine that's going to pull it and I put it to you that God has provided the fuel too – the power of the Holy Spirit. It is through the power of the Holy Spirit that you can understand how rich an inheritance you have been given.

If I want you to grasp this, St Paul really wants you to grasp this - delivering his pitch in one long and passionate sentence. Have you ever had a PPI phonecall – hearing that there is this financial situation about which you might be unaware? You have this financial past that could now make you richer than you realised you ever were. Now unfortunately PPI fails to deliver, there never was any pot of money at the end of the rainbow which somehow you have failed to be owed.

St Paul on the other hand wants you to know that one of the key riches you have in Christ is that he has bought you back, paid your debts and secured your place in God. We have redemption through his blood. And this is just one of the spiritual riches we can know in God – this perfect freedom from those things to which we are otherwise made captive, otherwise indebted.

Paul's explanation of our riches in God is beautiful, it is trinitarian in shape. He tells us about God who is the source of everything, Jesus who is the agent and the Holy Spirit who is the seal.

Jesus is our Estate Agent, if you like, and by that I am not being flippant – I am trying to convey the fact that it is through Jesus and by his work that we can receive our inheritance, enter the dwelling place that God secures for us and we have this made real for us by the Spirit.

The Holy Spirit seals this, marks us out as belonging to God just as your signature on the mortgage or the title deeds, or on the cheque marking your transfer of financial funds seals your exchange on a house and makes a new home yours. Your inheritance comes to you because Christ is both the broker and the agent, he has purchased your inheritance for you; makes possible for you those blessings from God. In Christ in the heavenly places we are richer than we understand ourselves to be. In fact, we aren't able to realise the riches God has lavished on us unless the Spirit makes this real for us.

It could very well be that we see caravans parked on front drives when really they are parked in Mayfair. We have to understand that the Spirit has made real for us our new location as a people in Christ.

This was real for Paul – his earthly location as he writes this letter is a Roman jail, his spiritual location is as a person in Christ, hence he is able to write one of the most beautiful sentences describing God's love for us from a prison cell.

His earthly location is prison and that might sometimes feel so for us, imprisoned by circumstances, attitudes, debts real and imagined, ones we could pay off if we adjusted our lives or could just put down - understanding ourselves to be forgiven so that we might forgive.

We can all experience prisons of our own making and Jesus speaks to remind us today of our real identity not as a people indebted but as a people set free, as chosen, redeemed, adopted, holy and blameless in his sight not because of anything we have or have not done but because of what God did for us before the foundation of the world and moreover through the death and resurrection of his Son. He took you, a bit second-hand and maybe weary, like my caravan and transformed you into Mayfair Real Estate – you don't look much different on the outside, you are still the same square footage but your value to God is infinite and the riches you have in him eternal.

Let's begin then to look at one another as those who are in Christ: chosen before the foundation of the world, beautiful to behold, being made holy and blameless.

Let's begin to value our worth and the worth of one another, to behave like the adopted children of God that we are, co-operating with God to get the van off the drive, put it into first gear, be fuelled by the Spirit so that we might start moving forward, perhaps very carefully – no caravans in the fast lane, and with a good set of mirrors to watch out for aggressive traffic all around us but into a place where the ground is good and solid and the awning at the front of the van has enough room for everyone.

Let's get on the road and begin to motor and trust that with God the fuel doesn't run down and the value only increases. Amen.

Undoing the reluctance of Adam

noreply@blogger.com (Revisingreform) — Tue, 30 Jun 2015 12:53:00 +0000

Jesus' ministry challenges us to reach out and never give up.

We are to reach out to this Jesus who has revealed himself to us.

We are to start out to meet him only to find him completely turned to us.

It was always about God's grace, remember, God being 'for you' through the cross. God chose you, long before you chose him. God chose you before the foundation of the world. It delights God when we RSVP to invitations he has sent.

In our scriptures (Mark 5:21-43) two more people reach out to Jesus and will never give up. They both have much to lose – and face potential judgement from the crowd. Both would be untouchable - the woman due to her condition and the man because death has visited his abode. They both reach out to Jesus with actions that are humble and full of faith - the woman pushing on in a condemning crowd, the man, a religious leader, with his face in the grit of the ground.

