Article here by Alan Nelson on Rick Warren’s pastors.com site. Three ideas: start with knowing your audience, get feedback, and incorporate active learning experiences. There is a feedback form in PDF format here.
Quote Of The Day
I’ve been playing my old John Martyn CDs while working at the computer of late. Just now I was burning his 1992 CD BBC Radio 1 Live in Concert and found this quote from the great man in Jeff Griffin’s sleeve notes:
Success is when you know your own worth – all the rest is unnecessary ultimately.
This could be taken in some trashy pop psychology wan, but reading it after hearing elderly people in church tell me they feel worthless when they can do fewer things is sobering and encouraging. For the Christian, knowledge of our own worth starts with being loved graciously and unconditionally by God in Christ.
The True Meaning Of Christmas
I’ve had a mailshot from Boots (it’s a large chemist/pharmacy chain, for those reading outside the UK). It’s connected with my loyalty card. Don’t you love this?
Dear Reverend Faulkner,
There are so many things to enjoy over Christmas: the parties, the presents and making yourself gorgeous for the big day itself. Well, we want to make sure that you look and feel a million dollars as well as help you enjoy the season for less. …
… Why not treat yourself to something gorgeous this Christmas? Go on, you know you deserve it.
I hope you enjoy Christmas like never before!
Rebecca Pearson
Advantage Card Manager
Well, now I know. I wouldn’t have guessed before. Yes, it’s the usual crass commercialism. Their mail-merge hasn’t noticed I’m a ‘Reverend’. Much of the language in the entire letter assumes I’m female. So much for personalisation. I am not a cherished individual, just a wallet. No, probably a purse in this case.
And it would of course take more than a million dollars to make me look gorgeous! Which is something I deserve, apparently – so they know I’ve been good, do they? As usual our culture has little room for grace. It’s like politicians speaking of state benefits that people deserve. And that becomes a gospel problem for the church today: how do we speak of grace and mercy when people are continually being told they deserve this, that and everything else?
Happy Christmas, Ms Pearson. I’m sending a friend of mine, Mr Scrooge, to your store. I’m sure he’ll fit your customer profile perfectly. I expect he’ll want a makeover, just as soon as the cosmetics team is back from colouring a new mother beautiful by the side of a manger.
Technorati Tags: Boots, loyalty+cards, Christmas, commercialism, grace
The True Meaning Of Christmas
I’ve had a mailshot from Boots (it’s a large chemist/pharmacy chain, for those reading outside the UK). It’s connected with my loyalty card. Don’t you love this?
Dear Reverend Faulkner,
There are so many things to enjoy over Christmas: the parties, the presents and making yourself gorgeous for the big day itself. Well, we want to make sure that you look and feel a million dollars as well as help you enjoy the season for less. …
… Why not treat yourself to something gorgeous this Christmas? Go on, you know you deserve it.
I hope you enjoy Christmas like never before!
Rebecca Pearson
Advantage Card Manager
Well, now I know. I wouldn’t have guessed before. Yes, it’s the usual crass commercialism. Their mail-merge hasn’t noticed I’m a ‘Reverend’. Much of the language in the entire letter assumes I’m female. So much for personalisation. I am not a cherished individual, just a wallet. No, probably a purse in this case.
And it would of course take more than a million dollars to make me look gorgeous! Which is something I deserve, apparently – so they know I’ve been good, do they? As usual our culture has little room for grace. It’s like politicians speaking of state benefits that people deserve. And that becomes a gospel problem for the church today: how do we speak of grace and mercy when people are continually being told they deserve this, that and everything else?
Happy Christmas, Ms Pearson. I’m sending a friend of mine, Mr Scrooge, to your store. I’m sure he’ll fit your customer profile perfectly. I expect he’ll want a makeover, just as soon as the cosmetics team is back from colouring a new mother beautiful by the side of a manger.
Technorati Tags: Boots, loyalty+cards, Christmas, commercialism, grace
Tomorrow’s Sermon, Mark 10:35-45: The Problem Of Status
1. Status
It was the Bunfight at the OK Corral. Well, no, it was tea
and cakes in the church hall after the official reopening of Broomfield’s premises in March, after our
refurbishment. The President of Conference met and greeted people like any
ordinary minister. Simon Burns MP mingled quietly and warmly with the crowd. So
did the Mayor – who was down-to-earth, and not in the slightest bit
self-important, despite the impression we had feared after the Mayor’s Parlour
had contacted us with all their demands for how his visit should be handled.
Quite different was one of the local councillors. I can’t
remember his name, and I’m glad about that. He buttonholed me for longer than I
would have wanted and proceeded to talk almost entirely about himself. His
particular beef was this: he and the Mayor had years ago been pupils at the
same school. But the Mayor this year had scheduled a dinner for the end of his
year in office on the same night as the annual old boys’ dinner at the school.
Being new here at the time I thought it must have been lauded public school – Felsted, maybe. But no. It was KEGS. Grammar school, yes, but not
the public school this buffer made it out to be.
We detest this sense of self-importance and pomposity in
politics. But we are not immune to it in the church. If you knew the tortured
discussions before the Broomfield
reopening about who should be on the platform for the service. It all seemed to
be about who was important enough to be up the front. I think people wanted to
honour the so-called ‘important’ people and were sincerely trying to avoid
causing offence. But I wonder whether we slipped into a worldly preoccupation
with status.
And likewise I once attended a concert given by a Christian
singer called Ian
White. Local ministers were invited to have a meal beforehand with him and
the pastor of the church where the concert was being held. I was the only one
who turned up – well, I was single at the time and it meant not having to cook!
Afterwards, I went into the worship area for the concert and found friends from
one of my churches arriving. I sat with them – at the back. At the end of the
concert the pastor couldn’t understand why I hadn’t gone with him and sat at
the front, in a prominent position. It had never occurred to me. And would it
surprise you if I told you that five or six years later that pastor fell from
grace? Money, sex and power were all allegedly involved.
So the world has a problem with the lust for power. And so
does the Church. Perhaps we shouldn’t be so shocked to read Mark 10 and find
James and John wanting the places of glory in the kingdom of God.
You might think they’d got the message about things being different in the
kingdom of God, given that we have just had the incident with the rich young
ruler (10:17-31) and Jesus has then warned them again about his own impending
rejection and suffering (10:32-34).
So we may well read the story and be horrified. But we are
reading back in retrospect, with a bigger picture of who Jesus is. We are also
reading it with blind spots, because it’s about the darkness in our hearts,
too.
Take me, for example. The other day I visited a lady who
asked me at the end of the conversation whether I preferred to be addressed as
‘reverend’, ‘minister’ or something else. ‘Try David,’ I said. (Well, Dave,
really, but I thought that would be too much for her.) And that is what I
believe. I don’t like titles. But I have to admit that when I fill in a form
and it asks for my title, I get a bit grumpy if ‘Reverend’ isn’t an option. I’d
like to tell you it’s just about our world not recognising the religious
dimension, but I fear my thoughts are less worthy than that.
And therefore this story is one to probe our own
hypocrisies. Where are we more interested in status, power and authority? Is
there some part of us that is a little too keen to have people look up to us
and admire us, rather than getting on with being Christlike? And what would
Jesus say to us?
2. Service
Jesus sees things quite differently. In fact implicitly he
points up the hypocrisy of his disciples. ‘You know that among the Gentiles
those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great
ones are tyrants over them,’ he tells them in verse 42. In other words, look,
you don’t like what you see of these other rulers. You see them and what their
desire for status and power does to them. They become the kind of people you
despise. Don’t you see that if you have your own way, this is how you would end
up? You will become the kind of person you hate.
And, he says, I don’t want you to become like that. You need
to take an alternative route. ‘But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes
to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first
among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to
serve,’ he tells them (verses 43-45a).
