Author: Dave Faulkner

I'm a British Methodist minister, married with two adult children. I blog from a moderate evangelical-missional-charismatic perspective. My interests include digital photography (currently using a Nikon Z8), contemporary music, and watching football (Tottenham Hotspur) and cricket. For my photography, please visit www.flickr.com/photos/davefaulkner

Outsider

I had been asked to join a new group. Oh all right then, committee. Yesterday afternoon was my first meeting. I had the address. It wasn’t in a part of town I knew well, but I looked it up and planned my route. I’m a big boy, after all.

It took ages to find a parking space that wasn’t in a residents-only zone. Then I had trouble finding the house: it was hidden away behind others on the road. By this time, I was five minutes late. I knocked on the door. No answer. I banged more loudly. Still nothing. Yet there were cars parked at the house. It was also a house with a name as well as a number, so I was doubly sure I was at the right address. Nothing.

I came home and sent an email to the chair of the committee. He rang later, profusely apologetic. He’s a decent guy, and I expect the other committee members are, too. I didn’t harangue him in the phone conversation or the email. Nobody had thought to give me the additional instructions I needed. It turned out they were meeting in an outhouse at the address. I would never have guessed.

It gave me a little bit of ‘outsider’ experience – something we could do with encountering as regular church people. In the evening, we had our Circuit Meeting and discussed a Circuit Review of us that had been written by a District officer. We noted how many churches generally think they are good at welcoming, although a few observe that they can’t get people to stay or to integrate after the warm welcome. Have we lost the sense of what it feels like to be an outsider or newcomer, because we’ve all been involved in church for so long?

Various suggestions came at the Circuit Meeting. We facetiously thought of the Ship Of Fools Mystery Worshipper. We thought that people who would not be widely recognised in the circuit might go from one church to another and see what kind of reception they had. I’m sure there are other good ideas, too. Maybe you have some that you’d like to post in the comments.

But it struck me all the more how many of us have lost the sense of just how unfamiliar, alien, even dangerous and scary it feels to non-Christians to cross the threshold of a church building. If you talk to visitors at one of those declining events, a church wedding or baptism, notice their discomfort and fear.

There are things we can do in order to be more hospitable, and they are good. But even that is not enough. That still assumes an ‘attractional’ model where our initial goal in mission is to get ‘them’ to come to ‘us’. I believe there is all the more argument here for the missional approach as well, where we Christians are the ones who take the risk of going onto unfamiliar territory where those with whom we wish to share God’s love are comfortable.

Of course, that levers up the fear factor higher than it already is among many churchgoers, who are so nervous of talking about their faith that they only place they might remotely do it is on church premises. But this is the cost we must pay for the sake of God’s mission. How much does God love the world? How much does God love us? How much will we love?

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Snapshots

Our hairdresser is a family friend. We go together to her house for haircuts. Earlier this year, we were at Gemma’s and we noticed some fabulous new photos of her daughter.

‘Where did you get those done?’

She replied that she had used a new photographer in town. We had a 20″ x 16″ portrait of the children in the dining room, but it was two years old. At the age of our small children, that’s a long time in which they had changed.

So we booked a session with Melanie, who was wonderful, and Debbie asked that one of the shots be a new 20″ x 16″ as a birthday present for her. Mark was impeccable during the shoot, and Rebekah started out well before switching into full drama queen mode.

A little while later, Melanie gave us a CD of the best shots, and we spent an evening narrowing down our choices. Eventually, we placed the order and last week I collected them. They are fabulous. The new big portrait is up. Mark’s cheeky smile radiates across the room, and in Rebekah’s case you can see glimpses of the beautiful young woman she will become. It’s stunning.

So the first purpose of this post is an unsolicited plug for Melanie’s work. I’m not posting copies of the photos here for two reasons: firstly, I would be breaching her copyright, and secondly I don’t in any case put photos of our children in the most public parts of the web. I only use parts of my Facebook profile and Flickr that friends can see.

But the extended purpose of this post is to meditate on change and continuity. It’s there in the different photos of our children, separated by two years. It’s even more obvious when you go to the church social and the ice-breaker game is stuck on the walls: ‘Guess which church member this is as a baby.’