Grit and sweat and heaving crowds – gospel stuff that overwhelms because God's love is overwhelming - unstoppable as it resounds around.

Grit and sweat and heaving crowds – I took my ten year old to the fair yesterday. I walked with my daughter to Ealing Green and as we walked along we negotiated holding hands. “Sticky hands mum” she said – so hot – and we let go. We negotiate touch all the time depending on such things. And yet Jesus touches the untouchables and makes them clean, reaches out in all the awkwardness with little regard for himself.

As a family we see friends soon I meet annually as we New Wine holiday in Somerset, I will have to remember after a year how I greet each person when we gather again. Will I handshake? Cheek-kiss? Single hug? Double-hug? I need to remember one friend who has said quite jovially she doesn't hug, it's not a problem instead she does this kind of squeezy fore-arm thing. I share this point about touch because in Mark's story today Jesus touches the untouchables and we are challenged by this as we negotiate contact all the time. The Christian story is about a God who reaches down in being born and with arms outstretched upon the cross to give his world a mighty hug restoring us to him.

In the Cisteen chapel, Michael Angelo's famous painting of God and Adam shows God's body twisting as he completely extends his arm to Adam to touch him with a fingertip. Adam only partially raises an arm and doesn't lean on in to God. We need to acknowledge that this is our tendency and reach on out to him.

We have a Jesus of the untouchables, a scandalising Messiah as we watch a woman reaching out to him, pushing her way into the crowd and having faith that knows no bounds. We watch Jairus whose name means enlightened who will learn something new about a God who has the power to bring life again where all was thought past dead.

Jesus ministers to them and not to others in that crowd because these two dared reach out to him, despite what others said.

Winston Churchill famously admonished the boys of Harrow School to: "Never, ever, ever, ever, ever give up. Never give up. Never give up. Never give up." Jesus said it first and by outsiders it's still heard. Never give up, he says – keep reaching out to me, I already have you spotted, I am in fact there before you in the crowd, I've come to take you home again, like the Father of the prodigal, Christ hitches up his robes and positively runs to restore the life half lived. Jairus' little girl will go on to live again and a woman returns restored both in her body and to her kind, she'd known her very life blood draining away for twelve years long but would now live a life in Him with a kind of wholeness never known.

We are challenged then today to undo the reluctance of the Adam in us, to twist ourselves perhaps uncomfortably to reaching out again– to a sweaty, sticky, uncomfortable, scandalising gospel. To risk a little reputation for the life that comes from him.

So the next time you mess up a greeting, lunge for a hug to be offered a fore-arm, shake a hand and find it sweaty, mix your lives up in uncomfortable ways think of God who in his Son did sweat and blood and grit and crowds and think upon his promise to never, ever, ever, never, ever, even to the point of his own death, ever give up on you. Amen.

The fear (being in awe of) the Lord or Whose church is it anyway?

noreply@blogger.com (Revisingreform) — Thu, 25 Jun 2015 14:12:00 +0000

Do you think that the disciples were more frightened before or after the stilling of the storm?

Which is more challenging – accepting your own demise, that the water might fill the boat or that you'll be saved and plunged into an entirely new way of life?

The Christian faith requires your acknowledging Jesus as God.

The Christian life leads to the slow death of the self for your new life in Christ.

Therefore do you think the disciples were more afraid before or after the stilling of the storm?

After the stilling of the storm, he who had only been teacher is now something else altogether – he is God.

He is God because only God has power over the very things God has made: the elements.

The elements dominate man no matter how hard we exert our mastery over them. In a fight with the ocean, the ocean will always win and it is heart-breaking to hear frequently of the drowning of so many people taking to the oceans in make-shift boats to flee countries where life hangs in the balance, to then lose life completely against an enemy that is ocean; those 'proud waves' as God describes them for Job. There have been many who have lost against the ocean.

When my second daughter, 18 months old, slipped beneath the water in a play pool we had in the back of our garden and drank the water into her lungs as I distracted fought with a deck chair, I learnt that day that her life was so fragile – that two foot of water could win and as I threw her over my knee and hit her on the back and watched the water gush out and the air rush in, I learnt that life is always 'gift.'

Do you think the disciples were more afraid before or after the stilling of the storm?