The call is to be a servant, or slave. The word ‘minister’
means ‘servant’, and one explanation for the origin of the clerical collar is
that it mimicked the collar worn by slaves – painfully ironic as we prepare to
mark next year the bicentenary of the
abolition of slavery in Britain and continue to campaign against people-trafficking.
And of course if the minister is a servant, we are all servants, according to
Jesus here. So if we are going to wear ‘dog collars’, either every Christian
should wear them or no-one should!
And this has as much application to politics as it does to
Church. I have observed before that is ‘minister’ means ‘servant’ then ‘Prime
Minister’ means ‘first servant’ – something worth bearing in mind when the next
General Election happens. For as well as assessing the policies put before us,
Christians might well want to ask an even more difficult question: which party
leader looks most likely to act as a servant?
But it’s not just the politicians or the church leaders,
it’s all of us. The call to serve comes from Jesus without discrimination. It
is what he came to do. It is what he calls us all to do. Our daily prayer needs
to be, ‘Lord, who can I bless in your name today? Where and how can I serve
you, and serve you by serving others?’
At one level that’s quite an easy prayer to say. But there
is a test for it. Someone has observed that the test of a true servant is how
they behave when they are treated like one. Many of us long to do heroic, even
sacrificial things for the kingdom
of God. But what if we
were to do them and receive no recognition? We’d like even our humble good works
to be noted. We want to be appreciated. But what if we aren’t? Jesus calls us
to serve without regard for things like that. It is noted and appreciated in
heaven. Recognition will come from the Father. But that may not be something we
experience here and now. Do we really want to serve, or do we have a darker
motive – one that would even manipulate acts of service into an inflation of
our personal status?
3. Suffering
The other day I learned that at an ecumenical Remembrance
Sunday service this year I have to preach on John 15:13, ‘No one has greater
love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.’ I know it’s the
traditional text, but I was uncomfortable. Surely that text is about Jesus’
sacrificial death, not about general human willingness to suffer? Don’t we make
‘the fallen’ of our wars virtually on a par with Jesus by using this text?
And that leads me into the last part of what Jesus says as a
corrective to the lust for status. ‘For the Son of Man came not to be served
but to serve … and to give his life a
ransom for many.’ (verse 45, my emphasis)
We just get further and further away from the lust for
status. Not only are we called to be servants as the sign of true greatness and
trustworthy leadership in the kingdom
of God, Jesus goes beyond
that – from service to suffering. Not only did he come to serve, he came to
give his life.
And before he tells this to all the disciples, he confronts
James and John with this. ‘You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to
drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized
with?’ he asks them (verse 38). Although they answer that they can, Jesus’
question really expects the answer, ‘No’. For sharing someone’s cup was to
share their suffering and in the Old Testament it was to do with God’s judgment
upon sin. And the image of baptism may not just be about being submerged in
suffering but refer back to his baptism by his cousin John where he identified
with human repentance. Put these two images of the cup and baptism together,
then, and it seems as if Jesus is saying to James and John, ‘Can you suffer for
human sin as I am going to?’ No wonder he thinks their answer should be ‘No’. [William
Lane, The Gospel Of Mark, pp 379-381.]
So there is a suffering that Jesus, who is entitled more
than any other human being to pull rank and claim status, will go through. He
will suffer for human sin. He will do so as a ‘ransom’ (verse 45) – in some
sense his suffering ‘pays’ to release others (although it’s dangerous to push
this image too far). He is a ‘substitute’, then (again, we shouldn’t push the
image too much), dying in place of others to set them free. Only Jesus, truly
God and truly human, can do this.
So was I right to be nervous about the Remembrance Sunday
text? I think I was.
But while Jesus suffers in a unique way for the sins of the
world, there is still a way in which we, his disciples, suffer too. For
although Jesus expects James and John to admit they can’t suffer for the sins
of the world he still tells them they will drink his cup and be baptised like
him (verse 39). Jesus is saying to them, you think that by following me you
will get to share in my status and glory. Don’t even think about that. If you
follow me, remember what I said not long ago to you: that if you want to be my
disciple, you need to deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me (8:34).
And it remains the call of Jesus’ disciples today. If we
follow him it is just as likely that the world will take the same dislike to us
as it took to him. To seek to live a pure, self-controlled life in a world
given up to its lusts is a prophetic statement. So too is to question a
consumer society that values people by the amount of money or possessions they
have. Sometimes prophets like Mother Teresa get Nobel Prizes in our world;
sometimes prophets like Martin Luther King and Dietrich Bonhoeffer get killed
for their troubles.
Yet we follow the Son of Man who took on human flesh in
great humility, the Messiah who died for our sins. We serve the Son of God who
conquered death in the resurrection, and who gives his Spirit without measure
from the right hand of the Father. It’s about being absolutely captivated by
this Jesus. And when we are, we give up status, we learn to serve and we risk
suffering for his name out of sheer love and devotion. We willingly make
sacrifices for ordinary mortals whom we love. How much more for our Lord?
And when we do that, we have the assurance that although
following Jesus may cost us as it cost him, it comes with the same rewards and
vindication. For his resurrection will be our resurrection. No status in the
world can buy that.
Technorati Tags: status, service, suffering, Broomfield, Simon+Burns+MP, President+Of+Conference, Felsted, KEGS, Ian+White, power, Jesus, disciples, discipleship, abolition+of+slavery, clerical+collars, dog+collars, Prime+Minister, Remembrance+Sunday, William+Lane, Mother+Teresa, Martin+Luther+King, Dietrich+Bonhoeffer, resurrection
Tomorrow’s Sermon, Mark 10:35-45: The Problem Of Status
1. Status
It was the Bunfight at the OK Corral. Well, no, it was tea
and cakes in the church hall after the official reopening of Broomfield’s premises in March, after our
refurbishment. The President of Conference met and greeted people like any
ordinary minister. Simon Burns MP mingled quietly and warmly with the crowd. So
did the Mayor – who was down-to-earth, and not in the slightest bit
self-important, despite the impression we had feared after the Mayor’s Parlour
had contacted us with all their demands for how his visit should be handled.
Quite different was one of the local councillors. I can’t
remember his name, and I’m glad about that. He buttonholed me for longer than I
would have wanted and proceeded to talk almost entirely about himself. His
particular beef was this: he and the Mayor had years ago been pupils at the
same school. But the Mayor this year had scheduled a dinner for the end of his
year in office on the same night as the annual old boys’ dinner at the school.
Being new here at the time I thought it must have been lauded public school – Felsted, maybe. But no. It was KEGS. Grammar school, yes, but not
the public school this buffer made it out to be.
We detest this sense of self-importance and pomposity in
politics. But we are not immune to it in the church. If you knew the tortured
discussions before the Broomfield
reopening about who should be on the platform for the service. It all seemed to
be about who was important enough to be up the front. I think people wanted to
honour the so-called ‘important’ people and were sincerely trying to avoid
causing offence. But I wonder whether we slipped into a worldly preoccupation
with status.
And likewise I once attended a concert given by a Christian
singer called Ian
White. Local ministers were invited to have a meal beforehand with him and
the pastor of the church where the concert was being held. I was the only one
who turned up – well, I was single at the time and it meant not having to cook!
Afterwards, I went into the worship area for the concert and found friends from
one of my churches arriving. I sat with them – at the back. At the end of the
concert the pastor couldn’t understand why I hadn’t gone with him and sat at
the front, in a prominent position. It had never occurred to me. And would it
surprise you if I told you that five or six years later that pastor fell from
grace? Money, sex and power were all allegedly involved.
So the world has a problem with the lust for power. And so
does the Church. Perhaps we shouldn’t be so shocked to read Mark 10 and find
James and John wanting the places of glory in the kingdom of God.
You might think they’d got the message about things being different in the
kingdom of God, given that we have just had the incident with the rich young
ruler (10:17-31) and Jesus has then warned them again about his own impending
rejection and suffering (10:32-34).