This struck me even more on Friday night, when Debbie and I sat down to watch Friday Night With Jonathan Ross. The main guest was one of my musical heroes from the 1970s, Stevie Wonder. His run of albums from ‘Music Of My Mind’ to ‘Hotter Than July’ (excepting ‘Journey Through The Secret Life Of Plants’!) has to be one of the most sustained streaks of brilliance in popular music. I don’t care for much of his music since – indeed if ‘I Just Called To Say I Love You’ could be permanently deleted from the world’s memory, I’d be happy.

But I love his Seventies music as much today in my forties as in my teens. ‘Living For The City’ still has to be one of the great social justice songs. So am I behaving as an overgrown teenager when I put his music on, or am I still genuinely appreciating his music, despite the fact that I have grown – and hopefully matured?

One thing I did was ponder the roots of my musical taste. My love of some black music clearly comes from growing up in multi-racial north London. My best friend’s brother introduced me to Otis Redding and Stax.

But my taste is – well, the polite word is ‘eclectic’. Singer-songwriters feature prominently. Some of that comes from being a child in church during the Sixties when folk and protest music was acceptable in the mainline denominations. It was more respectable than that pop racket. Also, I’m quite an introspective person, so the Seventies singer-songwriters were an obvious touchstone for me – Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell and so on.

And I’ve always had a thing about lyrics. I’m keen on meaning, so those people who say that lyrics don’t matter have little sympathy from me. Not only that, I tried writing songs with my best friend. Given that he was and is a musician and I never have been, the words were my department. Don’t worry, none of them has ever been released. You are safe. But it gave me a deeper appreciation of lyrics.

The serious side of me also went for prog rock – notably Genesis and Yes. (Genesis went down the pan when they became a pop band.) My love of the serious and the complex kept my loyalty to this kind of music in the punk wars. The late Alan Freeman once held a vote on his Saturday afternoon Radio 1 show. Punk yes or no? No won 51% to 49%. I was in the 51.

You can still trace a lot of these influences in music I enjoy thirty years later. Boo Hewerdine, John Hiatt and Aimee Mann are all currently trapped in my car CD player, strongly representing the singer-songwriter camp. I recently bought Stomu Yamashta‘s Complete Go Sessions on eBay on the prog front. And Stevie Wonder on the TV probably has me digging out some of those classic albums.

At the same time, however, there are aspects of my teenage record buying habits that I wouldn’t want people to know about. There are some singles I was glad disappeared when I finally and reluctantly said goodbye to vinyl. I’m too embarrassed to name them here, so I’ll just leave you to guess. Some of them should only have been bought by teenage girls, that’s all I’m saying. It’s change and continuity again.

All this is an extended introduction to say that holding together continuity and change is an important spiritual and theological issue. I’m not even referring to the management of change in a congregation, although there is plenty that could be said about that. At this point, I’m confining myself to the personal aspects.

The Reformation enshrined this when it said that people were simul justus et peccator, both justified and yet still sinners. Justification brings redemption and leads to sanctification, that is, change, yet we are still what we always were: sinners.

Or to put it another way: our past and our present go a long way to explaining us, and hope draws us on into God’s New Creation.

And in that respect, Tom Wright’s great sign of the New Creation to come is the Resurrection of Jesus, itself am expression of continuity and change in the nature of Christ’s resurrection body. There was continuity: once the disciples had got past their considerable intellectual barriers to resurrection happening in the middle of history, Jesus was recognisable. He was ‘known by the scars’, to take Michael Card‘s old phrase. But there was also change: whatever miracles Jesus did before the crucifixion, he never suddenly appeared in the middle of a locked room, as is recorded twice in John 20. In the Resurrection, Jesus is endowed with the ‘spiritual body’ of which Paul speaks in 1 Corinthians 15, and which my MPhil mentor Richard Bauckham used to say means, ‘a body animated by the Holy Spirit’.

So it isn’t necessarily a mark of immaturity if certain things remain from my youth. They may be part of an acceptable continuity that will travel with and in me throughout life in this age and the age to come.

Indeed, if the theory behind the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is correct that we have the same personality type for life, then that is an expression of this. You’ll see from the description I gave about the roots of some of my musical taste that a fair bit has to do with personality. No personality type is perfect: all have weaknesses. However, this is not necessarily about moral failure or weakness. God made humans to be interdependent, and in the Church God made us to be the Body of Christ, with complementary gifts.

