Category: Culture

Bloopers

Moronland.net – Top 13 Worst Slogan Translations Ever

Found this via Clipmarks – I’ve heard some of these before, notably the Pepsi and General Motors ones. You could use some of these for fun in sermons, although some wouldn’t be appropriate. But have a laugh, anyway.

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0

Sunday’s Sermon: Jesus Versus Religion

Luke 13:10-17

Jesus Versus Religion
If I’m honest – and to my shame – the person I have most been like in this
story is the synagogue ruler:

But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had
cured on the sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, ‘There are six days on which
work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath
day.’
(Verse 14)

One time was in the church youth group at my home church. We
had a meeting at one family’s house, and in our number was Linda. She was a
Diana Ross fan. She put one of her LPs (as they were in olden days). One track
was a cover version of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’. I was sitting nearest the
stereo. When the line in the song approached where Lennon envisions his
glorious future ‘with no religion, too’, I grabbed the volume control and faded
it down. My Christian friends were mad with me, even though they too disagreed
with Lennon’s sentiments. Have I changed my mind since about Lennon and
Imagine? No. But I have changed my mind about how I should have acted.

Likewise, I recall my first day at work. After lunch, the
training officer asked me what my star sign was. I replied that I was a
Christian, and I didn’t like all that occult stuff. It didn’t go down well. Again,
have I changed my views about horoscopes? No – and it still horrifies me to
find churchgoers who spend more time reading their horoscope than their Bible.
But do I wish I had answered with a different tone? Absolutely.

We don’t know whether the synagogue ruler in the reading was
a Pharisee – Luke doesn’t say. But to some extent, at least he behaves like
one. Banning healing on the Sabbath while allowing animals to be untied sounds
like one of the hundreds of additional rules the Pharisees added to explain,
apply and nail down how Jews were to live out the ‘Torah’ – God’s Law in the
first five books of the Bible. Certainly, he would have been responsible for
practical arrangements for worship[1].

But suppose he was a Pharisee. If so, he came from an
honourable heritage. The Pharisees had begun as a working-class protest
movement against the Greeks, who three hundred years before Christ had
conquered the Promised Land. The Greeks tried to force their culture and way of
life on the Jews. Some Jews embraced it, but many devout Jews resisted, and the
Greeks persisted more aggressively, even banning Sabbath-keeping, circumcision
and temple sacrifices, and putting to death some Jews. In response to this
pressure, the Pharisees emerged from the devout as the resistance party,
cherishing central aspects of their faith, such as the covenant with God and
the joy of keeping his commandments. When one Greek king set up an altar to
their god Zeus in the Jerusalem Temple, a fully-fledged insurgency movement –
the Maccabees – sprang up in opposition, which achieved Jewish independence. By
the time the Romans became the new occupying power and appointed Herod the
Great as king, the Pharisees had become a movement that couldn’t compromise on
one iota of detail about life, and they had drawn up elaborate rules to make
clear who was devout and who wasn’t.

So the Pharisees were about resisting pagan culture and maintaining
the heart of the faith. Their aims were honourable and important, if not vital.
So what went wrong? Two things: one, they had become obsessed with exterior
behaviour and not the heart. Two, they had become small-minded in prescribing
minute aspects of personal behaviour. Eugene Peterson puts it like this:

Imagine yourself moving into a house with a huge picture
window overlooking a grand view across a wide expanse of water enclosed by a
range of snow-capped mountains. You have a ringside seat before wild storms and
cloud formations, the entire spectrum of sun-illuminated colours in the rocks
and trees and wildflowers and water. You are captivated by the view. Several times
a day you interrupt your work and stand before this window to take in the
majesty and the beauty, thrilled with the botanical and meteorological
fireworks. One afternoon you notice some bird droppings on the window glass,
get a bucket of water and a towel, and clean it. A couple of days later a
rainstorm leaves a window streaked, and the bucket comes out again. Another day
visitors come with a tribe of small dirty-fingered children. They moment they
leave you see all the smudge-marks on the glass, they are hardly out the door
before you have the bucket out. You are so proud of that window, and it’s such
a large window. But it’s incredible how many different ways foreign objects can
attach themselves to that window, obscuring the vision, distracting from the contemplative
beauty. Keeping that window clean develops into an obsessive-compulsive
neurosis. You accumulate ladders and buckets and squeegees. You construct a
scaffolding both inside and out to make it possible to get to all the difficult
corners and heights. You have the cleanest window in the world – but it’s now
been years since you last looked through it. You’ve become a Pharisee.[2]

So there seems to have been a cluster of problems, a number
of areas where the devout Judaism of two thousand years ago (as represented by
the synagogue ruler and the Pharisees) clashed with Jesus. If we reflect on
these, we may see some of the differences between Jesus and ‘religion’. Many of
these differences are still around today, and we need to be vigilant lest we
decline from Jesus–centred discipleship into ugly religion.

Firstly, was it wrong for the Pharisees to defend the faith
and devotion to God against a Greek empire that wanted to put the glories of
human cultural achievement centre stage, in place of deep commitment to God?
This is a live question for us, because we face similar pressures. Ours is a
society that encourages us to say, ‘Me first’. Its rampant consumerism is its
god. When 9/11 happened, George W Bush, the supposed born-again Christian
President of the USA, urged people to show patriotism by … going shopping. Likewise,
our culture says, ‘Do what you feel,’ albeit reluctantly qualified by, ‘As long
as you don’t hurt anyone.’ In place of worthy heroes, we have an addiction to
celebrity. Teenage girls state their ambition in life is to become celebrities.
Magazines encourage us to ape the celebrities: look at the fashions they buy,
and if you can’t afford them, here are the nearest copies in High Street stores.
We are raising young people in a culture of violence – witness the shock of
recent murders of young people by young people.

So is it right to stand against this kind of culture?
Absolutely it is. It is a core task of our discipleship to do so. But there is
a difference between defending the faith and being defensive. Defending the
faith is a positive thing to do; being defensive is a negative and fearful
attitude. When I turned down the Diana Ross track in the youth group, I was
being defensive: it was as if I arrogantly feared those stupid words could
convert my Christian friends to atheism. When I arrogantly lectured the
training officer about my opposition to horoscopes, I was someone feeling
desperate to make a stand for Christ as soon as possible. How different I was
from the friend – also in the youth group – who began a career with Barclay’s
Bank. After two weeks at his first branch, someone said to him, ‘There’s
something different about you – are you a Christian?’

What’s the difference, then, between rightly defending the faith
and being defensive about it? I think it’s one of attitude; it’s about our soul.
It’s not about the exterior behaviour so much as about the heart, as Eugene
Peterson said. Defending the faith is based on a humble confidence in Christ,
just as Jesus demonstrated that same confidence in the Father. Being defensive,
on the other hand, is something that emanates from fear: fear that we will not
stand up for our faith, rather than the joy of knowing Christ. Do we defend, or
are we defensive? Do we need to rest more securely in the certainty of God’s
love for us?

Secondly, was it wrong for the Pharisees to start working
out all their additional rules in working out the application of God’s Word to
the faithful life? Somewhere in that project, they were attempting to do
something good. It isn’t always clear what the implications of Scripture are
for us. Often teachers of the faith offer a valuable service by suggesting what
a particular passage or doctrine means for a certain generation. The problem
with the Pharisees, though, as Peterson said, was that they became small-minded
and obsessive. They put their interpretations on a similar footing with Scripture
itself. As a result, rather than bringing the liberating power of God’s love
into people’s lives, they burdened them with weights, rather than lightening
them with the grace of God. Much as they didn’t intend to, theirs was a
ministry of binding and blinding people: binding instead of setting free,
blinding instead of revealing God’s love. This is why Jesus was so angry:

‘You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie
his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water? And
ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long
years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?’
(Verses 15-16)

If we set animals free for one day but bind people for
eighteen years, something has gone badly wrong. How can we guard against this? I
suggest one of the most important ways we can read the Bible is not to read
texts in isolation. Each word, each verse, each story is set within the big
picture of God’s great story of salvation. If we start applying them without
regard to that big story, we run the danger of abusing them. The old saying is,
‘A text without a context is a pretext.’ Everything needs to be set against the
background of God’s love in creation, and his determined work to bring people
back to him after the ruin of human sin – the forming of a people for himself,
the sending of prophets and ultimately his Son. It is the triumph of life over
death in the resurrection, and the emergence of the Church. It is the story of
grace, in which the kingdom of God battles the kingdom of darkness in all its
manifestations of sin, sinned-againstness and suffering. It is the story where
the climax is defeat for all the enemies of God. Set out interpretation and
application against that glorious backdrop and we can guard against binding and
blinding people.