So we may well read the story and be horrified. But we are
reading back in retrospect, with a bigger picture of who Jesus is. We are also
reading it with blind spots, because it’s about the darkness in our hearts,
too.
Take me, for example. The other day I visited a lady who
asked me at the end of the conversation whether I preferred to be addressed as
‘reverend’, ‘minister’ or something else. ‘Try David,’ I said. (Well, Dave,
really, but I thought that would be too much for her.) And that is what I
believe. I don’t like titles. But I have to admit that when I fill in a form
and it asks for my title, I get a bit grumpy if ‘Reverend’ isn’t an option. I’d
like to tell you it’s just about our world not recognising the religious
dimension, but I fear my thoughts are less worthy than that.
And therefore this story is one to probe our own
hypocrisies. Where are we more interested in status, power and authority? Is
there some part of us that is a little too keen to have people look up to us
and admire us, rather than getting on with being Christlike? And what would
Jesus say to us?
2. Service
Jesus sees things quite differently. In fact implicitly he
points up the hypocrisy of his disciples. ‘You know that among the Gentiles
those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great
ones are tyrants over them,’ he tells them in verse 42. In other words, look,
you don’t like what you see of these other rulers. You see them and what their
desire for status and power does to them. They become the kind of people you
despise. Don’t you see that if you have your own way, this is how you would end
up? You will become the kind of person you hate.
And, he says, I don’t want you to become like that. You need
to take an alternative route. ‘But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes
to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first
among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to
serve,’ he tells them (verses 43-45a).
The call is to be a servant, or slave. The word ‘minister’
means ‘servant’, and one explanation for the origin of the clerical collar is
that it mimicked the collar worn by slaves – painfully ironic as we prepare to
mark next year the bicentenary of the
abolition of slavery in Britain and continue to campaign against people-trafficking.
And of course if the minister is a servant, we are all servants, according to
Jesus here. So if we are going to wear ‘dog collars’, either every Christian
should wear them or no-one should!
And this has as much application to politics as it does to
Church. I have observed before that is ‘minister’ means ‘servant’ then ‘Prime
Minister’ means ‘first servant’ – something worth bearing in mind when the next
General Election happens. For as well as assessing the policies put before us,
Christians might well want to ask an even more difficult question: which party
leader looks most likely to act as a servant?
But it’s not just the politicians or the church leaders,
it’s all of us. The call to serve comes from Jesus without discrimination. It
is what he came to do. It is what he calls us all to do. Our daily prayer needs
to be, ‘Lord, who can I bless in your name today? Where and how can I serve
you, and serve you by serving others?’
At one level that’s quite an easy prayer to say. But there
is a test for it. Someone has observed that the test of a true servant is how
they behave when they are treated like one. Many of us long to do heroic, even
sacrificial things for the kingdom
of God. But what if we
were to do them and receive no recognition? We’d like even our humble good works
to be noted. We want to be appreciated. But what if we aren’t? Jesus calls us
to serve without regard for things like that. It is noted and appreciated in
heaven. Recognition will come from the Father. But that may not be something we
experience here and now. Do we really want to serve, or do we have a darker
motive – one that would even manipulate acts of service into an inflation of
our personal status?
3. Suffering
The other day I learned that at an ecumenical Remembrance
Sunday service this year I have to preach on John 15:13, ‘No one has greater
love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.’ I know it’s the
traditional text, but I was uncomfortable. Surely that text is about Jesus’
sacrificial death, not about general human willingness to suffer? Don’t we make
‘the fallen’ of our wars virtually on a par with Jesus by using this text?
And that leads me into the last part of what Jesus says as a
corrective to the lust for status. ‘For the Son of Man came not to be served
but to serve … and to give his life a
ransom for many.’ (verse 45, my emphasis)
We just get further and further away from the lust for
status. Not only are we called to be servants as the sign of true greatness and
trustworthy leadership in the kingdom
of God, Jesus goes beyond
that – from service to suffering. Not only did he come to serve, he came to
give his life.
And before he tells this to all the disciples, he confronts
James and John with this. ‘You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to
drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized
with?’ he asks them (verse 38). Although they answer that they can, Jesus’
question really expects the answer, ‘No’. For sharing someone’s cup was to
share their suffering and in the Old Testament it was to do with God’s judgment
upon sin. And the image of baptism may not just be about being submerged in
suffering but refer back to his baptism by his cousin John where he identified
with human repentance. Put these two images of the cup and baptism together,
then, and it seems as if Jesus is saying to James and John, ‘Can you suffer for
human sin as I am going to?’ No wonder he thinks their answer should be ‘No’. [William
Lane, The Gospel Of Mark, pp 379-381.]
So there is a suffering that Jesus, who is entitled more
than any other human being to pull rank and claim status, will go through. He
will suffer for human sin. He will do so as a ‘ransom’ (verse 45) – in some
sense his suffering ‘pays’ to release others (although it’s dangerous to push
this image too far). He is a ‘substitute’, then (again, we shouldn’t push the
image too much), dying in place of others to set them free. Only Jesus, truly
God and truly human, can do this.
So was I right to be nervous about the Remembrance Sunday
text? I think I was.
But while Jesus suffers in a unique way for the sins of the
world, there is still a way in which we, his disciples, suffer too. For
although Jesus expects James and John to admit they can’t suffer for the sins
of the world he still tells them they will drink his cup and be baptised like
him (verse 39). Jesus is saying to them, you think that by following me you
will get to share in my status and glory. Don’t even think about that. If you
follow me, remember what I said not long ago to you: that if you want to be my
disciple, you need to deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me (8:34).
And it remains the call of Jesus’ disciples today. If we
follow him it is just as likely that the world will take the same dislike to us
as it took to him. To seek to live a pure, self-controlled life in a world
given up to its lusts is a prophetic statement. So too is to question a
consumer society that values people by the amount of money or possessions they
have. Sometimes prophets like Mother Teresa get Nobel Prizes in our world;
sometimes prophets like Martin Luther King and Dietrich Bonhoeffer get killed
for their troubles.
Yet we follow the Son of Man who took on human flesh in
great humility, the Messiah who died for our sins. We serve the Son of God who
conquered death in the resurrection, and who gives his Spirit without measure
from the right hand of the Father. It’s about being absolutely captivated by
this Jesus. And when we are, we give up status, we learn to serve and we risk
suffering for his name out of sheer love and devotion. We willingly make
sacrifices for ordinary mortals whom we love. How much more for our Lord?
And when we do that, we have the assurance that although
following Jesus may cost us as it cost him, it comes with the same rewards and
vindication. For his resurrection will be our resurrection. No status in the
world can buy that.
Technorati Tags: status, service, suffering, Broomfield, Simon+Burns+MP, President+Of+Conference, Felsted, KEGS, Ian+White, power, Jesus, disciples, discipleship, abolition+of+slavery, clerical+collars, dog+collars, Prime+Minister, Remembrance+Sunday, William+Lane, Mother+Teresa, Martin+Luther+King, Dietrich+Bonhoeffer, resurrection
A Professional Christian
Here is a talk I gave tonight to a home group on the above theme:
Vocation
‘A professional Christian’: I must have used that expression
in a phone conversation with Jan when she invited me to speak to you. It’s a
title I use facetiously of myself at times as a minister. But there’s a hint of
irony behind it: the fact that I am paid to propagate the Christian faith can
make people suspicious of me. If he’s paid to say this, is he sincere? Isn’t he
just for hire? It’s all part of the suspicion of authority and power in our
world, and I’ll come on to that later.