But other things will fall away and be replaced or renewed. And that’s OK, too. That’s where the issues of holiness come in. So for example years ago I read an article in Third Way magazine about one of my musical heroes, Van Morrison. The author (Martin Wroe?) acknowledged that Morrison was not so much a practitioner of faith as a student of religions. He also acknowledged the commonly known fact about Morrison’s personality, namely that he is a notorious curmudgeon. Rock’s Mister Grumpy, indeed. However, he expressed a hope that there would be a place for him in the kingdom of God.

If there is, then it will be by the grace of God, just as it is for all of us. However, the question will arise for him, as it does for everyone, of change. How will he and we be made ‘fit for heaven’ (or the New Creation)? Transformation begins in this life by the sanctifying work of the Spirit, but is it complete at death?

The classical Catholic answer to this has been in terms of Purgatory. Tom Wright makes a good response to this in ‘Surprised By Hope‘. He describes it as a medieval metaphor and myth, without biblical support, having more to do with Aquinas and Dante. He quotes the current Pope, who appeals to 1 Corinthians 3, where the Lord himself is the fire in judgment who purifies us. Purgatory is unnecessary. God will see to it that we are fit for heaven and the New Creation.

And when he does, in that favourite verse of babysitters, ‘We shall not all sleep but we shall all be changed.’ By the grace of God, he will make us worthy of his presence. And there will be a degree of recognition due to continuity, although exactly what that is becomes another difficult question. Suffice to say it must be about more than physical likeness.

Who knows, maybe even some of my music collection will survive!

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Sermon: Forgiveness

Matthew 18:21-35

Introduction
Many years ago, I heard the true story of a young Christian woman who was raped. Many who suffer rape keep their identity secret, but this woman rushed to her church for support and told the story. 

The support came in this form: ‘Have you forgiven him?’

Job’s comforters, indeed.

We believe in forgiveness, and this parable makes clear that it is paramount in discipleship. But do we always handle forgiveness well? Is it really a choice between denying the opportunity to express your pain -as happened to the woman who was raped – and being bitter?

Today, rather than expound the parable of the unforgiving servant in my normal style, I’d like us to explore what forgiveness is and why we need to forgive.

What Is Forgiveness?
What do we make of Peter’s question about how often we should forgive? Seven times? Seventy times seven? (Or should that just be seventy-seven times – so much easier!)

I think we generally accept that Jesus is not putting a ceiling on forgiveness when we reach four hundred and ninety. Forgiveness is something we keep having to do – and I’ll come back to that question later.

But I think Jesus is also showing us that forgiveness is the permanent refusal to exercise vengeance. The numbers ‘seven’ and ‘seventy’ are connected with vengeance in Genesis chapter four. In that chapter, Cain kills Abel. The Lord chooses not to kill Cain, but makes him a wanderer, and threatens seven-fold vengeance on anyone who kills him. Later, one of Cain’s grandsons, Lamech, kills a man who wounded him, and says, ‘If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold’ (Genesis 4:24).

So when Jesus says, ‘Not seven times but seventy times seven,’ he is withdrawing the vengeance option. That is what forgiveness is. True forgiveness never says, ‘I forgive you, it was nothing,’ it says, ‘Yes, you hurt me, but I choose to lay aside my desire for vengeance.’

This is probably one of the most important ways in which we can be witnesses to Christ today. Most people will not read a Bible, but they will read our lives. So when we refrain from the option to press the vengeance button, we are allowing them to read about Jesus.

Of course, there is much more to what forgiveness is. Just to examine the Greek word employed here by Matthew and other New Testament writers tells us something. The word,aphiémi, means to set free. It’s what you do when you cancel a debt: you set the debtor free from their obligation to repay you. Forgiveness is like that. You release the one who has hurt you from the obligation to pay for what they have done. You allow them to walk away. You choose not to exercise your right of punishment.

But forgiveness is much more than setting free the offender. In a wonderful way, forgiveness sets us free, too. If we harbour resentment, then we become bound up, as if ropes have been wrapped around us. When we forgive someone, then the ropes of bitterness fall away. Forgiveness sets everyone free.