More afraid as Jesus slept or more afraid with him fully awake?

It is often in the storms of life that we become more aware of Jesus:

“Bail me out we cry, don't sleep, I need you now, it's convenient for me now to seem to wake you up – only really it never was you that were sleeping - it was me, to your presence that was always there, but I left you at the far end of my boat, made you a little cosy on a cushion and forgot you. I was asleep to you but now I am awake and I am crying “Bail me out Jesus, still the storms, don't have me perish.”

And for many there is that turning point.

Life changes, the life of Christ grows in you after such events.

He is no longer asleep.

The doll I brought back from hospital as a gift from my newborn baby to her older sister (so we could both care for babies together – I had read somewhere it helps the older child adjust and not become jealous) had a button where we could switch her off. She could switch off plastic baby Annabel with all her expensive accessories, I couldn't and wouldn't want to turn off my second daughter and I was constantly present to her presence apart from one moment caught up with a deck chair...

Is there a way in which you could become more attentive to Jesus, present to his presence?

Realise that it isn't him who sleeps at the far end of the boat, he just demonstrates rest, which is, after all the goal of creation: that all should be calm because reconciled to God.

That it might be you who needs waking, perhaps with the splashing of a little water, the slight sting of the salt that is to characterise your life. Your saltiness is a distinctiveness which has other people notice to whom you belong.

You belong to Jesus.

Is this frightening this being distinctive, this admission that Christ is God, that he has power over all the little things and the hugest storms that sweep into your life, that he knows your every thought, all your yesterdays and tomorrows and that all he requires of you is that you stay awake to his glorious and disturbing presence?

Do you then think the disciples were more afraid before or after the stilling of the storm?

"Why are you afraid?" He asks and they were filled with awe and said to one another, ‘Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?’

When I take a funeral, as I do from time to time, there is one part of the set liturgy that I am bold enough to change. It comes near the end of the service when I realise, that in a moment, the grieving will really begin, when the activity of planning and orchestrating music and memories will come to an end and people will return to lives and homes that will never be quite the same.

It is these lines:
Our days are like the grass; we flourish like a flower of the field;
when the wind goes over it, it is gone and its place will know it no more.
But your merciful goodness endures for ever and ever toward those who .. and I say...are awed by your presence

Not those who 'fear you' – but those awed by your presence - because this is really what we mean when we talk about 'fearing God.' When Jesus asks the disciples why they are afraid, he will replace their fear with wonder and with awe and with perhaps just silence – as they become still and encounter the Word gone forth, the Word of God, the Word made flesh, God come down from heaven to earth.

There is a right fear of the Lord which is a being lost in wonder, a being lost in praise. A being lost which is a being found again, a coming round to God, an awakening to his presence so that where ever and when ever storms might blow about, we will know a certain peace that is only found in God.

Our God is not a frightening God. But we must dare stay in the boat and behold this God who loves, who only asks us for our hearts so that he might do the rest.

Do you think the disciples were more afraid before or after the stilling of the storm?

It's because the call of discipleship is costly but the gains outweigh the losses, that we are to push on into his presence as a people characterised by love, that we are not to be afraid but only lost in wonder and journeying to the other side which will likely look quite similar to here.

Praying always for stiller waters,
Trusting the Father and the Son,
That in the presence of the Spirit his plans might be begun,
That we can be so distracted, bailing water from the boat,
Trust that Christ will calm our storming and we will all stay afloat.
We have a God of rainbows,
Of promises he keeps,
He is faithful even when sometimes he only seems to sleep.
Let's awaken to his plans for us,
Row on, reach the other side,
Don't imagine it before you have landed,
Let it take you by surprise,
It will not knock the wind from you
Or have you clinging sickly to the side,
Jesus wants the best for us,
His church: his earthly bride.

Have faith I say with Jesus. It's his church, not yours or mine. And so, in some ways, yes, the disciples were probably more afraid after the stilling of the storm.

After the stilling of the storm, they had to get out of the boat and actually do something.
Whilst they fought the wind and waves their energies were taken up with that.

Enough, peace, be still.

'They took him with them into the boat, just as he was.' Christ the captain of this ship, steers us in his direction to acknowledge him as God and that this Church is His.