But for now let me just use that to touch at the beginning
on an important question for all of us, and that is the matter of Christian
vocation. A dear Catholic friend of mine refers to my work as a minister as ‘my
vocation’, and that’s understandable in his tradition. But I want to suggest
that we all have a vocation. Traditionally Protestant and Free Church
Christians have seen professions such as medicine, nursing and education – work
that in some way is analogous to the ministry of Jesus – as also worthy of the
name ‘vocation’. But we haven’t included bank managers, secretaries,
hairdressers, waiters or factory workers. Yet Martin Luther did. He went to the
point of saying that if (in his day) there were a vacancy for the post of
village hangman, the dutiful Christian should apply. Now notwithstanding my
personal reservations about capital punishment, his point was that every job
that did not constitutionally promote sin was a potential vocation. All forms
of work are capable of being places where we express the kingdom of God
– and not just in a sense of being the person who doesn’t steal the office
paper clips.
Yet I would want to go further than that. Our vocation is
not simply about what we do, it is about who we are. One of my favourite Bible
stories is the baptism of Jesus. I love the fact that the voice from heaven
calls him ‘My Son, the belovèd’. He hasn’t begun his public ministry – his
‘vocation’, if you will. Yet the Father is already pleased with him. And in the
words of my Ethics tutor from my undergraduate days, ‘The Christian’s first
vocation is not to do but to be – to be a child of God’. So I invite you to see
your vocation that way. And if I talk this evening about my calling to be a
Methodist minister, it needs to be seen alongside two things: one, that it is
an outworking of my calling to be a child of God, and two, that we all share in
that calling. Certainly my calling is an honourable one – what Paul in 1
Timothy 3:1 calls ‘a noble task’ – but it is not a superior one. I share with
all the family of God the calling to be a child of God, and we each have
particular ways in which that is expressed.
My Calling
That may be very well, but how did I end up in the ministry? I still ask that question on some days!
I had become a Christian at the age of sixteen, when the
liturgy of the 1975 Methodist Confirmation Service made it clear to me that
Christianity wasn’t about trying to be good enough; it was about faith in Jesus
Christ and serving him as an act of gratitude for his forgiveness. I went into
Sixth Form to study Maths, Physics and Chemistry and gained university offers
to read either Computer Science or Maths. But a problem with severe neck pain prevented
me from sitting my A-Levels and although I tried to repeat my Upper Sixth year
I wasn’t going to do myself justice. So I left school and got a clerical job in
the Civil Service based on my O-Levels.
In the meantime I became less interested in Maths and more
interested in Theology. I joined a youth preaching team in my home circuit
(under the guidance of a Local Preacher) and later became a Local Preacher
myself.
But neither my job nor Local Preaching satisfied me. I felt
wasted in my job and wasn’t getting anywhere. Local Preaching felt like ‘hit
and run’ ministry: preach in one church and then not see them for six months.
It lacked continuity. Combined with some Bible passages that suddenly took on
new meaning for me I felt an urge towards something else, probably involving
theological study. Of one thing I was sure: it wasn’t the ordained ministry. I
had been on an ‘Is the ordained ministry for you?’ day and come away feeling,
‘Not in a million years’. I also felt my personality was unsuitable: I’m very
introverted and I felt I was so hyper-sensitive that I’d never cope with
people’s problems.
However, my minister encouraged me to explore things. When I
told him I wanted to go to theological college he said, ‘Dave, I’ve always
thought you were in the wrong job.’ I remember thinking, ‘Michael, you’ve been
my minister for six years and you only say that now!’
So I explored colleges. Methodist colleges were out: mostly
they trained accepted candidates for the ministry. Others, like Cliff College, only offered one year
evangelism courses at the time, and something like that also wasn’t right for
me. I looked elsewhere. And to cut a long story short, I ended up at Trinity College, Bristol, an Anglican
theological college that didn’t just train Anglican ordinands. What made the
difference was my interview with the college Principal, George Carey. He told
me I could come to the college and work out my future.
So I accepted a place there and there is a separate lengthy
but remarkable story about how God provided the money for me to go there, given
that my Local Education Authority turned me down for a student grant (this was
in the days before student loans). While I was there, a lot of my fears about
pastoral ministry were answered, especially through a course in pastoral
counselling.
The only question then was, if I offer for the ministry do I
stay in my native Methodism or go into the Church of England, since I was
seeing such a good advert for it at Trinity? In Methodism I had (and have)
misgivings about the circuit system and the way it destroys pastoral
continuity; in the Church of England I don’t like the idea of an established
church and the fact that my confirmation is not recognised by them.
Ultimately I didn’t trust the advice of any more Methodists
or Anglicans and went to see an old friend who was the pastor of an independent
evangelical church. We sat down in his study one morning and over coffee he said,
‘Dave, I don’t understand the Methodist
Church and I don’t
understand the Church of England. This is the tradition I grew up in and it’s
all I really know. However you understand the doctrine of God’s providence can
you really see your upbringing in Methodism as an accident? You may have good
reasons to leave the Methodist
Church, but are they
overwhelming reasons? And if they are overwhelming reasons, are you saying that
God has given up on Methodism?’
And so it was that I offered for the Methodist ministry. I
was accepted and sent to Hartley
Victoria College in Manchester,
where the fact that I’d done the equivalent of an Anglican ordination course
wasn’t good enough for Methodism. I had to study a further three years, during
which time I completed an MPhil in Theology at Manchester University.
From there I went to serve first of all in what was then
known as the Waltham Abbey and Hertford circuit for five years. Then I went to
the Medway circuit for eight years. Last year, as you know, I came here.
Ministry Versus A
‘Real Job’
Well, let’s kick off with some typical frequent comments
ministers receive:
‘You only work on Sundays’ – just a penny for every time
that’s been said to me I’d be a rich man.
Or – ‘I know Sunday is your busiest day’ – that’s meant to
be more understanding but it generally isn’t true. In my case I’m usually
finished earlier in the evening on a Sunday and as far as possible I try to
protect the afternoon as family time.
Or from church members – ‘What’s the best day of the week
for you?’ Much as I like to be a creature of habit and routine I find that’s an
almost impossible question. Not everything in ministry falls into a rhythm.
Ministry can’t be defined by a set of recurring appointments (and neither can
conventional jobs). And – again, similarly to other work – there are the
interruptions. I used to think they were interruptions to ministry until I read
the words of an American minister who said, ‘The interruptions are the ministry.’ The ministry would be
so much easier without the people!
How about ‘More tea, vicar?’ Gone are the days of obvious
rhythm in the ministry. When I trained for the ministry the tutor who spent two
years teaching us about pastoral matters had a very simple, old-style concept
of the minister’s day. You were at your desk by 9:00 am, with your shoes on as
a physical sign that you were at work. You spent the morning in your study, the
afternoon visiting, and the evening at meetings. But I soon found that shoes
ruined the manse carpet, and that meetings could happen at any time. So, for
example, two of my mornings each week are taken up with meetings: not
committees, but a Bible Study and a coffee morning outreach. That same tutor
also thought you could visit five different people every afternoon, and if
someone were out they didn’t count towards your five. But I don’t know a single
colleague who can manage that. It barely gives people time to get the kettle
on!
People also make comments about the workload. I always have
to remember that I’m not the only person who works long hours. Many people do
in our society. But in terms of ministry it is perhaps best put by a couple of
comments the late Donald English used to make to his students. He said, ‘The
ministry is not about priorities; it is about choosing between priorities.’ He
also told those he trained, ‘Learn to go to bed with a guilty conscience.’
Now try this for size: what is my employment status?
Employee, self-employed, company director, office holder? Any guesses? There
are those who think I am employed by the church. The church pays me – and some
think they can tell me what to do! (I won’t go into a painful experience with
circuit stewards in one previous appointment!) The Superintendent Minister can
instruct me and so can the Methodist Conference, but not the church members or
their representatives. Furthermore, my income tax is mainly dealt with under
PAYE and I pay employee’s National Insurance contributions. But I’m not an
employee in law. I don’t receive a salary; I receive a stipend, which
technically is a living allowance.