Thirdly and finally, was it wrong for the synagogue ruler to
desire good order in worship? Surely, this too is an honourable notion. In 1
Corinthians 14, Paul calls for everything to be done decently and in order. But
there is order and there is control. Paul issued his ‘decently and in order’
cry in the wake of self-indulgent people wanting to compete with each other to
make an impression in worship. We can take the desire for order too far and use
it to keep things under our control, rather than God’s. The question, ‘Who is
in control?’ is a question of faith. Either God is in control or we are. If we
are, then we do not trust him. Martyn Atkins,
the current President of the Methodist Conference, tells this story in his new
book:

Throughout the 1990s I served on a small working group that
eventually produced the Methodist Worship
Book in 1999. Not all our efforts ended up in the book itself, which is
probably a good thing. For example we toyed with a (spoof) ‘rite of renewal’
that consisted of a single rubric: ‘if there is a spontaneous outpouring of the
Holy Spirit, it will happen here!’[3]

It is one thing to have good order to prevent pride and
self-indulgence; it is another to straitjacket God. The synagogue ruler
straitjacketed God. The antidote is to keep order with a light touch, with a
sense of humility and dependence upon the grace of God. It is keeping order
while kneeling before the throne, along with everyone else.

It isn’t a matter simply for those who lead worship or lead
churches: it’s for every Christian, because many of us develop our mechanisms
for trying to restrict God. We are prey to the temptation to tell God what he
may or may not do, or how he may conduct his business. But the sovereign God
will not be restricted. Much as he loves us, he will not bow the knee to us.

The key, then, to siding with Jesus rather than religion, is
to adopt a posture of kneeling in the light of divine grace. Of course, the
Pharisees believed in grace, but sometimes beliefs are reduced to a doctrine
that is accepted in the mind but not practised with hands and feet. Our greatest
need is not only to believe in grace, but also to live humbly in the light of
it. God offers us the grace to do so. May we believe in and live according to
the grace taught and demonstrated by Jesus.

[2] Eugene Peterson, The
Jesus Way, p 211. Previous two paragraphs summarise pp 206-211.

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1

Sunday’s Sermon: Jesus Versus Religion

Luke 13:10-17

Jesus Versus Religion
If I’m honest – and to my shame – the person I have most been like in this
story is the synagogue ruler:

But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had
cured on the sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, ‘There are six days on which
work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath
day.’
(Verse 14)

One time was in the church youth group at my home church. We
had a meeting at one family’s house, and in our number was Linda. She was a
Diana Ross fan. She put one of her LPs (as they were in olden days). One track
was a cover version of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’. I was sitting nearest the
stereo. When the line in the song approached where Lennon envisions his
glorious future ‘with no religion, too’, I grabbed the volume control and faded
it down. My Christian friends were mad with me, even though they too disagreed
with Lennon’s sentiments. Have I changed my mind since about Lennon and
Imagine? No. But I have changed my mind about how I should have acted.

Likewise, I recall my first day at work. After lunch, the
training officer asked me what my star sign was. I replied that I was a
Christian, and I didn’t like all that occult stuff. It didn’t go down well. Again,
have I changed my views about horoscopes? No – and it still horrifies me to
find churchgoers who spend more time reading their horoscope than their Bible.
But do I wish I had answered with a different tone? Absolutely.

We don’t know whether the synagogue ruler in the reading was
a Pharisee – Luke doesn’t say. But to some extent, at least he behaves like
one. Banning healing on the Sabbath while allowing animals to be untied sounds
like one of the hundreds of additional rules the Pharisees added to explain,
apply and nail down how Jews were to live out the ‘Torah’ – God’s Law in the
first five books of the Bible. Certainly, he would have been responsible for
practical arrangements for worship[1].

But suppose he was a Pharisee. If so, he came from an
honourable heritage. The Pharisees had begun as a working-class protest
movement against the Greeks, who three hundred years before Christ had
conquered the Promised Land. The Greeks tried to force their culture and way of
life on the Jews. Some Jews embraced it, but many devout Jews resisted, and the
Greeks persisted more aggressively, even banning Sabbath-keeping, circumcision
and temple sacrifices, and putting to death some Jews. In response to this
pressure, the Pharisees emerged from the devout as the resistance party,
cherishing central aspects of their faith, such as the covenant with God and
the joy of keeping his commandments. When one Greek king set up an altar to
their god Zeus in the Jerusalem Temple, a fully-fledged insurgency movement –
the Maccabees – sprang up in opposition, which achieved Jewish independence. By
the time the Romans became the new occupying power and appointed Herod the
Great as king, the Pharisees had become a movement that couldn’t compromise on
one iota of detail about life, and they had drawn up elaborate rules to make
clear who was devout and who wasn’t.

So the Pharisees were about resisting pagan culture and maintaining
the heart of the faith. Their aims were honourable and important, if not vital.
So what went wrong? Two things: one, they had become obsessed with exterior
behaviour and not the heart. Two, they had become small-minded in prescribing
minute aspects of personal behaviour. Eugene Peterson puts it like this:

Imagine yourself moving into a house with a huge picture
window overlooking a grand view across a wide expanse of water enclosed by a
range of snow-capped mountains. You have a ringside seat before wild storms and
cloud formations, the entire spectrum of sun-illuminated colours in the rocks
and trees and wildflowers and water. You are captivated by the view. Several times
a day you interrupt your work and stand before this window to take in the
majesty and the beauty, thrilled with the botanical and meteorological
fireworks. One afternoon you notice some bird droppings on the window glass,
get a bucket of water and a towel, and clean it. A couple of days later a
rainstorm leaves a window streaked, and the bucket comes out again. Another day
visitors come with a tribe of small dirty-fingered children. They moment they
leave you see all the smudge-marks on the glass, they are hardly out the door
before you have the bucket out. You are so proud of that window, and it’s such
a large window. But it’s incredible how many different ways foreign objects can
attach themselves to that window, obscuring the vision, distracting from the contemplative
beauty. Keeping that window clean develops into an obsessive-compulsive
neurosis. You accumulate ladders and buckets and squeegees. You construct a
scaffolding both inside and out to make it possible to get to all the difficult
corners and heights. You have the cleanest window in the world – but it’s now
been years since you last looked through it. You’ve become a Pharisee.[2]

So there seems to have been a cluster of problems, a number
of areas where the devout Judaism of two thousand years ago (as represented by
the synagogue ruler and the Pharisees) clashed with Jesus. If we reflect on
these, we may see some of the differences between Jesus and ‘religion’. Many of
these differences are still around today, and we need to be vigilant lest we
decline from Jesus–centred discipleship into ugly religion.

Firstly, was it wrong for the Pharisees to defend the faith
and devotion to God against a Greek empire that wanted to put the glories of
human cultural achievement centre stage, in place of deep commitment to God?
This is a live question for us, because we face similar pressures. Ours is a
society that encourages us to say, ‘Me first’. Its rampant consumerism is its
god. When 9/11 happened, George W Bush, the supposed born-again Christian
President of the USA, urged people to show patriotism by … going shopping. Likewise,
our culture says, ‘Do what you feel,’ albeit reluctantly qualified by, ‘As long
as you don’t hurt anyone.’ In place of worthy heroes, we have an addiction to
celebrity. Teenage girls state their ambition in life is to become celebrities.
Magazines encourage us to ape the celebrities: look at the fashions they buy,
and if you can’t afford them, here are the nearest copies in High Street stores.
We are raising young people in a culture of violence – witness the shock of
recent murders of young people by young people.

So is it right to stand against this kind of culture?
Absolutely it is. It is a core task of our discipleship to do so. But there is
a difference between defending the faith and being defensive. Defending the
faith is a positive thing to do; being defensive is a negative and fearful
attitude. When I turned down the Diana Ross track in the youth group, I was
being defensive: it was as if I arrogantly feared those stupid words could
convert my Christian friends to atheism. When I arrogantly lectured the
training officer about my opposition to horoscopes, I was someone feeling
desperate to make a stand for Christ as soon as possible. How different I was
from the friend – also in the youth group – who began a career with Barclay’s
Bank. After two weeks at his first branch, someone said to him, ‘There’s
something different about you – are you a Christian?’

