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Beauty

Travelling to London yesterday and today, I noticed each morning on the train a different beautiful young woman. Yesterday, this stunning woman spent most of her time looking into a mirror while using a device that shaped her eyebrows into what she evidently thought was a more pleasing shape. The woman I noticed this morning sat down, put on a pair of glasses, and spent the journey giving her entire attention to a cross-stitch – to making something else beautiful.

Who was the true beautiful woman? I think I know.

And maybe that brief story might serve as a parable or illustration for someone’s sermon

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Outsider

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Snapshots

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

‘Where did you get those done?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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links for 2008-09-04

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Sermon For 31st August: Spiritual Health

I won’t be preaching for the next three Sundays, so here is one I’ve prepared for the end of the month.

Matthew 16:21-28

Introduction
Doctors told an American named Craig Boyden, who was just thirty-two, that he was suffering from Crohn’s disease and had three months to live. Perhaps understandably, he decided that if he only had three months, he’d better make the most of them. He went back to his job as a credit manager at a carpet company in Elliott City in Maryland, and embezzled $30,000. He the used the money to live it up – dining in the best restaurants, throwing parties for his friends, buying drinks for everyone in every bar he went into.

But the funny thing was that as the weeks went by, instead of feeling worse and worse he just felt fine, if anything, even better than he had done. So he went to a different doctor for a second opinion. There he discovered that he wasn’t suffering from Crohn’s disease at all, but just a hernia. He’d suffered an allergic reaction to the gloves that the surgeon was wearing during exploratory surgery, and that had led to the misdiagnosis.

But that left him with another problem: the firm had found out that $30,000 was missing. Fortunately for Boyden, when he explained everything, the court was understanding, and gave him a suspended sentence, on condition that he paid the money back at the rate of $5,000 a year.[1]

With sickness, it’s important to recognise and interpret the symptoms, make a diagnosis and from that basis prescribe the appropriate treatment. In our reading today, I want to suggest that Peter is suffering from a sickness of the spirit, even if he doesn’t realise it (at least at first). It’s a spiritual sickness that leads him to misunderstand the will of God. We need a healthy approach to discerning the will of God. Today’s sermon attempts to explore what a healthy approach to finding and following God’s will might look like, based on Peter’s symptoms, Jesus’ diagnosis and his prescription.

1. Symptoms
We find the symptoms of Peter’s sickness in his rebuke to Jesus:

‘God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.’ (Verse 22)

We can examine the symptoms by looking at the language Peter uses here.

‘God forbid it, Lord’ is an abbreviated version of a Jewish expression: ‘May God be gracious to you.’ It means, ‘May God mercifully spare you this,’ hence why Peter says, ‘This must never happen to you.’ It’s very emphatic, containing a double negative.

It sounds like Peter thinks he’s being kind to Jesus. In the previous few verses, Peter has confessed that Jesus is the Messiah. Now he seems to say, ‘We can’t let this happen to the Messiah! That isn’t what’s supposed to happen to the Messiah! He’s meant to triumph over the enemies of God’s people, not suffer!’

On this reading, Peter is kind and well-intentioned. He is sincere. We like sincerity. The alternative is hypocrisy, and who wants that? It is common to say in our society, ‘It doesn’t matter what you believe, so long as you are sincere.’ I once talked to the son of a deceased church member who said he was sure his mum had gone to heaven, because that was what she sincerely believed would happen after death. If you believed something else, then that was what would happen to you. He didn’t pause to consider how illogical this was.

But in any case, sincerity is not enough. Many years ago, there was an inquest held when a person died in a hospital operating theatre after the wrong anaesthetic was administered. The coroner told the anaesthetist, ‘ I believe you sincerely thought you were giving the correct anaesthetic. But you were sincerely wrong, and it cost a life.’

We can be sincerely wrong. Peter was. He had a faulty concept of the Messiah’s mission. Sincerity on its own made him sick. He missed God’s will for Jesus.

And he missed God’s will for himself. Because he could not or would not see that the true destiny of the Messiah would shape his own. If Jesus were to go to the Cross, then the cross shapes the destiny of all disciples.

Now if that’s the case, then Peter’s symptoms may be more than sincerity detached from truth; they may also be about letting personal ambition get in the way of hearing God’s voice. He wouldn’t have been alone among the disciples: in just four chapters’ time, James and John will want preferential seating at the Messiah’s banquet in the kingdom of God. How easy it is for us, too, to baptise our own preferences and ambitions as the will of God.

Our son will keep asking for something, even when we say ‘no.’ When we get to the point of saying to him, ‘It doesn’t matter how many times you ask, the answer will always be no,’ he often replies, ‘But I want you to say yes.’ That can be like our ambitions trying to distort the will of God. We are desperate for the answer that suits us. But God won’t give it – unless he chooses to give us up to our desires, and that’s a worrying development.

Peter, then, displays possibly two dangerous symptoms of spiritual sickness. One is sincerity divorced from truth, the other is the baptism of personal ambition. Do either of these ring bells for us?

2. Diagnosis
When I was a child, we once had a family doctor who was writing the prescription on his pad almost within seconds of a patient entering his surgery. You wouldn’t really say he had a bedside manner.

And neither did Jesus. Peter might have expected affirmation or encouragement in the wake of his statement, but what happens next is this:

But he turned and said to Peter, ‘Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling-block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’ (Verse 23)

So much for ‘gentle Jesus, meek and mild’! Let’s take a moment to think through this devastating diagnosis, that will have crushed Peter by asserting so aggressively that he is against the will of God.