What about self-employed? There is a case for that, too.
Because I also receive certain fees and equally have various expenses I can
claim against tax I have to deal with my income tax under the dreaded
self-assessment procedures. Thankfully I have a wonderful accountant! And in
law I can’t bring an unfair dismissal case against the church should I be
sacked, for according to the law I am not employed by the church but by God,
and you can’t take God to an industrial tribunal. Another evidence of
self-employment would be the degree of freedom I have to decide my own diary or
even send a substitute when I cannot fulfil a commitment. Some pastors are
regarded as self-employed in law, usually those who live on sporadic donations
rather than a regular stipend. But I am not self-employed.
Company director? That’s probably the easiest one to
dismiss. I am not the director of a limited company – although I could say some
facetious things here about Church plc!
No, I fall into that most obscure of categories, ‘office
holder’. I suspect it’s just a category for people who don’t fit anywhere else.
While there are probably several professions that do fall under this heading,
the only other one of which I am personally aware is Registrars of Births,
Marriages and Deaths. And I only discovered that when I went to register the
birth of our second child!
What Ministry Is And
What It Isn’t
My MPhil was a study in the doctrine of the church and I
have some fairly radical ideas about what ministry might be and how we might
shape church. It’s for these reasons that I probably just about survive on the
very fringes of Methodism and there are those with more traditional views than
me who might be horrified at some of my ideas. I’ve occasionally expressed them
on the Internet and I’m still waiting for my heresy trial! However I want to
get back to what I believe are some New Testament principles and connect them
from the world we live in – a world that is radically different in values and
convictions from the one many of us grew up in.
The Methodist
Church ordains
presbyteral ministers such as me to a ministry of word, sacrament and pastoral
care. One of my problems isn’t that any of these things are wrong, but that
there are many other leadership gifts excluded, compromised or marginalised
because these are the gifts we seek in a minister. So in Ephesians 4 Paul talks
about foundational ministries for the building up of the church and he mentions
‘apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers’. The Methodist
definition of ministry gives ample scope to the pastors and teachers but not to
the apostles, prophets and evangelists. Since pastors and teachers tend to care
for the flock it’s easy to end up with an inward-looking approach to church.
Those who are more mission-focussed can get squeezed by the system.
Today, more than ever, we need to see that the Christian
Church in the West is in a missionary situation. Past evangelism worked on the
basis that we were calling people back to a dormant faith – the Church of
England with its parish system and old-style Billy Graham rallies with their
appeal to people who accept what the Bible says – were perhaps appropriate in
such a time. But there is now widespread ignorance of, and even opposition to
the Christian faith. If we do not accept the moral values of the day we are
classified as bigoted. Some of that criticism is justified, some of it not, but
this is how we are perceived. Thanks to a plethora of high-profile scandals
reported in the media, ministers are either out to fleece you of your money or
we are child abusers. This is part of a wider suspicion of authority and power
in our society, and the Church spends much of her time behaving, and with
institutions, as if things were still in the 1950s.
Put it this way: think about our primary ways of
communicating, because the medium of communication isn’t just the message (as
Marshall McLuhan famously said), it’s the actual view of the world.[1] So
in the ancient world it was an oral culture. Communication was by speech. This
meant that truth was known in relationship with others. Jesus said, ‘I am the
way, the truth and the life’: that is truth in relationship. You couldn’t
separate the message from the messenger. This led to worship that was a
mystical and liturgical re-enactment
of sacred and eternal events.
Then came the invention of the printing press and the
consequent print culture. Now truth was not conceived in relationship but
individually as you followed the logical sequence of an argument. So you get
worship as a meeting, where hymns are
written to conform to doctrinal truth (remember that John Wesley checked the
theology of his brother Charles’ hymns) and the sermon, which was rather like a
lecture, was the focal point. Truth is not so much relational as a series of
propositions.
In our day this has been superseded by the broadcast culture
of television. Large churches (the so-called megachurches) and major Christian
festivals have been able to put on dramatic, upbeat, celebration-style worship.
It is worship as event. The ‘worship
leader’ is more significant now, and the preaching of the pastor is less about
a logical argument from Scripture than about connecting with people via stories
and personal experience. Truth is experienced in the present moment – or
‘existential’, to give it its technical name.
But even the broadcast culture is being challenged by the
digital culture fostered by the communications revolution centred upon
computers and the Internet. Worship becomes a gathering. It is interactive (because that’s the way the World Wide
Web is going – away from just static web pages you view), involves a multitude
of senses, and highly engaged. It can even be intimate, despite the way you
might think that sitting at a computer screen detaches people. Rather than have
a worship leader or a pastor you get a ‘spiritual conductor’ who creates an
open-ended experience that uses not only contemporary messages but draws on the
best ritual, preaching and praise of the preceding three eras and converges
them.
Now if that is the way the world is changing – and changing
fast: how many have lived through print, broadcast and now digital cultures? –
then church needs to change shape, especially if you accept my argument that we
are in a missionary situation. We can only remain the same if we just want to
keep the existing declining number of punters happy.
And even language like that betrays the concept of church as
a religious club. The great Swiss theologian Emil Brunner said, ‘The church
exists by mission as fire exists by burning.’ Or as it has also been put, ‘It
is not that the church
of God has a mission in
the world, rather that the God of mission has a church in the world.’
And all this leads us into things that you are considering
such as ‘Mission-Shaped
Church’ and the Fresh
Expressions project, jointly run by the Anglican and Methodist churches.
The Fresh Expressions website lists fourteen different approaches to church,
none of which looks quite like a Methodist five-hymn sandwich. There isn’t time
to go into this now: you’ll have to explore.
But the critical thing is that we have assumed church and
mission work on an idea that people will come to us. That is less and less
credible now. The word is no longer ‘come’: it is ‘go’.
[1] Here I
am following M Rex
Miller, The Millennium Matrix,
San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass, 2004, especially pp 96-97.
More On School Assembly Resources
Well, the newly-discovered school assembly bug has truly bitten. The assembly at the beginning of September at Little Waltham went well, and I soon went to the Guy Harlings Resource Centre to search for some more. There I discovered what I now regard as a little gem: ‘Stories For Interactive Assemblies’ by Nigel Bishop. Bishop is a primary school head who has retold fifteen of Jesus’ parables in the setting of a primary school. Not only that, there is follow-up material for teachers after each story.
Last week I went back to Little Waltham and told one of his stories. It went down tremendously well with children and staff. They then asked me at short notice to go back yesterday and fill in at their Harvest Festival, because the local vicar and URC ministers have both recently retired. Again, one of Bishop’s retold parables worked wonders.
I happen to differ with Bishop on biblical studies issues about the parables. He takes the standard critical view that parables only make one point, there is no allegory and therefore the couple of times that Jesus explains them are not original to him. I follow Craig Blomberg in his book ‘Interpreting The Parables’ who argues for limited allegory and takes the issue of concealment more seriously, rather than explaining it away on the grounds of inclusiveness.
However, that said, the great thing is that although Bishop is more liberal in his tendencies and I am more conservative in mine it has so far made little or no difference to the power and application of the stories. If you are looking for something new and creative for primary school assemblies I recommend this book highly. Just don’t start using it on my patch in this part of Essex!
Technorati Tags: primary+school, assembly, Little+Waltham, Guy+Harlings, Stories+For+Interactive+Assemblies, Nigel+Bishop, parables, Craig+Blomberg, Interpreting+The+Parables
Tomorrow’s Sermon, Jesus On Marriage And Divorce
A tortuous theme in tomorrow’s Lectionary Gospel reading. I hope I’ve done it justice and remembered hurting people at the same time. See what you think.
Introduction
I am a guilty party in an adulterous relationship.