What’s the difference, then, between rightly defending the faith
and being defensive about it? I think it’s one of attitude; it’s about our soul.
It’s not about the exterior behaviour so much as about the heart, as Eugene
Peterson said. Defending the faith is based on a humble confidence in Christ,
just as Jesus demonstrated that same confidence in the Father. Being defensive,
on the other hand, is something that emanates from fear: fear that we will not
stand up for our faith, rather than the joy of knowing Christ. Do we defend, or
are we defensive? Do we need to rest more securely in the certainty of God’s
love for us?

Secondly, was it wrong for the Pharisees to start working
out all their additional rules in working out the application of God’s Word to
the faithful life? Somewhere in that project, they were attempting to do
something good. It isn’t always clear what the implications of Scripture are
for us. Often teachers of the faith offer a valuable service by suggesting what
a particular passage or doctrine means for a certain generation. The problem
with the Pharisees, though, as Peterson said, was that they became small-minded
and obsessive. They put their interpretations on a similar footing with Scripture
itself. As a result, rather than bringing the liberating power of God’s love
into people’s lives, they burdened them with weights, rather than lightening
them with the grace of God. Much as they didn’t intend to, theirs was a
ministry of binding and blinding people: binding instead of setting free,
blinding instead of revealing God’s love. This is why Jesus was so angry:

‘You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie
his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water? And
ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long
years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?’
(Verses 15-16)

If we set animals free for one day but bind people for
eighteen years, something has gone badly wrong. How can we guard against this? I
suggest one of the most important ways we can read the Bible is not to read
texts in isolation. Each word, each verse, each story is set within the big
picture of God’s great story of salvation. If we start applying them without
regard to that big story, we run the danger of abusing them. The old saying is,
‘A text without a context is a pretext.’ Everything needs to be set against the
background of God’s love in creation, and his determined work to bring people
back to him after the ruin of human sin – the forming of a people for himself,
the sending of prophets and ultimately his Son. It is the triumph of life over
death in the resurrection, and the emergence of the Church. It is the story of
grace, in which the kingdom of God battles the kingdom of darkness in all its
manifestations of sin, sinned-againstness and suffering. It is the story where
the climax is defeat for all the enemies of God. Set out interpretation and
application against that glorious backdrop and we can guard against binding and
blinding people.

Thirdly and finally, was it wrong for the synagogue ruler to
desire good order in worship? Surely, this too is an honourable notion. In 1
Corinthians 14, Paul calls for everything to be done decently and in order. But
there is order and there is control. Paul issued his ‘decently and in order’
cry in the wake of self-indulgent people wanting to compete with each other to
make an impression in worship. We can take the desire for order too far and use
it to keep things under our control, rather than God’s. The question, ‘Who is
in control?’ is a question of faith. Either God is in control or we are. If we
are, then we do not trust him. Martyn Atkins,
the current President of the Methodist Conference, tells this story in his new
book:

Throughout the 1990s I served on a small working group that
eventually produced the Methodist Worship
Book in 1999. Not all our efforts ended up in the book itself, which is
probably a good thing. For example we toyed with a (spoof) ‘rite of renewal’
that consisted of a single rubric: ‘if there is a spontaneous outpouring of the
Holy Spirit, it will happen here!’[3]

It is one thing to have good order to prevent pride and
self-indulgence; it is another to straitjacket God. The synagogue ruler
straitjacketed God. The antidote is to keep order with a light touch, with a
sense of humility and dependence upon the grace of God. It is keeping order
while kneeling before the throne, along with everyone else.

It isn’t a matter simply for those who lead worship or lead
churches: it’s for every Christian, because many of us develop our mechanisms
for trying to restrict God. We are prey to the temptation to tell God what he
may or may not do, or how he may conduct his business. But the sovereign God
will not be restricted. Much as he loves us, he will not bow the knee to us.

The key, then, to siding with Jesus rather than religion, is
to adopt a posture of kneeling in the light of divine grace. Of course, the
Pharisees believed in grace, but sometimes beliefs are reduced to a doctrine
that is accepted in the mind but not practised with hands and feet. Our greatest
need is not only to believe in grace, but also to live humbly in the light of
it. God offers us the grace to do so. May we believe in and live according to
the grace taught and demonstrated by Jesus.

[2] Eugene Peterson, The
Jesus Way, p 211. Previous two paragraphs summarise pp 206-211.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

0

Sunday’s Sermon: Jesus Versus Religion

Luke 13:10-17

Jesus Versus Religion
If I’m honest – and to my shame – the person I have most been like in this
story is the synagogue ruler:

But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had
cured on the sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, ‘There are six days on which
work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath
day.’
(Verse 14)

One time was in the church youth group at my home church. We
had a meeting at one family’s house, and in our number was Linda. She was a
Diana Ross fan. She put one of her LPs (as they were in olden days). One track
was a cover version of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’. I was sitting nearest the
stereo. When the line in the song approached where Lennon envisions his
glorious future ‘with no religion, too’, I grabbed the volume control and faded
it down. My Christian friends were mad with me, even though they too disagreed
with Lennon’s sentiments. Have I changed my mind since about Lennon and
Imagine? No. But I have changed my mind about how I should have acted.

Likewise, I recall my first day at work. After lunch, the
training officer asked me what my star sign was. I replied that I was a
Christian, and I didn’t like all that occult stuff. It didn’t go down well. Again,
have I changed my views about horoscopes? No – and it still horrifies me to
find churchgoers who spend more time reading their horoscope than their Bible.
But do I wish I had answered with a different tone? Absolutely.

We don’t know whether the synagogue ruler in the reading was
a Pharisee – Luke doesn’t say. But to some extent, at least he behaves like
one. Banning healing on the Sabbath while allowing animals to be untied sounds
like one of the hundreds of additional rules the Pharisees added to explain,
apply and nail down how Jews were to live out the ‘Torah’ – God’s Law in the
first five books of the Bible. Certainly, he would have been responsible for
practical arrangements for worship[1].

But suppose he was a Pharisee. If so, he came from an
honourable heritage. The Pharisees had begun as a working-class protest
movement against the Greeks, who three hundred years before Christ had
conquered the Promised Land. The Greeks tried to force their culture and way of
life on the Jews. Some Jews embraced it, but many devout Jews resisted, and the
Greeks persisted more aggressively, even banning Sabbath-keeping, circumcision
and temple sacrifices, and putting to death some Jews. In response to this
pressure, the Pharisees emerged from the devout as the resistance party,
cherishing central aspects of their faith, such as the covenant with God and
the joy of keeping his commandments. When one Greek king set up an altar to
their god Zeus in the Jerusalem Temple, a fully-fledged insurgency movement –
the Maccabees – sprang up in opposition, which achieved Jewish independence. By
the time the Romans became the new occupying power and appointed Herod the
Great as king, the Pharisees had become a movement that couldn’t compromise on
one iota of detail about life, and they had drawn up elaborate rules to make
clear who was devout and who wasn’t.

So the Pharisees were about resisting pagan culture and maintaining
the heart of the faith. Their aims were honourable and important, if not vital.
So what went wrong? Two things: one, they had become obsessed with exterior
behaviour and not the heart. Two, they had become small-minded in prescribing
minute aspects of personal behaviour. Eugene Peterson puts it like this:

Imagine yourself moving into a house with a huge picture
window overlooking a grand view across a wide expanse of water enclosed by a
range of snow-capped mountains. You have a ringside seat before wild storms and
cloud formations, the entire spectrum of sun-illuminated colours in the rocks
and trees and wildflowers and water. You are captivated by the view. Several times
a day you interrupt your work and stand before this window to take in the
majesty and the beauty, thrilled with the botanical and meteorological
fireworks. One afternoon you notice some bird droppings on the window glass,
get a bucket of water and a towel, and clean it. A couple of days later a
rainstorm leaves a window streaked, and the bucket comes out again. Another day
visitors come with a tribe of small dirty-fingered children. They moment they
leave you see all the smudge-marks on the glass, they are hardly out the door
before you have the bucket out. You are so proud of that window, and it’s such
a large window. But it’s incredible how many different ways foreign objects can
attach themselves to that window, obscuring the vision, distracting from the contemplative
beauty. Keeping that window clean develops into an obsessive-compulsive
neurosis. You accumulate ladders and buckets and squeegees. You construct a
scaffolding both inside and out to make it possible to get to all the difficult
corners and heights. You have the cleanest window in the world – but it’s now
been years since you last looked through it. You’ve become a Pharisee.[2]

So there seems to have been a cluster of problems, a number
of areas where the devout Judaism of two thousand years ago (as represented by
the synagogue ruler and the Pharisees) clashed with Jesus. If we reflect on
these, we may see some of the differences between Jesus and ‘religion’. Many of
these differences are still around today, and we need to be vigilant lest we
decline from Jesus–centred discipleship into ugly religion.

