Jesus' Border Policy; A Clarification

I'm prepping for Sundays sermon on Matthew 19, whilst the world debates border controls. Struck by the fact that the Kingdom of God has an open border policy for the poor in spirit, children, persecuted and those who express their faith through kindness, and stringent border controls for the rich and those who ignore the needy. 

New Alpha film series - 'who is Jesus?'

A few months ago Alpha redid there materials into a new 'film series'. These are good - nicely presented, a move away from the lecture style, to something a bit more varied. I've used the clip on the reliability of the new testament (from 6:40 in) and folk found it really helpful.


if you can't view this clip, try https://vimeo.com/183533609

Locker Room Talk

"What you have said in the dark will be heard in the daylight, and what you have whispered in the ear in inner rooms will be proclaimed from the rooftops." Jesus, Luke 12:3

"The mouth speaks what the heart is full of" Jesus, Luke 6:45 

'Break the Cycle' - Doctor Who's sermon on Matthew 6 and the Iraq war.

Doctor Who usually peaks around Remembrance Day. This year is no exception, the following dialogue from Saturdays episode (starts from about 32 mins in, full section from 30m 22s). It's a cracking script & dialogue, covering war, forgiveness, repentance, Iraq, pride, sin, you name it. The Doctor is in blue, 'Zygella' the adversary in red, trying to justify her actions... 

It’s not fair

Oh it’s not fair, oh I didn’t realise that, it’s not fair! You know what? My TARDIS doesn’t work properly and I don’t have my own personal tailor.

The things don’t equate

These things have happened Zygella, they are facts. You just want cruelty to beget cruelty. You’re not superior to people who were cruel to you, you’re just a whole bunch of new cruel people. A whole bunch of new cruel people, who’ll be cruel to some other people, who’ll end up being cruel to you. The only way anyone can live in peace is if they’re prepared to forgive...why don’t you break the cycle.

Why should we?

What is it that you actually want?

War

Ah, right! And when this war is over, when you have a homeland free from humans (insert own personal enemies here) what do you think it’s going to be like? You know, have you thought about it, have you given it any consideration? Because you’re very close to getting what you want. What’s it going to be like? Paint me a picture. Are you going to live in houses, are people going to work, will there be holidays? Oh, will there be music? Do you think people will be allowed to play violins? who’s going to make the violins? Well? Oh, You don’t actually know do you? Because like every other tantrumming child in history, Bonnie, you don’t actually know what you want.  

So let me ask you a question about this brave new world of yours. When you’ve killed all the bad guys, and when its all perfect and just an fair, when you have finally got It exactly the way you want it, what are you going to do with the people like you, the troublemakers. How are you going to protect your glorious revolution from the next one.

We’ll win

Oh will you? Well maybe… maybe you will win. But nobody wins for long, the wheel just keeps on turning, so come on, break the cycle.

… when you fire that first shot, no matter how right you feel, you have no idea who’s going to die. You don’t know whose children are going to scream and burn! How many hearts will be broken! How many lives shattered. How much blood will be spilt before everyone has to do what they were always going to have to do from the very beginning – sit down and talk! … listen to me, listen, I just want you to think. Do you know what thinking is? It's just a fancy word for changing your mind.

I will not change my mind

Then you will die stupid. Alternatively, you could step away..

..No, I’m not stopping this Doctor..do you think they’ll let me go after what I’ve done

You’re all the same you screaming kids, you know that? 'Look at me, I’m unforgiveable', well here’s the unforeseeable – I forgive you. After all you’ve done. I forgive you. 

Talking About Jesus - Would It Be Better If We Didn't?

Talking Jesus this week published a survey of just over 2500 'normal' people and 1500 Christians. The findings are going to General Synod later this month.

Here are the questions the research was trying to get at:
What do people in this nation know and believe about Jesus? What do they really think of us, his followers? Are we talking about Jesus enough? And when we are, are we drawing people closer towards him, or further away?

The work was a joint project between the CofE, Evangelical Alliance, and other Christian agencies. Some of the findings:
 - 40% of the general population believe the Bible is God's word
 - 60% think Jesus really existed, 25% of under-35s think he is a fictional character
 - 21% think he was God, the majority believe Jesus was a spiritual leader/normal human being
 - just over 40% think Jesus was raised from the dead

A key focus of the survey was evangelism, how Christians are seen and how we share (or don't share) our faith:
- 2/3 of people know a 'practising Christian', and 60% of them enjoy that persons company. That means 40% don't/didn't know
- When asked to describe their Christian friend/acquaintance, positive characterstics scored much higher than negative ones (hooray!) - caring, friendly, generous, good-humoured were all about 5x more common than hypocritical, narrow minded, uptight and foolish.