At least I am, according to many Christians. Many Christians
take the teaching of Jesus in Mark 10 at face value and speak of marriage as
being ‘indissoluble’. Even divorce does not end the marriage in the sight of
God. And in case you didn’t know, my wife Debbie is previously divorced, and
her first husband is still alive.
So today in taking the Lectionary Gospel reading I have to
confront a Bible passage that could even challenge the validity of my own
marriage.
And this subject probably affects us all. We may have gone
through a divorce. We may have remarried, or we may be considering it. If we
haven’t, then given the high number of divorces in our society, it has almost
certainly touched us in some other way. A family member or a friend will have
been through the pain of a broken marriage.
How can Christians respond? We can go to one of two equally
unhelpful extremes, if we are not careful. At the one extreme we so uphold the
sanctity of marriage that we say hurtful things to those who have split up from
their spouses. I once met a couple before their wedding, where the bride was
previously divorced. Another church had refused to conduct her second marriage,
but rather than the vicar say, “I’m sorry, but out of conscience I can’t take
your wedding,” he told her, “You are damaged goods.”
At the other extreme we can be so enamoured of God’s
unconditional forgiving love in Christ that we fail to address brokenness and make
him sound like a God who doesn’t care about sin.
Somewhere, there has to be a different approach. And
contrary to the claims of some, I think we find it in this passage, and
especially when we combine it with Matthew’s account of this same incident.
But we can’t answer the question about divorce immediately.
First of all we have some context to set, because these words didn’t just drop
down from heaven to earth and appear ‘out of thin air’. There is some important
background. Secondly we’ll see that Jesus goes back to fundamental principles
about marriage. Then finally we’ll try to see where we might end up in terms of
a compassionate and principled Christian understanding of marriage and divorce.
1. Context
The Lectionary starts at verse 2 of Mark 10. I began at
verse 1:
He left that place and went to the
region of Judea and beyond the Jordan.
He leaves Capernaum, goes
across the mountains of Samaria to Judea, on a
normal pilgrim’s route to Jerusalem, and ends up
beyond the Jordan
in Perea [William Lane, The Gospel Of Mark, p 353]. What’s significant about that?
It puts him in the territory
of Herod the tetrarch,
where John the Baptist conducted most of his ministry and condemned Herod and
Herodias for entering into an adulterous marriage. And you’ll recall John lost
his head for his troubles.
So now when the Pharisees come to test Jesus (verse 2) this
isn’t an idle academic debate: they are trying to trap him. If Jesus supports
his cousin John’s teaching then maybe Herod and Herodias will have him
executed, too. That would be neat: Jesus is disposed of politically, without
any need for religious hands to become ritually unclean. On the other hand, if
Jesus doesn’t agree with John then that undermines one or both of them. Either
Jesus is the moral compromiser, in which case why continue to listen to him, or
John was just over the top and his ministry should now be discredited. It’s
nasty and clever, isn’t it?
As a little secondary sideshow, the question of what was
allowable in terms of divorce was a debate between two different camps of
rabbis. Deuteronomy 24:1 allowed a man to divorce a woman if he found something
‘objectionable’ (or ‘shameful’ in other translations) about her. But what
constituted ‘objectionable’? To one school, the followers of Shammai, it had to
be something morally objectionable. But the followers of Hillel said it could
be anything that annoyed or embarrassed the husband [ibid.].
So these things are rarely a matter of theoretical ivory
tower debate. And they aren’t for us, either. Whenever we debate a sensitive
ethical or moral issue, one of the first things we need to remember is that
real people are involved. Real people with painful experiences. And real people
with deep convictions. That’s obvious with a matter like divorce, but it’s also
true of other issues. Childlessness in marriage; abortion; bioethics; medical
advances; euthanasia; we need to grapple with all of these in the Church, but
never forgetting that somewhere quietly and perhaps secretly the issue we are
talking about is being confronted by someone in our midst.
2. Principles
There’s an old saying about interpreting Bible verses: ‘a
text without a context is a pretext’. It’s something Christians are frequently
guilty of, including when dealing with this passage – they think it has
appeared out of thin air without the context we have just spoken about. It
makes for some disastrous Christianity at times.
And that is exactly what Jesus accuses the Pharisees of
doing here. You ask about divorce, he says? Well let’s go back to the
Scriptures: what about Moses (verse 3)? But they just give Jesus a wooden quote
(verse 4). You haven’t even got to the intention behind the text, said Jesus:
that wasn’t a command about divorce;
it was a permission, because human
sin causes so much pain in the world (verse 5).
So, says Jesus, you’ve really got to get down to first
principles. And that means going back to God’s original design for marriage in
Genesis. He quotes a little bit from Genesis 1 and a further text from Genesis
2 that becomes the key text for a Christian understanding of marriage. Jesus
says you’ve got to get back to these first principles before you can even begin
to consider the question of divorce. So what are Jesus’ first principles about
marriage?
He begins by quoting Genesis 1:27:
God made them male and female.
(verse 6)
Now without just lifting this to use as a battering-ram in
our contemporary arguments about homosexuality and civil partnerships –
although it clearly has something to say about that and Jesus does not envisage
marriage being anything other than between a man and a woman – the context here
is marriage and divorce. But Jesus wants to say something basic here: marriage
is about bringing the two different but complementary and equal sexes together,
each bringing a gift to the other and each receiving from the other. Marriage
is a mutual giving and receiving.
Then he cites Genesis 2:24:
For this reason a man shall leave his
father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one
flesh.
(verses 7-8a)
This emphasises the maturity, commitment, unity and
faithfulness at the heart of godly marriage. Put all these things together and
you can see why marriage is more than a legal contract. It is a covenant. There
is a mutual commitment with blessings that follow as a result. There is
self-giving love, just like there is at the heart of God. There is unity – ‘one
flesh’ is not only a poetic description of the sexual aspect of marriage, it
signifies the heart of the relationship, that two become one. Richard Foster,
the great American writer on spirituality, says that love-making is ‘a
life-uniting act with life-uniting intent’. The Methodist Church
understands marriage as being between one man and one woman, with fidelity
within marriage and chastity outside.
And so Jesus says, in a statement that many have taken to
prove that in God’s eyes marriage cannot be dissolved (except by death),
Therefore what God has joined together,
let no one separate.
(verse 9)
You’ve taken this step of marriage, says Jesus. God intended
it for life. It isn’t about whether or not marriage ‘works’ as many people are
wont to say. It isn’t that ‘we just drifted apart’. It isn’t that ‘things were
fine when we were living together, but the moment we got married everything
went wrong’. All these are false understandings of marriage. The Methodist
marriage service does not – contrary to popular myth – ask the bride and groom
to say ‘I do’. It asks them to say ‘I will’ – which is both a promise and an
act of will. The love at the heart of marriage will not always be something
spouses feel like giving. But it has been promised in a solemn oath and that
may mean love at times is an act of will, love through gritted teeth. There is
a saying that I find helpful: ‘It is not love that will keep your marriage
alive, it is marriage that will keep your love alive.’
3. Issue
What have we seen so far? Firstly, in terms of context we
must never discuss issues such as marriage and divorce in some detached way.
People with deep convictions and painful experiences are involved. Secondly, we
have seen that Jesus elevates marriage to an extremely high level: it is a
covenant commitment of unity and faithfulness. We are being taught to be both
compassionate and principled.
What, then, of Jesus’ very strong statements against
divorce? And how does that affect people like me, who are married to someone
who is previously divorced? How does it affect others of us who have faced
divorce and may have remarried? Are we condemned?
Note first of all that Jesus is addressing a culture where
only men could institute divorce. For him to say, ‘Therefore what God has
joined together, let no one separate’ is a warning against men who want to divorce easily – either for trivial reasons or
because they want to bail out like cowards. Although this statement sounds
harsh you could conceive this as a support for women in marriage.
And likewise when he says,
‘Whoever divorces his wife and marries
another commits adultery against her.’