Firstly, was it wrong for the Pharisees to defend the faith
and devotion to God against a Greek empire that wanted to put the glories of
human cultural achievement centre stage, in place of deep commitment to God?
This is a live question for us, because we face similar pressures. Ours is a
society that encourages us to say, ‘Me first’. Its rampant consumerism is its
god. When 9/11 happened, George W Bush, the supposed born-again Christian
President of the USA, urged people to show patriotism by … going shopping. Likewise,
our culture says, ‘Do what you feel,’ albeit reluctantly qualified by, ‘As long
as you don’t hurt anyone.’ In place of worthy heroes, we have an addiction to
celebrity. Teenage girls state their ambition in life is to become celebrities.
Magazines encourage us to ape the celebrities: look at the fashions they buy,
and if you can’t afford them, here are the nearest copies in High Street stores.
We are raising young people in a culture of violence – witness the shock of
recent murders of young people by young people.

So is it right to stand against this kind of culture?
Absolutely it is. It is a core task of our discipleship to do so. But there is
a difference between defending the faith and being defensive. Defending the
faith is a positive thing to do; being defensive is a negative and fearful
attitude. When I turned down the Diana Ross track in the youth group, I was
being defensive: it was as if I arrogantly feared those stupid words could
convert my Christian friends to atheism. When I arrogantly lectured the
training officer about my opposition to horoscopes, I was someone feeling
desperate to make a stand for Christ as soon as possible. How different I was
from the friend – also in the youth group – who began a career with Barclay’s
Bank. After two weeks at his first branch, someone said to him, ‘There’s
something different about you – are you a Christian?’

What’s the difference, then, between rightly defending the faith
and being defensive about it? I think it’s one of attitude; it’s about our soul.
It’s not about the exterior behaviour so much as about the heart, as Eugene
Peterson said. Defending the faith is based on a humble confidence in Christ,
just as Jesus demonstrated that same confidence in the Father. Being defensive,
on the other hand, is something that emanates from fear: fear that we will not
stand up for our faith, rather than the joy of knowing Christ. Do we defend, or
are we defensive? Do we need to rest more securely in the certainty of God’s
love for us?

Secondly, was it wrong for the Pharisees to start working
out all their additional rules in working out the application of God’s Word to
the faithful life? Somewhere in that project, they were attempting to do
something good. It isn’t always clear what the implications of Scripture are
for us. Often teachers of the faith offer a valuable service by suggesting what
a particular passage or doctrine means for a certain generation. The problem
with the Pharisees, though, as Peterson said, was that they became small-minded
and obsessive. They put their interpretations on a similar footing with Scripture
itself. As a result, rather than bringing the liberating power of God’s love
into people’s lives, they burdened them with weights, rather than lightening
them with the grace of God. Much as they didn’t intend to, theirs was a
ministry of binding and blinding people: binding instead of setting free,
blinding instead of revealing God’s love. This is why Jesus was so angry:

‘You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie
his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water? And
ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long
years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?’
(Verses 15-16)

If we set animals free for one day but bind people for
eighteen years, something has gone badly wrong. How can we guard against this? I
suggest one of the most important ways we can read the Bible is not to read
texts in isolation. Each word, each verse, each story is set within the big
picture of God’s great story of salvation. If we start applying them without
regard to that big story, we run the danger of abusing them. The old saying is,
‘A text without a context is a pretext.’ Everything needs to be set against the
background of God’s love in creation, and his determined work to bring people
back to him after the ruin of human sin – the forming of a people for himself,
the sending of prophets and ultimately his Son. It is the triumph of life over
death in the resurrection, and the emergence of the Church. It is the story of
grace, in which the kingdom of God battles the kingdom of darkness in all its
manifestations of sin, sinned-againstness and suffering. It is the story where
the climax is defeat for all the enemies of God. Set out interpretation and
application against that glorious backdrop and we can guard against binding and
blinding people.

Thirdly and finally, was it wrong for the synagogue ruler to
desire good order in worship? Surely, this too is an honourable notion. In 1
Corinthians 14, Paul calls for everything to be done decently and in order. But
there is order and there is control. Paul issued his ‘decently and in order’
cry in the wake of self-indulgent people wanting to compete with each other to
make an impression in worship. We can take the desire for order too far and use
it to keep things under our control, rather than God’s. The question, ‘Who is
in control?’ is a question of faith. Either God is in control or we are. If we
are, then we do not trust him. Martyn Atkins,
the current President of the Methodist Conference, tells this story in his new
book:

Throughout the 1990s I served on a small working group that
eventually produced the Methodist Worship
Book in 1999. Not all our efforts ended up in the book itself, which is
probably a good thing. For example we toyed with a (spoof) ‘rite of renewal’
that consisted of a single rubric: ‘if there is a spontaneous outpouring of the
Holy Spirit, it will happen here!’[3]

It is one thing to have good order to prevent pride and
self-indulgence; it is another to straitjacket God. The synagogue ruler
straitjacketed God. The antidote is to keep order with a light touch, with a
sense of humility and dependence upon the grace of God. It is keeping order
while kneeling before the throne, along with everyone else.

It isn’t a matter simply for those who lead worship or lead
churches: it’s for every Christian, because many of us develop our mechanisms
for trying to restrict God. We are prey to the temptation to tell God what he
may or may not do, or how he may conduct his business. But the sovereign God
will not be restricted. Much as he loves us, he will not bow the knee to us.

The key, then, to siding with Jesus rather than religion, is
to adopt a posture of kneeling in the light of divine grace. Of course, the
Pharisees believed in grace, but sometimes beliefs are reduced to a doctrine
that is accepted in the mind but not practised with hands and feet. Our greatest
need is not only to believe in grace, but also to live humbly in the light of
it. God offers us the grace to do so. May we believe in and live according to
the grace taught and demonstrated by Jesus.

[2] Eugene Peterson, The
Jesus Way, p 211. Previous two paragraphs summarise pp 206-211.

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Facebook Faith

Brian Draper has written about Facebook in this week’s LICC Connecting With Culture column. Dave Warnock has recently written two posts on the phenomenon.

Recently I too, succumbed, and set up a profile. I’m too old for MySpace, whose grotty layouts seem to reflect the acne of its most avid users. I only like checking out bands on it, because it’s a great way to preview their music (that’s how I recently got into Duke Special). Facebook seems a little more grown-up, which may be surprising, given its origins among students. Expanding beyond the American student communities and opening up its API to outside developers to produce new applications have both been significant ‘growing up’ actions. Linkedin seems too much about CVs, job hunting and head-hunting – which makes it inappropriate for my particular calling/profession.

For me, Facebook is currently functioning like a broader Friends Reunited. I’ve belonged to that for a few years and made contact with some old school friends, but it’s limited by needing to know the school/college/workplace someone was at. They joy of the last few days on Facebook has been to find again old friends I worked with, especially from ecumenical youth ministry in Hertford in the mid-1990s. I have to remember it isn’t the same as face-to-face contact. It’s a helpful second best to meeting up again with these people who meant the world to me. I’ve never had friends like I had there.

Draper talks about how Facebook could prompt us into strengthening (or renewing?) friendships in their proper sense. He also talks about how well we know ourselves and are known by ourselves and God. Disclosure is an interesting theme for faith and the web. There is the question of how much self-disclosure we engage in online, and open ourselves to the risk of identity theft. It becomes a parallel to the way we fear to open up face-to-face with people, perhaps due to bad past experiences of the wisdom of caution. Jesus didn’t entrust himself to everyone, because he knew what was in their hearts. But – as we know increasingly these days – ‘story’ is vital. Our story and its part in God’s great story is significant, not least because it touches others. In this sense ‘testimony’ is of course much more than a conversion account (as it always should have been).