Perhaps another image of forgiveness will help. The Psalmist says, ‘As far as the east is from the west, so far has he [God] removed our transgressions from us.’ To forgive is to remove. It is to take sin away. Think of the hurt from sin as a large object that you cannot put in the wheelie bin for your normal rubbish collection. Instead, you open up the rear doors of your car and fold down the rear seats. You open up the hatch and remove the parcel shelf. Then you put the large object in the back, take it to the council depot at Drovers Way and dispose of it. How do you feel? Considerable relief, I expect. 

So it is with God’s forgiveness. Sin is landfill. That may not be a good illustration environmentally, but I’m sure you get the point. It’s buried. He doesn’t dig it up again. I think that’s why R T Kendall in his book Total Forgiveness says that if you keep talking about a wrong that has been done to you, then you probably haven’t forgiven. I’m not sure I entirely agree with him, but I take the general point. Forgiveness takes away sin. There is a sense in which it isn’t here any more.

One thing that is often said about forgiveness is that if we truly forgive, then we forget as well. ‘Forgive and forget’ are put together. Perhaps that’s a development of the idea that forgiveness is about the removal of sin. Others say, ‘I can forgive but I can’t forget’, and feel condemned by those who associate forgiveness with forgetting what happened. So does forgiveness necessarily involve forgetting the offence?

I am in the middle of reading a book by an Anglican priest containing his reflections on divorce, having been through a divorce himself. Early on in the book he gives one definition of forgiveness. He doesn’t describe it as forgetting at all. He calls it ‘remembering well’. Humanly, we are unlikely to forget bad things that have been done to us. The more we try to forget, the more they are entrenched in our memory – much like the proverbial flying elephant. But we can come to a point where we hold the memory in a holy way. When the memory comes back to us, we choose not to bitter. One way of doing this is by praying that God will bless the person who hurt us.

Some years ago, I heard a tape from Spring Harvest of a sermon by Caesar Molebatsi. If you haven’t heard of him, Molebatsi is a black South African pastor much involved in justice and reconciliation issues. During the terrible years of apartheid, he was hit by a white car driver and lost a leg. Although the driver was caught, he never apologised. Molebatsi has a permanent reminder of the violence in that he has only one leg. He regularly has to choose to forgive, because it is impossible to forget when the sin done to him meant he is without one of his limbs. His only choice is ‘remembering well’.

And that links with one other observation I’d like to make about forgiveness. One of our great mistakes when it comes to forgiveness is to think that it is instant, or a one-off. The moment we have said, ‘I forgive you,’ everything is fine. It isn’t. Someone like Caesar Molebatsi knows that. Bob Mayo, the author of the book on divorce I mentioned, also knows that. Whatever happened between him and his wife, he has the permanent reminder that she is no longer there, but living somewhere else.

No: forgiveness, says Bob Mayo, is a journey. It may take time and practice. We may long for reconciliation with the one who wronged us, but often forgiveness precedes reconciliation. It may be a long time before we can face seeing someone who hurt us deeply, even though we hold no bitterness against them. 

Miroslav Volf is a Croatian theologian who has written much on forgiveness and reconciliation, especially in the light of his experiences through the wars in the Balkans after the collapse of communism. One of his books, ‘Free Of Charge‘, was the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Lent book in 2006. In it, he says that forgiveness means we blame but do not punish. We do not pretend about the offence. It is real. But we choose not to punish, or press for punishment.

That is rather like God’s treatment of us with regard to our own sin. The Holy Spirit convicts us of sin so that we might repent and follow Jesus. The Spirit of God never pretends that the sin was a fiction. Otherwise, we could never repent and walk in the ways of God’s kingdom. But having convicted us, there is no sentence and we are treated as if we had never sinned, even though we have. If this is how God treats us, then it is also the goal we seek in our journey of forgiveness.

Why Forgive?
Having explored in quite a few ways what forgiveness is, I’m sure it’s already evident to a large extent why we need to forgive.

First of all, because it is consistent with the character of God. The Lord may say, ‘Vengeance is mine,’ but that is surely because God is the only one to whom vengeance may safely be trusted. In our hands, vengeance becomes revenge, not justice. But ‘the Lord is slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love’, and the work of the Holy Spirit within us is to make us slower to anger and more ready to be rich in love.