Here's the really worrying bit: the majority of Christians feel comfortable to some degree in talking to others about Jesus, look for opportunities to do so, and have done so in the last month. But as for the fruits.....
 More than half of English non-Christians who know a Christian (58%) have had a conversation with them about Jesus. Younger adults 18 to 34 (61%) are somewhat more likely than adults over 35 (54%) to report having had such a conversation. Two out of every five non-Christians say evangelism made them glad not to be a Christian (42%). Another two in five don’t know how they felt about it (42%), while only 16 per cent felt sad, after the conversation about Jesus, that they did not share the Christian’s faith. 

 When Christians talk about Jesus, the response is mixed. One in five non-Christians say they, after such a conversation, felt open to an experience or encounter with Jesus. But almost half say they were not open to such an experience (49%) and six in 10 didn’t want to know more about Jesus (59%). One in five did want to know more (19%); 16 per cent felt sad that they did not share the Christian’s faith; nearly one-quarter felt more positive about Jesus (23%) or felt closer to the Christian with whom they had the conversation (26%).

Whilst Christians who share their faith feel positive about having done so, the clear majority of those on the receiving end are turned off Christian faith, and the one telling them about it, by the experience. Christians think that the effects of their talking about Jesus is positive, but that's not what most of their hearers think. 

The recommendations from the survey don't reflect any of this. They pick up on some of the positives (that there are millions who believe Jesus was real, was God and rose from the dead, but haven't joined the dots, that Christians are generally seen in a positive light), but there is nothing that addresses our inability to share our faith in a helpful way in the majority of cases. Though the full report mentions a goal of (enabling) Christians to have millions more sensitive, positive, culturally-relevant conversations about Jesus that could be deeply effective in evangelism, I don't actually see anything that explores what sensitivity and cultural relevance look like. 

For many Christians, talking with a friend about their faith and about Jesus is a key part of their journey into faith. Sadly it sounds like for many non-Christians, such a conversation could also be a key part of their journeying away from faith. The solution is not to stop talking about Jesus, but to find out how to do it well, in a sensitive and relevant way.

There are many encouraging findings in the report, but I wish that there was a bit more engagement with the discouraging ones. I'm with Andrew Brown - there's no point encouraging more of us to talk about Jesus if we're not doing it very well. It's very helpful research, and the powerpoint summaries are really useful, but there's no point doing the research if we ignore one of the key findings. 

If I think x is wrong, does that make me x-phobic?

Odd piece by Giles Fraser in the Guardian a couple of days back, writing about Operation Christmas Child:

this literature promotes an exclusivist version of Christianity in the form of innocuous-looking comic book with the sinister message slipped in: “There is only one way to be friends with God.” In many places these boxes are distributed, this is thinly disguised code for: Islam is wrong.

I have two problems with this:

1. To say that something is wrong doesn't make you a phobic. This is a trick that goes all the way back to Freud, and probably long before: 'Disagreeing with me is nothing to do with my bad logic, it is an emotional flaw in you that is the problem'. Some things are right/true/correct and some things are wrong/mistaken/incorrect. Pointing out that something belongs in the later category, whether it's a system of thought or an answer in to a maths question, isn't a psychological condition. 

2. Last time I looked Giles Fraser was a CofE vicar, a Christian. Christians believe that Jesus is the incarnate Son of God, the Messiah, God in human form who dies for our salvation and rises again so that we might rise with him. (plus some small print). Jesus is both the fullest revelation of God on earth, and the God-given path to a restored relationship with God now an in eternity. That's what Jesus said he was, and that's what Christians believe. The leaflet simply paraphrases this: does that make Jesus himself sinister?

So someone else then turns up a few hundred years later, be they Mohammed or Joseph Smith, and claims to have a better idea than Jesus about who God is, how he is at work, and how to live in response to this. No Christian can logically go 'oh well, that's fair enough, you're just as likely to be right as Jesus'. There are flat contradictions between the Koran and the Bible. Jesus and Mohammed cannot both be right about themselves and about God. God isn't going to turn up in person to save the world, and then a few hundreds years later go 'oh that didn't work, I'll just go back to using prophets'. 