But Draper’s other comment about how well we know others is one that hits me as a minister, especially in a week when I am consumed with funerals. Whenever I take the funeral of someone I knew in a congregation, I always learn things from their loved ones that I never knew before. That happened to me on Wednesday. I conducted the service for a saint who, in the two years I had known him, had been ravaged by Alzheimer’s Disease. In the address I pointed to 1 Corinthians 13:12, where Paul says that now we look through a glass darkly, but then we shall see face-to-face; we shall know, even as we are fully known (by God). God doesn’t need Facebook; we have his profile elsewhere: Jesus said, if you have seen me, you have seen the Father, and even then, there is more to know of God. But for dear David who died, the Gospel is that not only is his knowledge healed back from the distortions of what it was before Alzheimer’s caused its two deaths (the death of his personality and then the death of his body), he now knows better than he ever did. He knows ‘as he is fully known.’

Facebook can’t do any of that for us, but whatever its faults I am convinced it can be a kingdom of God tool. I don’t mean that we just post a Christian application on our profile. I mean that it can help us get going on that process of knowing one another’s story in the great story of God. That then has to be followed up, and that has to mean incarnationally, in flesh and blood, not the ones and zeros of the digital world.

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The Religion Of Branding

I’ve just found this three-year-old interview with Naomi Klein about the problem of branding. Here are some extracts which bear Christian reflection:

In a marketplace where it’s so easy to produce products, where your
competitors can essentially match you on the product itself, you need
to have something else. You need to have an added value, and that added
value is the identity, the idea behind your brand. And this is spoken
of in many different ways, “the story behind the brand.” I don’t think
we can understand this phenomenon just in terms of how easy it is to
produce products. I think it also has to do with a reaction to a
culture in the ’80s where people were longing for some kind of deeper
meaning in their lives.So what brands started selling was a kind of pseudo-spirituality — a
sense of belonging, a community. So brands started filling a gap that
citizens, not just consumers, used to get elsewhere, whether from
religion, whether from a sense of belonging in their community….

How has branding moved into politics?
I think it was when George Bush went to Baghdad for Thanksgiving and
held up the turkey. I have a friend who says that since September 11,
she’s felt as if she’s been living in a movie. What I realized when I
saw that image was that, in fact, it’s not that American politics is
being influenced by Hollywood, but that it’s being deeply influenced by
Madison Avenue. That image with Bush holding the turkey was a
quintessential advertising image. It was more than just a political
photo op. He was being treated in a sense as a corporate mascot — not
as a president, but the corporate mascot of the nation. That image of
holding that platter is a quintessential advertising image, almost like
Aunt Jemima, the early brand images of the comforting corporate mascot

What do you say to the American who feels overwhelmed by all this?
One other thing I wanted to say is that I do think that we care more
than we’re given credit for. And I always think it’s quite amazing that
after September 11, there was this amazing outpouring of caring. And
the response from the government of the U.S., from Bush, was, “Go
shopping.” And it wasn’t just once or twice. Essentially the entire
government response after September 11 in terms of what individuals
could do to make a difference was to shop. There was a big campaign in
Canada; we got in on this, and we had “Canada Loves New York” weekends,
where we would just come here and shop. And the idea that … the
greatest way to express solidarity with people is through consumption,
when people were responding in ways that were much, much more
significant and human, and [were] helping each other in a time of need,
and [then they were] told by the government: “No, do something really
isolated; just shop. Save your country; support people that way.”How do we wake up?

Can we break this cycle of artifice?
I don’t think there’s a way out of this until we actually — not to
get too New Age here — but I think we really need to ask ourselves
what we’re honestly shopping for when we’re shopping. Sometimes you’re
really just shopping because you need something, but shopping is now
the primary leisure activity, the primary family activity, and a lot of
it is extraordinarily un-fun and unsatisfying. And I think that it is
important to ask yourselves what you’re actually shopping for. If you
are shopping for community, if you are shopping for democracy, you
actually are not going to get it at the mall. And you will only be
cured of this particular malaise if you find ways to fulfill those
desires elsewhere. That’s certainly the only way I kicked my shopping
habit.

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Tomorrow’s Sermon: The Conspiracy Of The Insignificant

2 Kings
5:1-14

Introduction
In early 2005, we realised that Debbie’s car, a Peugeot 306, was no longer
going to be functional as family car. It was insufficiently like the Tardis to
cope with the amount of clutter we needed to cart around with two small
children. Through friends and family, we were quickly converted to the virtues
of a ‘people-carrier’.

We short-listed three different cars: a Vauxhall
Zafira, Renault
Scenic and a Citroen
Picasso. Despite three recommendations for the Zafira, we eliminated it as
too expensive and with too small a boot.

That left the Scenic and the Picasso. For a while, we couldn’t
tell the difference between them in appearance, but we settled on the Picasso and
once we bought one we found that whenever we were out we were always spotting
Picassos on the road. Had they suddenly increased in number once we became
interested in them? No; we had simply become more tuned into them.

Sometimes I find reading the Bible is like that. It isn’t until
I get interested in a particular issue that I realise how much of the Bible
reflects that concern, or is relevant to it.

I had one of those experiences this last week. You will know
by now that one of my concerns is how we are faithful Christian witnesses in a
society where Christianity is no longer central, but on the margins. We live in
a culture whose values have been changing rapidly in recent decades. The Gospel
may not change, but many of our old ways of being church have become obsolete.

I have read the story of Naaman and his healing since Sunday
School. Perhaps you have, too. However, this week when it came up in the Lectionary
I found it was no longer a charming Sunday School story. It was a model for
mission in today’s world. I see it, because the story is set in a time when
Israel was under the cosh from Aram (verses 1-2). A pagan nation with alien
values has mastery over the people of God. Within these strictures, fruitful
mission happens – just as it can in our day when forces are pushing the church to
the margins of society. This week we saw the church-state ties loosened as
Gordon Brown relinquished
some powers over the appointment of bishops other senior clergy. It opens
up again the whole issue of the Church of England’s established status – and in
my Methodist opinion, that’s a good thing.

So in this context, where the church is less central to our
society, how does the story of Naaman encourage us in our mission? I find it by
exploring the three Israelite characters connected with him: the slave girl,
the king of Israel and Elisha.

1. The Slave Girl
How many of us were shocked by the news a couple of days ago that a
three-year-old girl was kidnapped in Nigeria?
Perhaps we need to think of something like that to understand the horror of
what happened when this young girl was taken captive by the Arameans in 2 Kings
5. Granted, she is probably older than three, given the way she speaks, and
neither is she being threatened by death. However, if you want a sense of the
horror, think Nigeria.

Yet in this situation of trauma and oppression, the young
girl is a star:

She said to her mistress, ‘If only my lord were with the
prophet who is in Samaria! He would cure him of his leprosy.’ (verse 3)

Here is a wounded, marginalised person offering love. Here
is one who as both child and female has no status, yet she offers love. Forgiving
love and compassion for one who has done wrong to her, her family, her religion
and nation. Truly, a little child leads here, as she blesses an enemy.

How does this translate for us? Isn’t one of the dangers of
being a minority that has been sidelined more and more that all we want to do
is carp and snipe at the society that has done this to us? We criticise this,
we declaim about that and we lay into something else. If we’re good, we pretend
we are offering a prophetic critique of the world, but if only we were. More likely,
we are laying bare the chip on our shoulder and giving energy to the resentment
we feel that people no longer see the church as an institution whose opinions
should be sought and respected.

The young slave girl says, bless those who have done this to
you. Look for ways to love and serve them. Search out opportunities to tell
them the good news – not that God can’t
wait to singe them in Hell, but that he is crazy with love for them and
passionate that they find him.

When I ministered in Kent, there was a branch of Ottakar’s bookshops
in Chatham High Street. They regularly displayed and promoted occult books. Alongside
the display there was sometimes the opportunity to sign up for occult meetings.
I shared this with a prayer meeting. The response was interesting. I thought
they would be the kind of Christians who would want to instigate a prayer march
against the shop, and perhaps a letter-writing campaign, too. They didn’t.
Their immediate response was to pray that God would bless the shop and its
employees, because that would be a better way of making a gospel difference.

For us, our ‘Naaman’ might be an unpleasant boss at work. What
might happen if we showed Christian love and concern for that boss’s needs and
difficulties? Or today’s Naaman could be an unjust political group or multinational
corporation. How might we show the love of Christ to them? (And this is the end
of International Boycott Nestlé Week!)

I am not saying we should never criticise or boycott, but we
have to be sure our motive is God’s love, not vindictiveness. The slave girl reminds
us to love and make a difference.

2. The King Of Israel
Naaman goes to his king, who prepares a letter for his opposite number, the
king of Israel. Leave aside for a moment the naïveté that assumes the Israelite
king can heal the soldier. We have to excuse that as innocent ignorance: it’s
something Christians encounter often from people who make requests of them. I often
find it comes in terms of expecting that the minister can do something, which
another Christian can’t. There is no point in criticising this: we cannot
expect complete understanding of our ways.