It’s central to our calling to become more Christ-like. Whatever the word ‘Christian’ means today, it started out as meaning ‘little Christ’. Debbie and I say that Rebekah is her mini-me and Mark is my mini-me. Notwithstanding the fact that the ‘mini-me’ language comes from the Austin Powers films, where Mini-Me is the son of Doctor Evil, I nevertheless assume that Jesus is longing to see a vast crowd of his ‘mini-me’s on earth. A central way in which we can be more like him is in adopting the practice and discipline of forgiveness.

For of course Jesus often called his would-be disciples with the words, ‘Follow me’. He didn’t simply mean a geographical following of him, but following his lifestyle. It’s what Jewish rabbis did: they expected their disciples to follow them in the sense of imitating their life. So if discipleship is about following Jesus and Jesus modelled forgiveness, then it’s of the essence of Christian faith to forgive.

But this approach poses questions, and one is this: another strand of the call to faith is what Paul emphasises, namely that God saves us in Christ entirely by his own work, and not on the merits of our good deeds. How then can it be essential to forgive? Wouldn’t that be salvation by good works, rather than by faith?

I believe the answer is something along these lines. God does indeed save us entirely by his own work in Christ. We receive that by faith, and faith itself is not a good work, either: it is the holding out of empty hands in trust to receive all that God has done for us. However, the test of faith is whether we are grateful for God’s gifts – or as Paul put it to the Galatians, ‘faith working by love’. It’s therefore reasonable and logical to expect that those who by faith receive what God gives us in Christ demonstrate that by showing grateful love. And since Christ shows us the love of God supremely in forgiveness, it behoves us to show true faith by being forgiving people. That is what makes sense of the parable. That is why at the end the master is angry with the unforgiving servant. He has not demonstrated this.

One other question occurs to me, and it is the question of justice in society. If forgiveness means blaming but not punishing, how do we keep good order in society? Won’t criminals run rampant, free from concern about being imprisoned? Perhaps a story I have told before might help.

On the night of my thirtieth birthday, I was in Manchester training for the ministry and was invited to a friend’s house for a celebratory meal of – beans on toast. My friend and his wife offered to call a taxi to take me back to college, but – feeling I knew city life as a Londoner and being too stingy to pay for a ride – I declined. That was my mistake. On the way back, I was mugged by a teenager. He smashed my glasses and took cash. I had no hesitation after the attack in calling the police. As it turned out, they didn’t catch my assailant (even though he was clearly known in the area), but I resolved that if they had, I would have co-operated with a prosecution. However, I felt I could only do that as a Christian once I had committed to forgiving the thug. Society needed justice, and the criminal needed forgiveness. I felt that was a fair balance.

And that ties up some of the other reasons why we forgive, which I hinted at earlier: forgiveness is good and indeed authentic witness. If there is one thing we can do in society to show Christ, it is to forgive.

So may God who is rich in mercy fill us with the knowledge and experience of his mercy, that we too may be rich in mercy to others.

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Trafficking

If you care about the trafficking of girls and women into prostitution – surely a modern-day slavery – here is a letter you can sign to the Newspaper Society, asking for the removal of certain small ads from all papers.

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Osteopath

When I was eighteen, my life changed unexpectedly. Since the age of five, I had been identified as a university prospect. I had a place (subject to A-Level grades) to read Computer Science at Imperial College, London. One month before the A-Levels, though, a sudden searing pain in my neck put paid to them. Although a consultant rheumatologist prescribed some physiotherapy that regained the movement in my neck and the pain reduced, it never completely subsided. I took a clerical job in the Civil Service and decided to review my long-term future. Ultimately that led to theological colleges and the ministry, but that’s another story.

Fast-forward to six years ago. My wife was pregnant with our first child, but I was still suffering from neck pain and frequent headaches. I didn’t want to be regularly out of action when a baby was around. My GP recommended the osteopath attached to the practice, and I began seeing Jamie regularly. One of the first things he explained to me was that my neck problems began with my feet. I could begin to teach my body a healthier posture if I based my sitting positions on how I placed my feet. Then the spine would start to move into a better position.