(verse 11)
Why? Because in Jewish Law an unfaithful husband wasn’t seen
as committing adultery against his own wife, only against the husband of the
woman with whom he slept. So Jesus here is striking a blow for the dignity and
equality of women in marriage. You are not the property of your husband, you
are an equal partner, is the implication of such teaching.
But then what about verse 12?
‘And if she divorces her husband and
marries another, she commits adultery.’
Doesn’t that mean that when Debbie married me she became an
adulteress, even though her first husband had broken his marriage vows?
This verse is not what it seems at first. For one thing,
remember what I said a minute ago that in the culture of Jesus’ place and time only
men could institute divorce. How then can Jesus speak of a woman divorcing her
husband? There are two possibilities, each one based on different manuscripts
we have of Mark’s Gospel.
The first is the text that says exactly this. The assumption
becomes that Mark or a later scribe adds these words for the Roman audience he
is writing to, thus making his own expansion of Jesus’ teaching to fit the
circumstances of Roman law, where a woman could bring divorce proceedings. However
that assumes that Jesus only wants to advocate marriage as an indissoluble
relationship, and I think I’ve indicated already that there is more here to
Jesus’ teaching than that.
The second possibility is based on an alternative manuscript
of Mark. It does not speak of a woman divorcing her husband but deserting him
for another man. This is exactly what Herodias had done in order to marry
Herod, and which John the Baptist had condemned. The fact that Herodias had
sent her first husband a letter of separation meant nothing. She had broken the
sacred bond of marriage.
Overall, then, Jesus’ teaching against divorce is there to
reinforce fidelity and to give dignity to those who are wronged. It is not in
the spirit of his teaching to condemn those who are the victims of
unfaithfulness. These are warnings for those tempted to err, not condemnations
for those living with vow-breakers.
And we can see this if we compare the fuller version of
Jesus’ teaching on this subject recorded in Matthew 19. There he allows a
specific exception for divorce, and that is what most English translations
render as ‘adultery’, but is a Greek word porneia
that means any kind of sexual immorality (Matthew 19:9). That which
fundamentally breaks the marriage covenant of unity and faithfulness is a
permissible ground for divorce, says Jesus. And in that sense I personally
would see such issues as violence in the same category.
Conclusion
Jesus teaches a high view of marriage. It is an exclusive
covenant between one man and one woman, calling for faithfulness within the
relationship and chastity outside it. This is God’s design from the beginning,
he says. His censures against divorce are intended to protect the weaker party
(women, in his culture) and those who would suffer as a result of one partner
breaking the marriage bond. The sinned-against are not condemned here, as we
sometimes think.
In the Gospel there is healing for the wounded and
broken-hearted. There is a God who, in Jesus Christ, shows us that, however
other human beings may have betrayed us, he is constantly faithful. In him we
find hope, and he calls his people to model that faithful love, not only in
family life but also as we love the wounded.
What, then, of those who have caused the damage to spouses
and families? What does the Gospel of Jesus Christ say to them? There is a
clear call to repentance. And that means not only being sorry, but being sorry
enough to change. The form that repentance might take will vary according to
the current circumstances of both the unfaithful party and the one who has been
wronged, but at very least would probably include the Old Testament concept of
restitution. And so, to take just one example, there should certainly be no
argument about paying a fair maintenance sum.
But above all, let us pray for and give practical support to
those in our midst who are married; to those who suffer the ongoing pain of
divorce; to those who have lived through faithful marriages but now miss their
spouses; to those who are not married – some happy with that situation, others
not so; some who may yet marry and others who never will. For the love of God
in Christ makes each one dearly valued and esteemed by him.
Technorati Tags: Jesus, marriage, divorce, Pharisees, Hillel, Shammai, John+the+Baptist, Richard+Foster
Tomorrow’s Sermon, Jesus On Marriage And Divorce
A tortuous theme in tomorrow’s Lectionary Gospel reading. I hope I’ve done it justice and remembered hurting people at the same time. See what you think.
Introduction
I am a guilty party in an adulterous relationship.
At least I am, according to many Christians. Many Christians
take the teaching of Jesus in Mark 10 at face value and speak of marriage as
being ‘indissoluble’. Even divorce does not end the marriage in the sight of
God. And in case you didn’t know, my wife Debbie is previously divorced, and
her first husband is still alive.
So today in taking the Lectionary Gospel reading I have to
confront a Bible passage that could even challenge the validity of my own
marriage.
And this subject probably affects us all. We may have gone
through a divorce. We may have remarried, or we may be considering it. If we
haven’t, then given the high number of divorces in our society, it has almost
certainly touched us in some other way. A family member or a friend will have
been through the pain of a broken marriage.
How can Christians respond? We can go to one of two equally
unhelpful extremes, if we are not careful. At the one extreme we so uphold the
sanctity of marriage that we say hurtful things to those who have split up from
their spouses. I once met a couple before their wedding, where the bride was
previously divorced. Another church had refused to conduct her second marriage,
but rather than the vicar say, “I’m sorry, but out of conscience I can’t take
your wedding,” he told her, “You are damaged goods.”
At the other extreme we can be so enamoured of God’s
unconditional forgiving love in Christ that we fail to address brokenness and make
him sound like a God who doesn’t care about sin.
Somewhere, there has to be a different approach. And
contrary to the claims of some, I think we find it in this passage, and
especially when we combine it with Matthew’s account of this same incident.
But we can’t answer the question about divorce immediately.
First of all we have some context to set, because these words didn’t just drop
down from heaven to earth and appear ‘out of thin air’. There is some important
background. Secondly we’ll see that Jesus goes back to fundamental principles
about marriage. Then finally we’ll try to see where we might end up in terms of
a compassionate and principled Christian understanding of marriage and divorce.
1. Context
The Lectionary starts at verse 2 of Mark 10. I began at
verse 1:
He left that place and went to the
region of Judea and beyond the Jordan.
He leaves Capernaum, goes
across the mountains of Samaria to Judea, on a
normal pilgrim’s route to Jerusalem, and ends up
beyond the Jordan
in Perea [William Lane, The Gospel Of Mark, p 353]. What’s significant about that?
It puts him in the territory
of Herod the tetrarch,
where John the Baptist conducted most of his ministry and condemned Herod and
Herodias for entering into an adulterous marriage. And you’ll recall John lost
his head for his troubles.
So now when the Pharisees come to test Jesus (verse 2) this
isn’t an idle academic debate: they are trying to trap him. If Jesus supports
his cousin John’s teaching then maybe Herod and Herodias will have him
executed, too. That would be neat: Jesus is disposed of politically, without
any need for religious hands to become ritually unclean. On the other hand, if
Jesus doesn’t agree with John then that undermines one or both of them. Either
Jesus is the moral compromiser, in which case why continue to listen to him, or
John was just over the top and his ministry should now be discredited. It’s
nasty and clever, isn’t it?
As a little secondary sideshow, the question of what was
allowable in terms of divorce was a debate between two different camps of
rabbis. Deuteronomy 24:1 allowed a man to divorce a woman if he found something
‘objectionable’ (or ‘shameful’ in other translations) about her. But what
constituted ‘objectionable’? To one school, the followers of Shammai, it had to
be something morally objectionable. But the followers of Hillel said it could
be anything that annoyed or embarrassed the husband [ibid.].
So these things are rarely a matter of theoretical ivory
tower debate. And they aren’t for us, either. Whenever we debate a sensitive
ethical or moral issue, one of the first things we need to remember is that
real people are involved. Real people with painful experiences. And real people
with deep convictions. That’s obvious with a matter like divorce, but it’s also
true of other issues. Childlessness in marriage; abortion; bioethics; medical
advances; euthanasia; we need to grapple with all of these in the Church, but
never forgetting that somewhere quietly and perhaps secretly the issue we are
talking about is being confronted by someone in our midst.