What is more disappointing is the king of Israel’s response.
He doesn’t give a theological lecture – that would be bad enough. Instead, he
goes on the defensive:

When the king of Israel read the letter, he tore his clothes
and said, ‘Am I God, to give death or life, that this man sends word to me to
cure a man of his leprosy?
Just look and see how he is trying to pick a quarrel with me.’ (verse 7)

The king of Israel cannot see human need for what it is and
respond appropriately. It is as if he knows the story of the Trojan Horse and
sees Naaman’s illness as the way in which Israel will be further weakened.

Is that so far from some of our responses as a Christian
minority today? I don’t think so. There are those who think we shouldn’t
support environmental causes, because we become ‘guilty by association’ with
some crazy green campaigners who happen to think that planet Earth is actually
a goddess named Gaia, and we shouldn’t get our names tarnished by working with
such fruitcakes. The fact that there is ample biblical material for being
environmentally conscious should be enough: God calls us to be stewards of the
earth, not rapists of it.

Alternatively, consider how long it took some Christians to
become concerned with fighting HIV/AIDS, because of its association with sexual
practices that lie outside traditional Christian morality. Thank God that
mentality has changed through the example of organisations like ACET AND TEAR
Fund, who hold orthodox Christian beliefs, but are at the forefront of
medical prevention and political campaigning.

In a world packed with terrible needs, it would be spiritual
suicide to follow the example of the king of Israel. It’s no good getting on
our high horse about certain moral evils in our society, but doing nothing to
heal the pain.

But let’s bring it close and personal. Who are the people we
know, who have made a mess of their lives, perhaps through their own fault, but
whom we have been resisting the idea of helping? Is now the time to see that we
have made a mistake and need to reach out with Christian compassion? For Debbie
and me recently it’s been about being available to two pregnant women: one is
living with her partner and already has one child by him, the other had a
second child on her own without ongoing involvement from the father of either
child. Neither of these women lives lifestyles with which we agree as
Christians. However, would it surprise you if I told you that one of these
mothers is now asking questions about baptism?

3. Elisha
Surely the story is going to end up with Elisha performing an amazing miracle. It
builds up that way. The slave girl calls him ‘the prophet who is in Samaria
[who] would cure [Naaman] of his leprosy’ (verse 3). The writer of 2 Kings
describes Elisha as ‘the man of God’ (verse 8) and Elisha himself urges the
king of Israel to forward Naaman onto him so ‘that he may learn that there is a
prophet in Israel’ (verse 8).

Therefore, it’s a surprise when Naaman arrives at Elisha’s
house and the great man doesn’t come out to greet him, but sends a messenger,
telling Naaman to wash seven times in the Jordan (verse 10). What’s going on?

Here’s my theory: Naaman has some kind of superstar complex.
He’s miffed that the spiritual hero won’t come out to him (verse 11), and he’s
insulted by the thought of washing in that feeble, insignificant river the
Jordan. He’s got celebrity rivers back in Damascus – the Abana and the Pharpar
(verse 12). So not meeting Elisha and suffering the indignity of the River Jordan
force Naaman away from this hero-worship attitude.

And isn’t that just what we need today? We live in a culture
that needs to be weaned off celebrity adulation, and where people – ooh, let me
think, Chantelle
Houghton and Paris
Hilton – are merely famous for being famous. So addicted are we to this
that an informed politician like Al Gore
needs to utilise gas-guzzling pop stars to communicate his planet-saving message. By a conspiracy of
insignificant non-celebrity Christians, operating without spin doctors or
street teams, armed only with the love of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit,
we subvert a sick culture and bring healing in the name of Jesus.

And that means that the church needs to be healed of her own
addiction to celebrity, too. We may not have the hype and publicity tools
available to entertainers and politicians, but there is an unhealthy reliance
upon famous Christians and Christian leaders. We believe, however, in a priesthood
of all believers, and so it’s time to stop this dependency upon such people and
realise this is a call to all Christians.

In fact, one Christian leader from the Southern Hemisphere, Alan Hirsch, tells a story in his
recent book, ‘The
Forgotten Ways’ about the early growth of a church
he and his wife led in Melbourne. It did not happen under their leadership, but
before they arrived. George the Greek was a drug dealer who once chose prison
instead of a fine for his crimes. While there he read the Bible and God
encountered him. Upon release, George and his brother John set about sharing
their faith. Within six months, fifty people had become disciples of Jesus. There
were gay men, lesbians, Goths, drug addicts and prostitutes among the converts.
No Christian celebrity or authority figure did this: just George the Greek and
his brother John, loving people into the kingdom.

Conclusion
Ultimately, this takes us full circle, back to the young slave girl, who
blessed her needy, oppressive master. She, Elisha’s messenger and the river
Jordan are the heroes of the story. Elisha knows well to get out of the way
rather than garner praise for himself; sadly, the king of Israel sets no
example at all.

For we who are squeezed daily further to the margins as
Christians in our society, the message is clear: a generation of nobodies, operating
from the fringes of our culture, is God’s apostolic team for the salvation of
the world and the healing of the nations. This morning, as we take Holy
Communion, we enlist for that call.

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Tomorrow’s Sermon: The Conspiracy Of The Insignificant

2 Kings
5:1-14

Introduction
In early 2005, we realised that Debbie’s car, a Peugeot 306, was no longer
going to be functional as family car. It was insufficiently like the Tardis to
cope with the amount of clutter we needed to cart around with two small
children. Through friends and family, we were quickly converted to the virtues
of a ‘people-carrier’.

We short-listed three different cars: a Vauxhall
Zafira, Renault
Scenic and a Citroen
Picasso. Despite three recommendations for the Zafira, we eliminated it as
too expensive and with too small a boot.

That left the Scenic and the Picasso. For a while, we couldn’t
tell the difference between them in appearance, but we settled on the Picasso and
once we bought one we found that whenever we were out we were always spotting
Picassos on the road. Had they suddenly increased in number once we became
interested in them? No; we had simply become more tuned into them.

Sometimes I find reading the Bible is like that. It isn’t until
I get interested in a particular issue that I realise how much of the Bible
reflects that concern, or is relevant to it.

I had one of those experiences this last week. You will know
by now that one of my concerns is how we are faithful Christian witnesses in a
society where Christianity is no longer central, but on the margins. We live in
a culture whose values have been changing rapidly in recent decades. The Gospel
may not change, but many of our old ways of being church have become obsolete.

I have read the story of Naaman and his healing since Sunday
School. Perhaps you have, too. However, this week when it came up in the Lectionary
I found it was no longer a charming Sunday School story. It was a model for
mission in today’s world. I see it, because the story is set in a time when
Israel was under the cosh from Aram (verses 1-2). A pagan nation with alien
values has mastery over the people of God. Within these strictures, fruitful
mission happens – just as it can in our day when forces are pushing the church to
the margins of society. This week we saw the church-state ties loosened as
Gordon Brown relinquished
some powers over the appointment of bishops other senior clergy. It opens
up again the whole issue of the Church of England’s established status – and in
my Methodist opinion, that’s a good thing.

So in this context, where the church is less central to our
society, how does the story of Naaman encourage us in our mission? I find it by
exploring the three Israelite characters connected with him: the slave girl,
the king of Israel and Elisha.

1. The Slave Girl
How many of us were shocked by the news a couple of days ago that a
three-year-old girl was kidnapped in Nigeria?
Perhaps we need to think of something like that to understand the horror of
what happened when this young girl was taken captive by the Arameans in 2 Kings
5. Granted, she is probably older than three, given the way she speaks, and
neither is she being threatened by death. However, if you want a sense of the
horror, think Nigeria.

Yet in this situation of trauma and oppression, the young
girl is a star:

She said to her mistress, ‘If only my lord were with the
prophet who is in Samaria! He would cure him of his leprosy.’ (verse 3)

Here is a wounded, marginalised person offering love. Here
is one who as both child and female has no status, yet she offers love. Forgiving
love and compassion for one who has done wrong to her, her family, her religion
and nation. Truly, a little child leads here, as she blesses an enemy.

How does this translate for us? Isn’t one of the dangers of
being a minority that has been sidelined more and more that all we want to do
is carp and snipe at the society that has done this to us? We criticise this,
we declaim about that and we lay into something else. If we’re good, we pretend
we are offering a prophetic critique of the world, but if only we were. More likely,
we are laying bare the chip on our shoulder and giving energy to the resentment
we feel that people no longer see the church as an institution whose opinions
should be sought and respected.

