Category: Religion

Living With Broken Dreams

Taking my iPod for a walk the other morning after dropping the kids off at school, this great old song came on:

For one so young at the time, it was such a mature song, and I began to think about the disappointments that crush our dreams:

  • You dreamed of a long and happy retirement, but your spouse was struck down by a terminal cancer
  • You thought your work was going to change the world, but instead you clung on for retirement
  • Your children’s choices in adulthood broke your heart
  • You longed for children, but none came along
  • You expected to marry, but either the right person never came along, or they did and they were a disappointment, or they left you for someone else
  • You wanted to be a church leader, but the church didn’t share your conviction
  • Your heart ached for reconciliation with your family after those dark early years, but it never came and the parent who so let you down died before it could be resolved

Parents, teachers and church leaders all encourage children, teenagers and young converts to dream big dreams. “You can change the world!” Years later, many of those former young people are sat among the shards of shattered hopes. We could live differently.

We could sing the cynical words of ‘Always look on the  bright side of life’, – you know, ‘Life’s a pice of sh*t when you look at it’ – as the best an atheist, nihilist world can offer.

But I can’t accept that. Wouldn’t it be better to live with that Christian balance of Cross and Resurrection? The disciples thought their dreams had been destroyed at Calvary. ‘We had hoped he would be the one to redeem Israel,’ said one on the Emmaus Road. The discovery of an empty tomb and witnessing the One who blessed and broke bread changed everything.

A sermon I preached about three years ago and which you can find here on this blog was built on some personal experience of walking through such dashed dreams and darkened hopes. It was based on the last verse of 1 Corinthians 15, Paul’s great chapter about the Resurrection. His conclusion is not to sit tight and look forward to heaven, but to keep on striving, because ‘in the Lord your labour is not in vain.’ The God who will make all things new – even new heavens and a new earth – will make something good out of broken dreams.

Perhaps we can therefore encourage young people to dream differently. Dream on; dream about God’s kingdom purposes, which cannot be thwarted, even if he takes us on a detour to get there.

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A Methodist Message For Christmas

Mark WakelinThis is the Christmas message from the President of the Methodist Conference, the Revd Dr Mark Wakelin:

“Truly this was the Son of God!

“I was asked once by a well-known broadcaster, ‘do you believe that Jesus is the Son of God?’ I replied, as you do, by asking him, ‘it depends on what you mean by, ‘Son of God.’  His reply shook me because he then said, ‘It’s a perfectly simple question, ‘Is Jesus Christ the Son of God?’ My own thought was immediately, ‘I wonder which bit of ‘Son of God’ he is finding simple?’

“I presume he meant do I believe in a literal way? But that is hardly simple. Literal language is OK for baked beans and possibly sunsets, but it gets a bit thin when talking about most of the things that really matter such as love, sadness and wonder. It runs out of steam totally when talking of God. You can’t say anything literal about God!

“I was once in an argument about the new hymn book (I am afraid I get a bit grumpy about some of the alterations to ancient poems that we make and think that our desire to modernise the old is a little like the Christians who wanted to cover the modesty of the paintings in the Sistine Chapel). My colleague disliked the word ‘ineffable’ because he felt no one would understand it. There is a certain irony in that as you can imagine! Given that ‘ineffable’ basically means something we can’t understand, I would have thought it was a useful word to hang on to if we also want to talk about God. God is ‘ineffable’ – and that’s the point.

“That’s the point of Christmas. How does God communicate with us when words are not adequate? How can we even try to talk of God when literal language so lets us down? God’s answer is, of course, the ‘self sending’ – of a God who in Charles Wesley’s words is, ‘contracted to a span, incomprehensibly made man.’ What we can ever understand of God has to begin by taking account of God revealed in the person of Jesus Christ. Who is written about in Colossians 1:15: ‘He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation’ and verse 19: ‘For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.’

“The ‘Word’ is God, says John. Now this isn’t simple language either, but it directs you a kind of struggle to understand that is different from, for example, trying to get your head around Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity! Because it is truth revealed and held in a person, understanding and engaging with that truth is as much about love and obedience as it is about intellectual capacity and linguistic dexterity. We are not so much asked to assent to a philosophical or religious claim, ‘yes I agree that Jesus is the Son of God,’ but inhabit a story, the Christmas story, to live within ancient tale of human struggle and courage, of wonder and delight, of mystery and of angels declaring good news. Children get this much more easily than adults who want the whys and the wherefores of an extraordinary story which is far more than an odd biological claim on the Universe.

“Do I believe that Jesus is the Son of God? Of course, wonder of wonders, ‘Let earth and heaven combine, angels and men agree, to praise in songs divine the incarnate deity.’ I inhabit this ancient story and find it to be true. Wrapped in our clay we may not immediately recognise the creator of all things. But it is our life task, to discover a vulnerable God who is on a mission to finish the ‘new creation’ and is looking for followers.

“Happy Christmas!”

 

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Remembrance Sunday: Swords Into Ploughshares

At Knaphill this Sunday we shall hold our usual all age worship parade service for Remembrance Sunday. Our Bible text is Micah 4:1-5, especially the famous words in verse 3, ‘They will beat their swords into ploughshares’.

With that in mind, we are using the video below, which has connections with Christian Aid, and which we found through Barnabas In Churches. It tells a remarkable story of putting this Bible verse into practice in a creative way in Mozambique. Watch and be moved.

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Being A Blessing

At a recent all age worship service, we were looking at what the Book  of Proverbs says about riches. At the end of our ‘AAW’, we like to give the congregation a take-away to remind them of the theme. This time, one of our team suggested we give everybody a small amount of money – 50p – and invite them to use it in a Christian way. If people were badly off and needed it for themselves, they could keep it. However, we hoped that many would do some good with it. Hopefully we’ll hear some good stories in due course.