We start with ‘Satan’. It couldn’t be worse, could it? The very least this means is ‘adversary’. Peter, you are not my supporter, you are my opponent, my enemy.

If by ‘Satan’ Jesus doesn’t simply mean ‘adversary’ but the Devil, then we link back to chapter four of Matthew’s Gospel, where the Devil tempts Jesus in the wilderness in order to sidetrack him from the Father’s will. This is what Peter is doing. Rather than correcting Jesus, he is sidetracking him.

And he is a ‘stumbling block’: Peter, the ‘rock’, becomes a ‘rock of stumbling’. It’s the same word Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 1:23 to describe general Jewish offence at the idea of preaching Christ crucified. The Cross is a stumbling block to people finding faith, and Peter is a stumbling block in the way of Jesus going there for the salvation of the world.

Summing Peter up, then, Jesus diagnoses him not as a friend and disciple but as an opponent who wants to sidetrack him from the will of God. He is a serious obstacle to Jesus’ progress in bringing salvation.

Do we ever become the opponents of Christ? Do we get in the way of him fulfilling his purposes? I do. There are times when I don’t like his will. It might be something general from Scripture, like his insistence that the way to glory is through suffering and rejection. I’d rather it came through ease and popularity.

Or it might be that he wants me to do something in particular that isn’t congenial to me. I have been dragged kicking and screaming into his will on some occasions. I have heard him say ‘Yes’ and I have tried to persuade him that he really meant ‘No’. It is by his grace and mercy that he has faced me down as he did Peter, in order to put me in places where I might be fruitful for him.

Being healthy in the life of the Spirit entails saying ‘yes’ to Jesus.

3. Prescription
So how does Jesus set about making a sick Peter healthy? His prescription starts with the words, ‘Get behind me.’ The first thing Peter has to do is clear away the obstacles. Rather than standing in front of Jesus as a rock of stumbling, he should get behind him. How is he to remove the obstacle? By dropping his objection to the Cross. We have to stop seeing the Cross as an offence and embrace it. The path to spiritual health is like the words of the hymn, ‘In the cross of Christ I glory’. Yes, the Cross may lead us to weep for our sins that put Christ there, but we cannot stop with such emotions. Healthy spirituality rejoices in what Christ has done for us.

But ‘Get behind me’ may mean something else, too. ‘Behind’ is the proper place for a disciple. Disciples followed teachers: logically, that meant standing behind them. Jesus is telling Peter that the key to spiritual health and participating in the will of God is in following him – not in debating his words, but in doing them. John’s Gospel records Jesus saying something that sheds light on this:

‘Anyone who resolves to do the will of God will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own.’ (John 7:17)

It’s no good treating the words of Jesus as theory, or just praising them as the greatest wisdom ever given to the human race. We can’t be bystanders. We need to be what James in his epistle called ‘doers of the word’ (James 1:22). We shall only have spiritual health when we commit ourselves to walking in the footsteps of Jesus.

We see another part of the prescription implied when Jesus tells Peter, ‘you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things’ (verse 23). Surely the implication is that we need to set our minds on the things of God. It’s similar to what Paul tells the Colossians:

‘Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.’ (Colossians 3:2-3)

If we want spiritual health, we focus on God’s ways and God’s agenda. When we set our minds on human things or ‘things that are on earth’, we lower our vision and we tend to become self-centred. That is the way of the world, and it is the way of death. It is the approach that says your well-being is defined by your money and possessions.

Jesus is quite explicit in what follows about what constitutes setting our minds on divine things: it means denying ourselves, taking up our cross and following him (verses 24-28). We let the Cross shape our minds, hearts and actions.

When we set our minds on divine things, we are committed to spiritually healthy minds. But it cannot remain theoretical: if the brain doesn’t send signals to the rest of the body, there is something wrong with us. So too in the spiritual life: setting our minds on divine things is accompanied by the signals travelling to our hands and feet so that our cross-shaped thinking is complemented by cross-shaped acting.

Jesus’ prescription for spiritually healthy people who embrace the will of God, then, is to glory in the Cross and put his teaching into practice. This means letting our thoughts and deeds be shaped by a discipleship that is willing to suffer for following Jesus.

Just one last thing to say: I am on two repeat prescriptions from my doctor. We fall into a trap if we think that Jesus’ prescription is a one-off. It’s a repeat prescription. Spiritual health means we keep taking the tablets.

[1] Simon Coupland, Spicing Up Your Speaking, p 221 # 213, adapting Bill Bryson, Bizarre World, p 13f.

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Self-Centred Nerds

In February, I said I would be writing an article for Ministry Today under the title, ‘Is Blogging For Self-Centred Nerds?’ Finally, over the last two evenings, I’ve written it. I’ve taken responses from the original article, plus those given when Richard Hall broadcast my appeal. I’ve also quoted from a recent Tall Skinny Kiwi post and taken extensive material from a United Methodist Reporter article written two years ago.

I know, two years ago. So long in webland, and longer in the blogosphere.

I don’t know when the article will be published in hard copy or appear on the Ministry Today website. I’ll let you know.

Thanks to everyone who contributed, either here, at Richard’s blog, or in the other articles without knowing. I’ve linked to just about every blogger I’ve quoted, so if you commented, you’re almost certainly in the piece and hopefully you’ll receive a bit more traffic.

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