The young slave girl says, bless those who have done this to
you. Look for ways to love and serve them. Search out opportunities to tell
them the good news – not that God can’t
wait to singe them in Hell, but that he is crazy with love for them and
passionate that they find him.

When I ministered in Kent, there was a branch of Ottakar’s bookshops
in Chatham High Street. They regularly displayed and promoted occult books. Alongside
the display there was sometimes the opportunity to sign up for occult meetings.
I shared this with a prayer meeting. The response was interesting. I thought
they would be the kind of Christians who would want to instigate a prayer march
against the shop, and perhaps a letter-writing campaign, too. They didn’t.
Their immediate response was to pray that God would bless the shop and its
employees, because that would be a better way of making a gospel difference.

For us, our ‘Naaman’ might be an unpleasant boss at work. What
might happen if we showed Christian love and concern for that boss’s needs and
difficulties? Or today’s Naaman could be an unjust political group or multinational
corporation. How might we show the love of Christ to them? (And this is the end
of International Boycott Nestlé Week!)

I am not saying we should never criticise or boycott, but we
have to be sure our motive is God’s love, not vindictiveness. The slave girl reminds
us to love and make a difference.

2. The King Of Israel
Naaman goes to his king, who prepares a letter for his opposite number, the
king of Israel. Leave aside for a moment the naïveté that assumes the Israelite
king can heal the soldier. We have to excuse that as innocent ignorance: it’s
something Christians encounter often from people who make requests of them. I often
find it comes in terms of expecting that the minister can do something, which
another Christian can’t. There is no point in criticising this: we cannot
expect complete understanding of our ways.

What is more disappointing is the king of Israel’s response.
He doesn’t give a theological lecture – that would be bad enough. Instead, he
goes on the defensive:

When the king of Israel read the letter, he tore his clothes
and said, ‘Am I God, to give death or life, that this man sends word to me to
cure a man of his leprosy?
Just look and see how he is trying to pick a quarrel with me.’ (verse 7)

The king of Israel cannot see human need for what it is and
respond appropriately. It is as if he knows the story of the Trojan Horse and
sees Naaman’s illness as the way in which Israel will be further weakened.

Is that so far from some of our responses as a Christian
minority today? I don’t think so. There are those who think we shouldn’t
support environmental causes, because we become ‘guilty by association’ with
some crazy green campaigners who happen to think that planet Earth is actually
a goddess named Gaia, and we shouldn’t get our names tarnished by working with
such fruitcakes. The fact that there is ample biblical material for being
environmentally conscious should be enough: God calls us to be stewards of the
earth, not rapists of it.

Alternatively, consider how long it took some Christians to
become concerned with fighting HIV/AIDS, because of its association with sexual
practices that lie outside traditional Christian morality. Thank God that
mentality has changed through the example of organisations like ACET AND TEAR
Fund, who hold orthodox Christian beliefs, but are at the forefront of
medical prevention and political campaigning.

In a world packed with terrible needs, it would be spiritual
suicide to follow the example of the king of Israel. It’s no good getting on
our high horse about certain moral evils in our society, but doing nothing to
heal the pain.

But let’s bring it close and personal. Who are the people we
know, who have made a mess of their lives, perhaps through their own fault, but
whom we have been resisting the idea of helping? Is now the time to see that we
have made a mistake and need to reach out with Christian compassion? For Debbie
and me recently it’s been about being available to two pregnant women: one is
living with her partner and already has one child by him, the other had a
second child on her own without ongoing involvement from the father of either
child. Neither of these women lives lifestyles with which we agree as
Christians. However, would it surprise you if I told you that one of these
mothers is now asking questions about baptism?

3. Elisha
Surely the story is going to end up with Elisha performing an amazing miracle. It
builds up that way. The slave girl calls him ‘the prophet who is in Samaria
[who] would cure [Naaman] of his leprosy’ (verse 3). The writer of 2 Kings
describes Elisha as ‘the man of God’ (verse 8) and Elisha himself urges the
king of Israel to forward Naaman onto him so ‘that he may learn that there is a
prophet in Israel’ (verse 8).

Therefore, it’s a surprise when Naaman arrives at Elisha’s
house and the great man doesn’t come out to greet him, but sends a messenger,
telling Naaman to wash seven times in the Jordan (verse 10). What’s going on?

Here’s my theory: Naaman has some kind of superstar complex.
He’s miffed that the spiritual hero won’t come out to him (verse 11), and he’s
insulted by the thought of washing in that feeble, insignificant river the
Jordan. He’s got celebrity rivers back in Damascus – the Abana and the Pharpar
(verse 12). So not meeting Elisha and suffering the indignity of the River Jordan
force Naaman away from this hero-worship attitude.

And isn’t that just what we need today? We live in a culture
that needs to be weaned off celebrity adulation, and where people – ooh, let me
think, Chantelle
Houghton and Paris
Hilton – are merely famous for being famous. So addicted are we to this
that an informed politician like Al Gore
needs to utilise gas-guzzling pop stars to communicate his planet-saving message. By a conspiracy of
insignificant non-celebrity Christians, operating without spin doctors or
street teams, armed only with the love of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit,
we subvert a sick culture and bring healing in the name of Jesus.

And that means that the church needs to be healed of her own
addiction to celebrity, too. We may not have the hype and publicity tools
available to entertainers and politicians, but there is an unhealthy reliance
upon famous Christians and Christian leaders. We believe, however, in a priesthood
of all believers, and so it’s time to stop this dependency upon such people and
realise this is a call to all Christians.

In fact, one Christian leader from the Southern Hemisphere, Alan Hirsch, tells a story in his
recent book, ‘The
Forgotten Ways’ about the early growth of a church
he and his wife led in Melbourne. It did not happen under their leadership, but
before they arrived. George the Greek was a drug dealer who once chose prison
instead of a fine for his crimes. While there he read the Bible and God
encountered him. Upon release, George and his brother John set about sharing
their faith. Within six months, fifty people had become disciples of Jesus. There
were gay men, lesbians, Goths, drug addicts and prostitutes among the converts.
No Christian celebrity or authority figure did this: just George the Greek and
his brother John, loving people into the kingdom.

Conclusion
Ultimately, this takes us full circle, back to the young slave girl, who
blessed her needy, oppressive master. She, Elisha’s messenger and the river
Jordan are the heroes of the story. Elisha knows well to get out of the way
rather than garner praise for himself; sadly, the king of Israel sets no
example at all.

For we who are squeezed daily further to the margins as
Christians in our society, the message is clear: a generation of nobodies, operating
from the fringes of our culture, is God’s apostolic team for the salvation of
the world and the healing of the nations. This morning, as we take Holy
Communion, we enlist for that call.

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Tomorrow’s Sermon: The Conspiracy Of The Insignificant

2 Kings
5:1-14

Introduction
In early 2005, we realised that Debbie’s car, a Peugeot 306, was no longer
going to be functional as family car. It was insufficiently like the Tardis to
cope with the amount of clutter we needed to cart around with two small
children. Through friends and family, we were quickly converted to the virtues
of a ‘people-carrier’.

We short-listed three different cars: a Vauxhall
Zafira, Renault
Scenic and a Citroen
Picasso. Despite three recommendations for the Zafira, we eliminated it as
too expensive and with too small a boot.

That left the Scenic and the Picasso. For a while, we couldn’t
tell the difference between them in appearance, but we settled on the Picasso and
once we bought one we found that whenever we were out we were always spotting
Picassos on the road. Had they suddenly increased in number once we became
interested in them? No; we had simply become more tuned into them.

Sometimes I find reading the Bible is like that. It isn’t until
I get interested in a particular issue that I realise how much of the Bible
reflects that concern, or is relevant to it.

I had one of those experiences this last week. You will know
by now that one of my concerns is how we are faithful Christian witnesses in a
society where Christianity is no longer central, but on the margins. We live in
a culture whose values have been changing rapidly in recent decades. The Gospel
may not change, but many of our old ways of being church have become obsolete.