When we moved here three years ago, Jamie recommended a practice, and I now see Tom every six weeks. This morning I saw him. He is always full of helpful advice. I explained today that on my daily power walk that I take for fitness and blood pressure reduction, I regularly end up with a stiff neck. I had noticed that I tighten up my shoulders involuntarily. He showed me how I could help that by tightening my abdominal muscles in order to take some strain off my spine.

Afterwards, I went to a local Christian bookshop. There I bumped into a vicar friend. In exchanging the usual pleasantries, he said of his parish, ‘I’ve been here three years and I’ve only just learned the questions I need to ask. I don’t know the answers, but I do at last know the questions.’

Later, it struck me that metaphorically there was a connection with osteopathy. What I have learned from osteopathy is the general life lesson that the presenting problem is not necessarily the source of the problem, nor is it necessarily the place where the solution must begin. Healing my neck involves my feet and abdominal muscles, amongst other places. Likewise, it has taken my friend three years to get to the roots of parish issues. Clearly, the questions weren’t what he first conceived them to be. A good proportion of ministry is about people wanting us to ‘take the pain away’, but the best ways of doing so may not be what people want.

Richard Foster famously said that superficiality is the curse of our age. We go for surface solutions, for style over substance. It is especially tempting in the ministry if your long-term future in an appointment is not secure. In order to make an impact, you may find yourself leaning in the direction of doing something spectacular that does not have roots, in the hope that you might be able to stay longer. However, if you knew you were staying longer, you might take the healthier course of action – of exploring what the real questions and issues were, rather than leaping on the obvious.

While I am not sure I like the Anglican system where the incumbent is granted the ‘freehold’ of the parish and can stay as long as they like, provided they are not naughty, I do wonder whether the Methodist system should have further longevity built into it. Our present system allows for an initial invitation of five years. This is reviewed just under four years in – that is the real length of time in which a minister has to have an impact in order to win the vote. It used to be worse: the initial appointment when I was younger was three years. We do seem to have learned from other traditions that longer ministries are generally better, but I wonder whether we should increase that initial five to, say, seven.

We need to resist the crash-bang-wallop nature of our culture, where everything has to be instant. (Blogging and twenty-four-hour news channels only exacerbate the instant coffee and microwave food society.) Might it be counter-cultural to be slow, so that we might trace the root causes of problems and begin to apply treatment?

UPDATE: When I wrote this post yesterday, there was another aspect of osteopathy I meant to include. As I understand it, osteopathy is a therapy that doesn’t so much heal the body itself as put the body into a place where it self-heals. That, it seems to me, makes for an interesting pastoral analogy. Pastors don’t heal people, they equip them to find healing. In Psalm 23, the Lord as shepherd leads the sheep to green pastures and still waters – but there they presumably feed and water themselves. A pastor’s ministry includes showing people how they may access spiritual food and water, rather than simply putting it on a plate for them all the time.

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Friends

Yesterday, we travelled back to Kent for a barbecue. We had been one couple among eight on a National Childbirth Trust ante-natal course six years ago. Five of the eight couples remained friends. As it happens, two of the other couples are also Christians, one couple has started to show an interest in spiritual things recently, but the other couple – to our knowledge, at least – hasn’t. But they are our friends, regardless. We enjoy each other’s company. None of the other families has moved away, only us. But when we return, we seem to pick up where we left off.

Debbie and I are glad to have both Christian and non-Christian friends – both from before we ever met each other, and since. Some of the families we know through school here are good friends. As far as we know, only one of those families is Christian.

I think back to 2003, when I was on a sabbatical. We got away from Methodism and worshipped at the nearby Baptist Church, where we knew the pastor and his wife quite well. When he (or one or two others) preached, it was thoughtful and challenging. However, there were some regulars in the pulpit who were not so good.

One was a church deacon. He prowled across the dais like an evangelical superstar, waiting to pounce like a spiritual lion. In one sermon, he told us how Christian friends would always be there for us, but it would never be true of non-Christians. They would ask you how you were, but would not be interested in your response.

Idiot.

Both of us are grateful for friends who have stuck with us in the darkest of times, not all of them people who share our faith at all.

People are made in the image of God, and are capable of good and loving acts. Those acts are not salvific, but neither are ours. We hope we can be a model of Christian love – that our deliberate intention to cultivate friendships will be missional.

I’m glad we’re not trapped in the holy huddle. Thank God for our non-Christian friends.

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