I believe Islam is wrong because I believe Jesus is who he says he is. (To put this in perspective, I also believe there are certain traditions of thought within Christianity that are wrong, along with capitalism, communism, buying t-shirts made in sweatshops, texting during a conversation, and using Facebook as a form of therapy. I'm a mass of phobias) But lets have an adult, reasoned discussion about it, rather than chucking abusive labels at people who don't see things the way we do, closing down the debate before its even begun. 

Top Christmas videos #9 Christmas Starts

A shorter and much less expensive ad than John Lewis. Amid the various marketing attempts to colonise the birth of Jesus as a shopping festival, and the widespread confusion about whether Jesus plays for Chelsea, it reminds us that  Christmas starts with Christ.

What annoys us doesn't annoy Jesus, and what annoys Jesus doesn't annoy us.

From a recent survey:

Modern life is a daily struggle. Here, according to a poll of 2,000 Britons for Nurofen Express, are the top 50 most annoying things about it.

1. Your laptop/computer freezing
2. PPI calls
3. Slow Wi-Fi
4. Being stuck in traffic
5. People who take up two parking spaces
6. Public transport delays
7. Junk mail
8. Waiting on the phone for the doctors

I think we'll stop there because I've already cried myself completely out. Waiting on the phone for the doctor? Well, it's a close call compared to dying of Ebola because there isn't a doctor for miles, and no decent road to carry any traffic to the nearest hospital (read adapted shed). It's simply tragic.

Don't let the world around you squeeze you into its mould, says Romans 12. If these are the things which really wind us up (I'm talking to Christians here, sorry if you're not one, please bear with me) then we have genuinely lost the plot. Clue: what is Jesus most annoyed about? Probably nothing that's in our top 50.

What annoys us doesn't annoy Jesus, and what annoys Jesus doesn't annoy us. And it should.

The Cross

Where is Jesus in the depths of our suffering? He is the God who became wholly human, who stood by our side, who sucked into himself every ounce of sin and suffering and brutality of this world, before then and after, in total injustice, absorbed it, held it, overcame it and rose from the dead, and is alive and with us by his Spirit today in reality and truth. And therefore death is defeated, despair is overcome, whatever we feel, wherever we are, however weak we are, afraid we are, depressed we are. You can be overwhelmed by the sorrows of this world – many are, sadly; depression assails them and only darkness seems all around. And yet Jesus remains light, whatever we feel, and loves us, however much we turn away.

So this cross is for all of us. It is the cross of sorrows and grief, that says God loved us enough to come and share every ounce of it with us. Grace upon grace, love to the loveless shown, that they might lovely be.

And the response he calls us to – to trust this grace and love with our lives. The one who is lifted high on the cross requires more than a glance from us, more than a quick squint or look. He calls us to believe, to trust, to take this love for us as the most certain thing in our lives. To become those who take up our cross and follow him. Who consider it fitting for us not to live life for ourselves, for our own glory, our own power, because that way lies evil and darkness. But live our lives for others, sacrificing everything. That is what it means to take up our cross, it’s what Jesus said. And when we do that, the morning breaks, the light fills our lives and our hearts and our world.

And as God’s people we are called to go out and draw others to find that extraordinary life that is found in the death of Jesus Christ. 

from Justin Welby's sermon this week at Bristol Cathedral. Read the rest here. 

"Do you believe this?"

Resurrection: Rob Bell from Rob Bell on Vimeo.

Because Jesus is risen, everything matters, and nothing is hopeless.

Christ is risen!

Finding Jesus

I'm preaching on the Magi tomorrow, strange people for God to put at the front of the queue to worship Jesus, happy to travel hundreds of miles whilst the professionals in Jerusalem couldn't even manage the 6-8 miles to Bethlehem.

I'll be using a story from this article by Carl Medearis, who has an amazing ministry looking for Jesus in places where few people expect to find him. The paper is a reminder that God is constantly surprising, and a reminder that if we start by assuming that God is at work, we'll probably be more likely to find out what He's doing.

Happy hunting.

Mended

“(Jesus) is never disgusted. He never says that anything – anyone – is too dirty to be touched. That anyone is too lost to be found. Even in situations where there seem to be no grounds for human hope, he will not agree that hope is gone beyond recall.

Wreckage may be written into the logic of the world, but he will not agree that it is all there is. He says, more can be mended than you fear. Far more can be mended than you know.”