I have read the story of Naaman and his healing since Sunday
School. Perhaps you have, too. However, this week when it came up in the Lectionary
I found it was no longer a charming Sunday School story. It was a model for
mission in today’s world. I see it, because the story is set in a time when
Israel was under the cosh from Aram (verses 1-2). A pagan nation with alien
values has mastery over the people of God. Within these strictures, fruitful
mission happens – just as it can in our day when forces are pushing the church to
the margins of society. This week we saw the church-state ties loosened as
Gordon Brown relinquished
some powers over the appointment of bishops other senior clergy. It opens
up again the whole issue of the Church of England’s established status – and in
my Methodist opinion, that’s a good thing.

So in this context, where the church is less central to our
society, how does the story of Naaman encourage us in our mission? I find it by
exploring the three Israelite characters connected with him: the slave girl,
the king of Israel and Elisha.

1. The Slave Girl
How many of us were shocked by the news a couple of days ago that a
three-year-old girl was kidnapped in Nigeria?
Perhaps we need to think of something like that to understand the horror of
what happened when this young girl was taken captive by the Arameans in 2 Kings
5. Granted, she is probably older than three, given the way she speaks, and
neither is she being threatened by death. However, if you want a sense of the
horror, think Nigeria.

Yet in this situation of trauma and oppression, the young
girl is a star:

She said to her mistress, ‘If only my lord were with the
prophet who is in Samaria! He would cure him of his leprosy.’ (verse 3)

Here is a wounded, marginalised person offering love. Here
is one who as both child and female has no status, yet she offers love. Forgiving
love and compassion for one who has done wrong to her, her family, her religion
and nation. Truly, a little child leads here, as she blesses an enemy.

How does this translate for us? Isn’t one of the dangers of
being a minority that has been sidelined more and more that all we want to do
is carp and snipe at the society that has done this to us? We criticise this,
we declaim about that and we lay into something else. If we’re good, we pretend
we are offering a prophetic critique of the world, but if only we were. More likely,
we are laying bare the chip on our shoulder and giving energy to the resentment
we feel that people no longer see the church as an institution whose opinions
should be sought and respected.

The young slave girl says, bless those who have done this to
you. Look for ways to love and serve them. Search out opportunities to tell
them the good news – not that God can’t
wait to singe them in Hell, but that he is crazy with love for them and
passionate that they find him.

When I ministered in Kent, there was a branch of Ottakar’s bookshops
in Chatham High Street. They regularly displayed and promoted occult books. Alongside
the display there was sometimes the opportunity to sign up for occult meetings.
I shared this with a prayer meeting. The response was interesting. I thought
they would be the kind of Christians who would want to instigate a prayer march
against the shop, and perhaps a letter-writing campaign, too. They didn’t.
Their immediate response was to pray that God would bless the shop and its
employees, because that would be a better way of making a gospel difference.

For us, our ‘Naaman’ might be an unpleasant boss at work. What
might happen if we showed Christian love and concern for that boss’s needs and
difficulties? Or today’s Naaman could be an unjust political group or multinational
corporation. How might we show the love of Christ to them? (And this is the end
of International Boycott Nestlé Week!)

I am not saying we should never criticise or boycott, but we
have to be sure our motive is God’s love, not vindictiveness. The slave girl reminds
us to love and make a difference.

2. The King Of Israel
Naaman goes to his king, who prepares a letter for his opposite number, the
king of Israel. Leave aside for a moment the naïveté that assumes the Israelite
king can heal the soldier. We have to excuse that as innocent ignorance: it’s
something Christians encounter often from people who make requests of them. I often
find it comes in terms of expecting that the minister can do something, which
another Christian can’t. There is no point in criticising this: we cannot
expect complete understanding of our ways.

What is more disappointing is the king of Israel’s response.
He doesn’t give a theological lecture – that would be bad enough. Instead, he
goes on the defensive:

When the king of Israel read the letter, he tore his clothes
and said, ‘Am I God, to give death or life, that this man sends word to me to
cure a man of his leprosy?
Just look and see how he is trying to pick a quarrel with me.’ (verse 7)

The king of Israel cannot see human need for what it is and
respond appropriately. It is as if he knows the story of the Trojan Horse and
sees Naaman’s illness as the way in which Israel will be further weakened.

Is that so far from some of our responses as a Christian
minority today? I don’t think so. There are those who think we shouldn’t
support environmental causes, because we become ‘guilty by association’ with
some crazy green campaigners who happen to think that planet Earth is actually
a goddess named Gaia, and we shouldn’t get our names tarnished by working with
such fruitcakes. The fact that there is ample biblical material for being
environmentally conscious should be enough: God calls us to be stewards of the
earth, not rapists of it.

Alternatively, consider how long it took some Christians to
become concerned with fighting HIV/AIDS, because of its association with sexual
practices that lie outside traditional Christian morality. Thank God that
mentality has changed through the example of organisations like ACET AND TEAR
Fund, who hold orthodox Christian beliefs, but are at the forefront of
medical prevention and political campaigning.

In a world packed with terrible needs, it would be spiritual
suicide to follow the example of the king of Israel. It’s no good getting on
our high horse about certain moral evils in our society, but doing nothing to
heal the pain.

But let’s bring it close and personal. Who are the people we
know, who have made a mess of their lives, perhaps through their own fault, but
whom we have been resisting the idea of helping? Is now the time to see that we
have made a mistake and need to reach out with Christian compassion? For Debbie
and me recently it’s been about being available to two pregnant women: one is
living with her partner and already has one child by him, the other had a
second child on her own without ongoing involvement from the father of either
child. Neither of these women lives lifestyles with which we agree as
Christians. However, would it surprise you if I told you that one of these
mothers is now asking questions about baptism?

3. Elisha
Surely the story is going to end up with Elisha performing an amazing miracle. It
builds up that way. The slave girl calls him ‘the prophet who is in Samaria
[who] would cure [Naaman] of his leprosy’ (verse 3). The writer of 2 Kings
describes Elisha as ‘the man of God’ (verse 8) and Elisha himself urges the
king of Israel to forward Naaman onto him so ‘that he may learn that there is a
prophet in Israel’ (verse 8).

Therefore, it’s a surprise when Naaman arrives at Elisha’s
house and the great man doesn’t come out to greet him, but sends a messenger,
telling Naaman to wash seven times in the Jordan (verse 10). What’s going on?

Here’s my theory: Naaman has some kind of superstar complex.
He’s miffed that the spiritual hero won’t come out to him (verse 11), and he’s
insulted by the thought of washing in that feeble, insignificant river the
Jordan. He’s got celebrity rivers back in Damascus – the Abana and the Pharpar
(verse 12). So not meeting Elisha and suffering the indignity of the River Jordan
force Naaman away from this hero-worship attitude.

And isn’t that just what we need today? We live in a culture
that needs to be weaned off celebrity adulation, and where people – ooh, let me
think, Chantelle
Houghton and Paris
Hilton – are merely famous for being famous. So addicted are we to this
that an informed politician like Al Gore
needs to utilise gas-guzzling pop stars to communicate his planet-saving message. By a conspiracy of
insignificant non-celebrity Christians, operating without spin doctors or
street teams, armed only with the love of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit,
we subvert a sick culture and bring healing in the name of Jesus.

And that means that the church needs to be healed of her own
addiction to celebrity, too. We may not have the hype and publicity tools
available to entertainers and politicians, but there is an unhealthy reliance
upon famous Christians and Christian leaders. We believe, however, in a priesthood
of all believers, and so it’s time to stop this dependency upon such people and
realise this is a call to all Christians.

In fact, one Christian leader from the Southern Hemisphere, Alan Hirsch, tells a story in his
recent book, ‘The
Forgotten Ways’ about the early growth of a church
he and his wife led in Melbourne. It did not happen under their leadership, but
before they arrived. George the Greek was a drug dealer who once chose prison
instead of a fine for his crimes. While there he read the Bible and God
encountered him. Upon release, George and his brother John set about sharing
their faith. Within six months, fifty people had become disciples of Jesus. There
were gay men, lesbians, Goths, drug addicts and prostitutes among the converts.
No Christian celebrity or authority figure did this: just George the Greek and
his brother John, loving people into the kingdom.

Conclusion
Ultimately, this takes us full circle, back to the young slave girl, who
blessed her needy, oppressive master. She, Elisha’s messenger and the river
Jordan are the heroes of the story. Elisha knows well to get out of the way
rather than garner praise for himself; sadly, the king of Israel sets no
example at all.

For we who are squeezed daily further to the margins as
Christians in our society, the message is clear: a generation of nobodies, operating
from the fringes of our culture, is God’s apostolic team for the salvation of
the world and the healing of the nations. This morning, as we take Holy
Communion, we enlist for that call.

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