Well, one vicar in North Yorkshire has done the same thing on a much larger scale. I don’t often say the words, ‘Here is an inspiring story in the Daily Mail’, but on this occasion read this and enjoy.

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Advice For The New Archbishop Of Canterbury

If it is true that Justin Welby, Bishop of Durham, is to be the new ABC, then I wonder whether he will heed the advice that Rowan Williams is offering his successor (as reported in the same article):

Speaking in Auckland yesterday, at what aides said would be his final press conference, he was asked for advice for his successor.

Quoting the theologian Karl Barth, he said that the new Archbishop should preach “with a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other”.

He said that it was vital that whoever is named must be able to make his message relevant to modern life and “like” reading newspapers.

“You have to be cross-referencing all the time and saying, ‘How does the vision of humanity and community in the Bible map onto these issues of poverty, privation, violence and conflict?’

“And you have to use what you read in the newspaper to prompt and direct the questions that you put to the Bible: ‘Where is this going to help me?’

“So I think somebody who likes reading the Bible and likes reading newspapers would be a good start.”

Valuable as this is, I just wonder whether ‘newspaper’ ought to be augmented with ‘social media’. The new Archbishop enters a world where communications are faster than ever, and social media reporting and campaigning (whatever the doubts about accuracy) has such a rapid effect upon events, that he will need to be strongly aware of that, too. Perhaps the ABC needs not only a press office but a rapid response social media office.

That said, who am I to advise? And perhaps it would be good to heed the thoughts of Adrian Chatfield on Twitter, who tweeted,

https://twitter.com/AdrianChatfield/status/266293662160412672
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Christians At War

Here is the fixture list:

Arminians v Calvinists
Egalitarians v Complementarians
Creationists v Theistic Evolutionists
Conservatives v Liberals

And so on.

Bill Kinnon calls for Christians to stop ripping each other to shreds in the way opposing sports fans do.

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Stephen Holmes On The Church And Social Media

I’m not sure who I saw refer to this recent video, it might have been Vicky Beeching. This is an interesting seven-minute interview with Dr Stephen Holmes of St Andrew’s University. I’d be interested in your views.

A couple of the points for conversation that struck me were these:

1. Dr Holmes says that the church is often slightly behind the curve when it comes to adopting technology. This is my experience, too. We cannot adopt things as wholeheartedly as people like me would like to, because inevitably several of our older members do not have access, and we don’t want to treat them as second-class. However, that also means we lag further behind in contemporary means of communication. And like it or not, one of the things the Christian church is about is communication.

Furthermore, I even find among many Christians who are connected to the web that they are reluctant to embrace a lot of social media, with the sole general exception of Facebook. Sometimes it seems we are only using electronic technology as a new form of typewriter.

2. What about his point that it’s only in recent times that our culture has been so private? There is a lot of nervousness about the way privacy is broken down in social media, but Dr Holmes suggests near the end of the interview that we are merely reverting to the way society once was, and that such openness is a good thing. What do you think about that?

Here is the video:

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Rachel Held Evans And The Southern Baptists

Only in America? Rachel Held Evans tells her readers:

Since a lot of you have asked, (and in the spirit of Banned Books Week,) I thought I’d let you know that I recently received word that Lifeway has decided not to carry A Year of Biblical Womanhood in stores, presumably in the wake of the “vagina” controversy over the summer.

The history: Evans has written a book detailing how she spent twelve months attempting to follow all the biblical instructions for wives as literally and fully as possible. Her manuscript contains the word ‘vagina’. Her editor encouraged her to remove this scandalous word, because it would offend the sensibilities of Christian bookstores. Readers of her blog campaigned for her not to give in to such silliness, and she didn’t.

Now, the Southern Baptist bookstore chain Lifeway has said it won’t stock this evidently shocking book. Is it down to using this terrible word? Certainly, Evans has criticised Christian bookstores for demanding such ultra-sanitised content that, if they really followed through with their stated convictions, they wouldn’t stock the Bible itself. So maybe this is Lifeway’s revenge. That’s a nice Christian motive if it is the truth. Yet bizarrely, they are taking online orders for this book! Well, business is business, I guess.

Maybe it’s Evans’ public pronouncements in general, that have been deemed too theologically liberal for Southern Baptists. One of their scholars, Denny Burk, denounced her the other day as a ‘non-evangelical’, a ‘post-evangelical’ and a ‘theological liberal’. He doesn’t give any evidence in the blog post or the comments, but since Burk is a ‘complementarian‘, he is probably offended by her egalitarian views on gender rôles. Indeed, one of the thrusts of his article is that several of these women should not be celebrated, because they are doing things that only men should do – proclaim the Word of God. Worse than that, Evans has raised doubts about creationism and dares to think that gay people are human beings, not an issue.

Only in America?

Actually, no. Although they have certainly changed in recent years, the British-based international bookstore chain Christian Literature Crusade used to be known in some circles as ‘Constricted Literature Crusade’. (I think Michael Saward may have been responsible for that name.) They only sold certain books under the counter in brown paper bags if you ordered them, because they wouldn’t stock them. The Lion Handbook to the Bible was one example, because it contained a photo of an archaeologist who was smoking.

So am I advocating that Christian bookstores should have no boundaries? Of course not. But I am saying that fear is not a decent motive for boundary-setting. And I am saying that attitudes which denigrate women (why else would a proper biological name for a body part – a body made by God – be unacceptable?) are also unworthy of Christians.

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