Francis Spufford ‘Unapologetic'. 

(If you've not read it, imagine CS Lewis after several pints rewriting Schliermachers 'Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers' - which short circuits rational disputes by talking about talking about how Christianity feels - ghost written by Malcolm Tucker. Actually, don't bother, just read it, astounding book.)

Good Morning Jesus

Cue general amusement, at the Aussie computer consultant who thinks he's Jesus, and that his girlfriend is Mary Magdalene. After the Ashes victory yesterday, maybe the Aussies will need a miracle. Is the man deluded? A con artist? A nutter? A false prophet? Or a mixture of all 4?

Well, what would you think of someone who claimed to be specially sent by God to save the world...........?

Whatever you think of the guy, the way the interview is conducted is fascinating. How would we treat the real Jesus if he turned up in 2013?




update: some suggested questions for Jesus here. 

Perfect Love

from Dai Woolridge, who brought us the brilliant Christmas Chord, a piece commissioned for Spring Harvest.

HT Start the Week

The Beatbox Passion

Ok, it's utterly unseasonal (if you want the Beatbox Nativity, go here), but I've only just caught up with this, even though it's been online for a few months. Actually, it's more seasonal than most of the stuff around during December, because at least it's about Jesus.

Jesus Christ, Masterchef

Considering he spent most of his working life in the building trade, Jesus seems to have turned out as a decent cook. I'm not sure his judgement of quantities was quite so good - perhaps that's why he needed people like Matthew and Judas around, with an eye for detail and cost.

Wedding at Cana - great wine, but late on in the feast, and far too much for the guests to get through.

Feeding of the 5000 - 'they all ate and were satisfied' and there were still 12 baskets of leftovers.

Breakfast by the lake in John 21 - Jesus cooks breakfast for the disciples, invites them to come and join him, but still needs 'some of the fish that you've caught'.

This cavalier attitude to food spills over into the parables: banquets are ordered and prepared before the guest list is fully known, fatted calves are slaughtered for waster relatives. And, like the Tiger Who Came to Tea, Jesus didn't have a problem inviting himself to people's houses for dinner (Zaccheus) or inviting the disciples to turn up with no food in strange places on his account and expect to be fed (Luke 10).

All completely irresponsible. Doesn't he know there's a recession on?

A pile of used linen and an empty parking space

Christ is Risen!

For the Cross

David Cameron is Praying for You

David Camerons Easter message.

“Easter week is a very important moment in the Christian calendar, so I would like to extend my best wishes to everyone here in the United Kingdom, and across the world, at this special time of year.

“This is the time when, as Christians, we remember the life, sacrifice and living legacy of Christ. The New Testament tells us so much about the character of Jesus; a man of incomparable compassion, generosity, grace, humility and love. These are the values that Jesus embraced, and I believe these are values people of any faith, or no faith, can also share in, and admire.

“It is values like these that make our country what it is – a place which is tolerant, generous and caring. A nation which has an established faith, that together is most content when we are defined by what we are for, rather than defined by what we are against. In the book of Luke, we are told that Jesus said, “Do to others as you would have them do to you” – advice that when followed makes for a happier, and better society for everyone.

“So as families and friends get together this week, I would like to send my best wishes to you all, and I hope and pray you have a very happy and peaceful Easter.”

Thanks Dave, we're praying for you too. This comes alongside a reception for Christian reps at 10 Downing Street, reported from various angles by the Telegraph (gay marriage), Guardian (the ghost of Alastair Campbell) and Rupert Murdochs Panzer Division (fuel prices). God and Politics has the full text of Cameron's speech at this event, and it's a fascinating read.

For the moment, I'll resist the temptation to dissect the theology, and be pleased that a PM is unashamedly celebrating Easter, in his own inclusive multiculturally-sensisitve way. Though I hope that in private DC gets that Jesus is not merely a living legacy, he's a living person.

Is it Possible to Preach about Maundy Thursday?

The more I think about doing a sermon on Jesus washing the disciples feet, the more obvious it becomes that a simple sermon won't do to recreate the impact or the meaning of what Jesus did.

After all, if Jesus had merely spoken for 20 minutes about mutual service, it would have just got noted down alongside all the rest of his teaching. But the sheer discomfort of the disciples, the dramatic role reversal of master becoming servant, the sheer grace (though nobody has washed his feet, Jesus the divine Word is washing theirs), the best way to recreate all of that is to do it.

which applies to blogging about it too.