2. Principles
There’s an old saying about interpreting Bible verses: ‘a
text without a context is a pretext’. It’s something Christians are frequently
guilty of, including when dealing with this passage – they think it has
appeared out of thin air without the context we have just spoken about. It
makes for some disastrous Christianity at times.
And that is exactly what Jesus accuses the Pharisees of
doing here. You ask about divorce, he says? Well let’s go back to the
Scriptures: what about Moses (verse 3)? But they just give Jesus a wooden quote
(verse 4). You haven’t even got to the intention behind the text, said Jesus:
that wasn’t a command about divorce;
it was a permission, because human
sin causes so much pain in the world (verse 5).
So, says Jesus, you’ve really got to get down to first
principles. And that means going back to God’s original design for marriage in
Genesis. He quotes a little bit from Genesis 1 and a further text from Genesis
2 that becomes the key text for a Christian understanding of marriage. Jesus
says you’ve got to get back to these first principles before you can even begin
to consider the question of divorce. So what are Jesus’ first principles about
marriage?
He begins by quoting Genesis 1:27:
God made them male and female.
(verse 6)
Now without just lifting this to use as a battering-ram in
our contemporary arguments about homosexuality and civil partnerships –
although it clearly has something to say about that and Jesus does not envisage
marriage being anything other than between a man and a woman – the context here
is marriage and divorce. But Jesus wants to say something basic here: marriage
is about bringing the two different but complementary and equal sexes together,
each bringing a gift to the other and each receiving from the other. Marriage
is a mutual giving and receiving.
Then he cites Genesis 2:24:
For this reason a man shall leave his
father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one
flesh.
(verses 7-8a)
This emphasises the maturity, commitment, unity and
faithfulness at the heart of godly marriage. Put all these things together and
you can see why marriage is more than a legal contract. It is a covenant. There
is a mutual commitment with blessings that follow as a result. There is
self-giving love, just like there is at the heart of God. There is unity – ‘one
flesh’ is not only a poetic description of the sexual aspect of marriage, it
signifies the heart of the relationship, that two become one. Richard Foster,
the great American writer on spirituality, says that love-making is ‘a
life-uniting act with life-uniting intent’. The Methodist Church
understands marriage as being between one man and one woman, with fidelity
within marriage and chastity outside.
And so Jesus says, in a statement that many have taken to
prove that in God’s eyes marriage cannot be dissolved (except by death),
Therefore what God has joined together,
let no one separate.
(verse 9)
You’ve taken this step of marriage, says Jesus. God intended
it for life. It isn’t about whether or not marriage ‘works’ as many people are
wont to say. It isn’t that ‘we just drifted apart’. It isn’t that ‘things were
fine when we were living together, but the moment we got married everything
went wrong’. All these are false understandings of marriage. The Methodist
marriage service does not – contrary to popular myth – ask the bride and groom
to say ‘I do’. It asks them to say ‘I will’ – which is both a promise and an
act of will. The love at the heart of marriage will not always be something
spouses feel like giving. But it has been promised in a solemn oath and that
may mean love at times is an act of will, love through gritted teeth. There is
a saying that I find helpful: ‘It is not love that will keep your marriage
alive, it is marriage that will keep your love alive.’
3. Issue
What have we seen so far? Firstly, in terms of context we
must never discuss issues such as marriage and divorce in some detached way.
People with deep convictions and painful experiences are involved. Secondly, we
have seen that Jesus elevates marriage to an extremely high level: it is a
covenant commitment of unity and faithfulness. We are being taught to be both
compassionate and principled.
What, then, of Jesus’ very strong statements against
divorce? And how does that affect people like me, who are married to someone
who is previously divorced? How does it affect others of us who have faced
divorce and may have remarried? Are we condemned?
Note first of all that Jesus is addressing a culture where
only men could institute divorce. For him to say, ‘Therefore what God has
joined together, let no one separate’ is a warning against men who want to divorce easily – either for trivial reasons or
because they want to bail out like cowards. Although this statement sounds
harsh you could conceive this as a support for women in marriage.
And likewise when he says,
‘Whoever divorces his wife and marries
another commits adultery against her.’
(verse 11)
Why? Because in Jewish Law an unfaithful husband wasn’t seen
as committing adultery against his own wife, only against the husband of the
woman with whom he slept. So Jesus here is striking a blow for the dignity and
equality of women in marriage. You are not the property of your husband, you
are an equal partner, is the implication of such teaching.
But then what about verse 12?
‘And if she divorces her husband and
marries another, she commits adultery.’
Doesn’t that mean that when Debbie married me she became an
adulteress, even though her first husband had broken his marriage vows?
This verse is not what it seems at first. For one thing,
remember what I said a minute ago that in the culture of Jesus’ place and time only
men could institute divorce. How then can Jesus speak of a woman divorcing her
husband? There are two possibilities, each one based on different manuscripts
we have of Mark’s Gospel.
The first is the text that says exactly this. The assumption
becomes that Mark or a later scribe adds these words for the Roman audience he
is writing to, thus making his own expansion of Jesus’ teaching to fit the
circumstances of Roman law, where a woman could bring divorce proceedings. However
that assumes that Jesus only wants to advocate marriage as an indissoluble
relationship, and I think I’ve indicated already that there is more here to
Jesus’ teaching than that.
The second possibility is based on an alternative manuscript
of Mark. It does not speak of a woman divorcing her husband but deserting him
for another man. This is exactly what Herodias had done in order to marry
Herod, and which John the Baptist had condemned. The fact that Herodias had
sent her first husband a letter of separation meant nothing. She had broken the
sacred bond of marriage.
Overall, then, Jesus’ teaching against divorce is there to
reinforce fidelity and to give dignity to those who are wronged. It is not in
the spirit of his teaching to condemn those who are the victims of
unfaithfulness. These are warnings for those tempted to err, not condemnations
for those living with vow-breakers.
And we can see this if we compare the fuller version of
Jesus’ teaching on this subject recorded in Matthew 19. There he allows a
specific exception for divorce, and that is what most English translations
render as ‘adultery’, but is a Greek word porneia
that means any kind of sexual immorality (Matthew 19:9). That which
fundamentally breaks the marriage covenant of unity and faithfulness is a
permissible ground for divorce, says Jesus. And in that sense I personally
would see such issues as violence in the same category.
Conclusion
Jesus teaches a high view of marriage. It is an exclusive
covenant between one man and one woman, calling for faithfulness within the
relationship and chastity outside it. This is God’s design from the beginning,
he says. His censures against divorce are intended to protect the weaker party
(women, in his culture) and those who would suffer as a result of one partner
breaking the marriage bond. The sinned-against are not condemned here, as we
sometimes think.
In the Gospel there is healing for the wounded and
broken-hearted. There is a God who, in Jesus Christ, shows us that, however
other human beings may have betrayed us, he is constantly faithful. In him we
find hope, and he calls his people to model that faithful love, not only in
family life but also as we love the wounded.
What, then, of those who have caused the damage to spouses
and families? What does the Gospel of Jesus Christ say to them? There is a
clear call to repentance. And that means not only being sorry, but being sorry
enough to change. The form that repentance might take will vary according to
the current circumstances of both the unfaithful party and the one who has been
wronged, but at very least would probably include the Old Testament concept of
restitution. And so, to take just one example, there should certainly be no
argument about paying a fair maintenance sum.
But above all, let us pray for and give practical support to
those in our midst who are married; to those who suffer the ongoing pain of
divorce; to those who have lived through faithful marriages but now miss their
spouses; to those who are not married – some happy with that situation, others
not so; some who may yet marry and others who never will. For the love of God
in Christ makes each one dearly valued and esteemed by him.
Technorati Tags: Jesus, marriage, divorce, Pharisees, Hillel, Shammai, John+the+Baptist, Richard+Foster
